The UN reported 10,000 persons arbitrarily detained between mid-March and late-June 2011;[35]: 5 a year later that number had more than doubled, though the true number of detainees may have been far higher.[38]: 11 [40]: 12 At the notorious Seidnaya jail, north of Damascus, 2,500 military officers and lesser ranks were being held after they disobeyed orders or attempted desertion.[43] Human Rights Watch do ented more than 20 different methods of torture used against detainees, including: prolonged and severe beatings, often with objects such as batons and wires; painful stress positions; electrocution; burning with car battery acid; sexual assault; pulling out fingernails; mock execution; and sexual violence.[40]: 18–19 Many were held in disgusting and cruelly overcrowded conditions; many who needed medical assistance were denied it, and some consequently died.[40]: 14–17
Human Rights Watch accused the government and Shabiha of using civilians as human shields when they advanced on opposition-held areas.[44] A UN report confirmed this, saying soldiers had used children as young as eight, detaining and killing children afterwards. The UN added the Syrian Government as one of the worst offenders on its annual "list of shame".[45] In May 2012, Al Arabiya aired leaked footage of a man being tortured in a government detention centre in Kafranbel.[46]
In response to these violations, the UN Human Rights Council passed a condemnatory resolution. It also demanded that Syria cooperate with a UN investigation into the abuses, release all political prisoners, and allow independent monitors to visit detention facilities.[47]
The charity Save the Children conducted interviews in refugee camps with Syrian civilians who had fled the fighting, and released a report in September 2012 containing many accounts of detention, torture and summary execution, as well as other incidents such as the use of civilians as human shields, allegedly including tying children onto advancing tanks so that rebel forces would not fire upon them.[48]
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A 2016 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report stated that pro-Assad forces deliberately carried out indiscriminate attacks against civilian population through aerial bombing. Between February 2014 and January 2015, Human Rights Watch reports that "at least 450 major damage sites" in Syria "showed damage consistent with barrel bomb detonations". A local Syrian group estimates that in the first year after UN resolution 2139 was passed, aerial barrel bomb attacks killed 6,163 civilians in Syria, including 1,892 children. HRW report stated that the Assad government deployed toxic chemicals in numerous barrel bomb attacks between March to May 2015.[63] Pro-Assad forces also imposed forced starvation on civilian populations by besieging numerous residential areas.[63] According to a UN investigation, in September 2016 the Syrian air force dropped barrel bombs from helicopters on a United Nations humanitarian aid convoy at Urum al-Kubra headed to Aleppo. The bombs were followed by rocket fire from jets, and strafing of survivors with machine guns, killing 14 aid workers. In a report issued 1 March 2017, the United Nations found the attack was "meticulously planned" and "ruthlessly carried out"—and because it was deliberate, a war crime.[65][66]
According to three eminent international lawyers in the 2014 Syrian detainee report[67] Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in the light of a huge cache of evidence smuggled out of the country showing the "systematic killing" of about 11,000 detainees. Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had no eyes; others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution. Experts say this evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that had yet emerged from the 34-month crisis.[68][69]
According to a report by Amnesty International, published in November 2015, the Syrian government had forcibly disappeared more than 65,000 people since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War.[70] According to a report in May 2016 by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 60,000 people have been killed through torture or died from dire humanitarian conditions in Syrian government jails since March 2011.[71]
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The Ba'athist Syrian government has deployed chemical warfare as a systematic military strategy in the Syrian civil war, and is estimated to have committed over 300 chemical attacks, targeting civilian populations throughout the course of the conflict.[78][79] As of 2023, at least nine separate investigations conducted by both the UN and the OPCW have concluded that the Assad government carried out several chemical weapons attacks.[80] Investigation conducted by the GPPi research ins ute do ented 336 confirmed attacks involving chemical weapons in Syria between 23 December 2012 and 18 January 2019. The study attributed 98% of the total verified chemical attacks to the Syrian Arab Armed Forces. Approximately 90% of all attacks had occurred after the Ghouta chemical attack in August 2013.[81][82]
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Physician Annie Sparrows believes an explanation for the killing is that the Syrian government viewed doctors as dangerous, seeing their ability to heal rebel fighters and civilians in rebel-held areas as a "weapon" against the government. Over the 2.5 years, doctors, nurses, dentists, and pharmacists who provide medical care to civilians in contested areas have been arrested and detained; paramedics have been tortured and used as human shields, ambulances have been targeted by snipers and missiles; medical facilities have been destroyed; the pharmaceutical industry devastated. In 2011, there were more than 30,000 doctors in Syria. More than 16,000 doctors fled, and many of those left were in hiding. More than ninety were assassinated for doing their jobs and at least 36 paramedics, in uniform on authorized missions, were killed by Syrian military snipers or shot dead at checkpoints.[101]
As of August 2016, more than 200 medical facilities had been attacked by the government and its allies since the start of the war, and according to The Economist, "Experts reckon that no previous war has witnessed such widespread, systematic targeting of hospitals and medical workers."[102]
The 2019–2020 UN HRC report for the first time directly accused Russian Air Force of "indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas" in connection to bombing of refugee shelter in Haas and market place in Ma’arrat al-Nu’man in summer 2019, and described them as "amounting to the war crime".[103]
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