Three men; identified as Shadi Badran, Nawras al-Sukkar, and Rami Koukash all from al-Kafr town in southern rural Suwayda governorate; were arrested on October 9, 2024, by personnel from the Syrian regime’s Military Security Intelligence at a checkpoint, known as al-Jadida Checkpoint, in Jadidat Artouz town in western Rural Damascus governorate, while travelling back from Lebanon to Syria to flee the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon. They were then taken to an undisclosed location.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) notes that the arrests were carried out without any court-issued legal warrant being presented. The detainees’ families were not informed of their arrest, while their phones were seized, and they have not been allowed to contact their families or a lawyer since then.
SNHR is concerned that they may be subjected to torture in detention and may go on to become more forcibly disappeared persons, with 85 percent of all those detained falling into this category.
We call for the provision of both material and moral reparations for these three detainees and all other victims of such detentions and for their families, and call on all parties to put an end to all arbitrary detentions whose only purpose is to spread mass fear and extort people.
We also call on the regime to reveal the fate of thousands of people forcibly disappeared in its detention centers. We are seriously concerned about their fates.
