Syrian rebels give up Damascus area town to government

The Syrian government took control of a town northeast of Damascus on Thursday after rebels evacuated to north Syria — the latest in a string of handovers by rebels to the government.

Residents in the town of Dumayr welcomed security forces into their town in a triumphant show for the cameras of the state-affiliated al-Ikhbariya TV station.

People walk among damaged buildings in the town of Douma, the site of a suspected chemical weapons attack, near Damascus, Syria, Monday, April 16, 2018. Two days after Syrian troops declared Douma liberated from opposition fighters, a tour in the city showed the wide destruction it has suffered since falling under rebel control six years ago. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Waving the national flag, they lifted al-Ikhbariya TV correspondent Rabieh Dibeh onto their shoulders and chanted their support for President Bashar Assad, after the last of 5,000 rebels and family members boarded buses and left the town.

There have been several handovers by rebels to the government in the capital region following a punishing government offensive against the rebellious eastern Ghouta region earlier this year.

More than 1,500 civilians were killed in the offensive, which culminated in allegations of a chemical weapons attack on the town of Douma, with reports that more than 40 people were killed.

This photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows Russian soldiers and Syrian government forces overseeing the evacuation of rebel fighters from the Army of Islam and their families from the town of Dumayr, northeast of Damascus, Syria, Thursday, April 19, 2018. (SANA via AP)

This photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows Russian soldiers and Syrian government forces overseeing the evacuation of rebel fighters from the Army of Islam and their families from the town of Dumayr, northeast of Damascus, Syria, Thursday, April 19, 2018. (SANA via AP)

Rebels surrendered towns across eastern Ghouta as the offensive drove on, giving up control of an area once home to an estimated 400,000 people in a matter of weeks.

The Army of Islam rebels in Dumayr followed their companions belonging to the same group from Douma to Jarablus, a town in north Syria shared between Turkish and Syrian opposition control.

The Syrian government has been following a proven strategy of besieging opposition areas until residents and fighters, desperate for food, medical treatment and relief, give up and accept government control.

The bruising offensives have displaced hundreds of thousands of residents, and tens of thousands more choose to leave to north Syria than to submit again to the government and be conscripted by the military.

U.N. officials and human rights groups say the strategy and the evacuation arrangements amount to forced population displacement, a war crime.

A similar arrangement to have Islamic State militants evacuate their pocket inside the capital appeared to collapse on Thursday.

This photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows Russian soldiers and Syrian government forces overseeing the evacuation of rebel fighters from the Army of Islam and their families from the town of Dumayr, northeast of Damascus, Syria, Thursday, April 19, 2018.  (SANA via AP)

This photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, shows Russian soldiers and Syrian government forces gathering next to a bus during the evacuation of rebel fighters from the Army of Islam and their families from the town of Dumayr, northeast of Damascus, Syria, Thursday, April 19, 2018.  (SANA via AP)

Government forces began bombarding the Hajr al-Aswad neighborhood and Yarmouk Palestinian camp inside Damascus only hours after reports surfaced that IS militants would be given two days to leave.

Local opposition activist Sami Dreid, in the nearby Yalda neighborhood, said the militants were expected to relocate to IS-held territory in the east Syrian desert. He said it was not clear why the deal appeared to have fallen through.

Dumayr, in the Qalamoun mountains, is a short drive away from Douma, the site of the alleged April 7 chemical weapons attack.

Inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons were still not able to reach the scene on Thursday, 12 days after the suspected attack.

The attack prompted the United States, France and Britain to strike at suspected Syrian chemical weapons facilities. The three countries said they held the Syrian government and its ally Russia responsible.

Damascus and Moscow denied responsibility.

A U.N. security team touring the sites of the alleged attack on Tuesday was shot at and subjected to a blast, said OPCW Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu.

The security team was supposed to give the all-clear for OPCW inspectors to follow, but their visit was put on hold pending the security situation, Uzumcu added.

A U.N. spokesman said discussions were taking place in the Syrian capital to arrange security to allow OPCW inspectors to visit Douma.

Stephane Dujarric said the U.N. did not want to "telegraph" when a U.N. security team would return, "due to the volatility" of the situation on the ground.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said U.S. officials "have credible information that indicates that Russian officials are working with the Syrian regime to deny and to delay these inspectors from gaining access to Duma."

"We believe it is an effort to conduct their own staged investigations," Nauert told reporters in Washington. "Russian officials have worked with the Syrian regime, we believe, to sanitize the locations of those suspected attacks and remove incriminating evidence of chemical weapons use."

Journalists visited Douma a day before the U.N. security team. They were not exposed to any weapons fire.

Associated Press journalists spoke to witnesses who said they were overwhelmed by the smell of chlorine and experienced fainting during an April 7 assault.

