Why is opposition arresting Kurds in northeast Syria?
A Kurdish civilian was tortured and killed after he was kidnapped by an armed opposition faction in north Syria, days after the United Nations condemned the detention of civilians in Syria.
The Sham Legion, affiliated with the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA), and military police recently kidnapped three civilians, including a 70-year-old man, in the northern Syrian city of Afrin.
The kidnapping came only days following a March 1 UN report entitled "A decade of arbitrary detention and imprisonment," which called for an end of kidnappings and crimes committed by armed groups in Syria, including the Islamic State and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
The authors of the report, from the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, said, “Tens of thousands of people in Syria have been unlawfully deprived of their liberty at any one time. Arbitrary detention and imprisonment have been deliberately instrumentalized to instill fear and suppress dissent among the civilian population or, less frequently, for financial gain. Armed groups have also targeted religious and ethnic minority groups.”
The Afrin Post, a local paper focusing on Syrian affairs, more precisely on Afrin, reported that the Sham Legion and the military police kidnapped three elderly people March 3. One of them was killed and the fate of the remaining two remains unknown, it added.