First responders released videos purporting to show fatalities from the attack — lifeless bodies collapsed in an apartment, with foam around their mouths, a sign of asphyxiation.

The Army of Islam, which controlled Douma at the time of the attack, surrendered the town to the government days later.

Also on Thursday, neighboring Iraq launched airstrikes inside Syria targeting militants from the Islamic State group.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's office said Iraqi fighter jets launched "lethal" airstrikes against the extremists in an area along the Syria-Iraq border. The statement said the militants posed a threat to Iraq, without providing further details.

Syrian and Iraqi forces have driven IS from nearly all the territory the group once held, but the extremists have maintained a presence in the remote desert areas along the border. Iraq has carried out airstrikes in Syria against the group in the past.

BEIRUT (AP) — Amnesty International said Wednesday it has documented widespread abuses, including torture and deprivation of medical care, in detention facilities holding thousands of suspected Islamic State members and their relatives in northeast Syria.

The centers and camps hold about 56,000 people — the majority of them children and teens — and are run by local authorities affiliated with the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF and its allies, including U.S.-led coalition forces, defeated the Islamic State group in Syria in 2019, ending its self-proclaimed Islamic “caliphate” that had ruled over a large swath of territory straddling Iraq and Syria.

What to do with the suspected IS fighters and their families has become an intractable issue. Many countries whose citizens traveled to Syria to join IS have been reluctant to repatriate them, as have local communities in Syria.

"People held in this system are facing large-scale violations of their rights, some of which amount to war crimes,” Nicolette Waldman, Amnesty’s senior crisis advisor, told journalists.

The United States is also responsible for the alleged violations because it played a key role in establishing and maintaining the detention system, providing hundreds of millions of dollars to the SDF and affiliated forces and regularly interrogating detainees, Waldman said.

The human rights group interviewed 126 people accused of IS affiliation currently or formerly detained, along with representatives of the local administration and aid workers.

The Amnesty report said the vast majority of detainees are being held “indefinitely, without charge or trial, in violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law,” while those who have been tried were, in many cases, convicted on the basis of confessions extracted under torture.

The alleged abuses include “beating, stress positions, drowning, electric shocks and gender-based violence,” including a male detainee who said he and others had been sodomized with broomsticks by guards, the report said. Detainees were also deprived of food, water and medical care and subjected to extreme cold and heat in overcrowded cells, with some allegedly dying of suffocation, it said.

The report added that many of the approximately 14,500 women and 30,000 children held had been victims of human trafficking, including women who were forced to marry IS fighters and minors who were forcibly recruited by the group, and that local authorities had failed to set up a “mechanism to identify trafficking victims” and protect them.

The report also criticized the practice of forcibly separating adolescent boys — some as young as 11 or 12 — from their mothers and placing them in rehabilitation centers indefinitely.

Amnesty called on local authorities, the U.S. government and other allies to bring the detention system into compliance with international law and urged the United Nations to work with them to establish a screening process to release all who are not “reasonably suspected” of having committed a serious crime.

The Autonomous Authorities of the North and East Syria Region, the civilian administration affiliated with the SDF, wrote in response to the Amnesty findings that it had not received any official complaints regarding torture in detention facilities and “if this happened, they are individual acts.”

The administration said it would take action against employees who committed violations if evidence is provided. It denied allegations that inmates were deprived of food, water and medical care. It acknowledged overcrowding in the facilities, which it attributed to lack of financial resources to secure larger centers.

The local authorities took issue with the allegation that people were arbitrarily detained, asserting that most detainees “are members of a terrorist organization and were arrested during the battles" and that many had committed crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The U.S. State Department said in its own response that “we share many of (Amnesty’s) concerns” and it has been working to address them. It called on the international community to “aid local entities’ management of these challenges” and for countries with citizens held in detention in Syria to repatriate them.

Waldman said she believes Washington "very likely knew about these poor conditions from the beginning."

She added: “We think that it may not be the case that they are doing everything they can. They need to accept a much greater responsibility, especially since they played such a key role in establishing the situation in the first place."

FILE - Kurdish forces patrol al-Hol camp, which houses families of members of the Islamic State group in Hasakeh province, Syria, on April 19, 2023. Amnesty International said Wednesday, April 17, 2024 it has documented widespread abuses, including torture and deprivation of medical care, in detention facilities holding thousands of suspected Islamic State members and their relatives in northeast Syria. (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad, File)

FILE - Women residents from former Islamic State-held areas in Syria line up for aid supplies at Al-Hol camp in Hassakeh province, Syria, March 31, 2019. Amnesty International said Wednesday, April 17, 2024 it has documented widespread abuses, including torture and deprivation of medical care, in detention facilities holding thousands of suspected Islamic State members and their relatives in northeast Syria. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, File)