Baladi News – (Omar Yusuf)
Activists on social media websites shared a video showing torture and humiliation practices by militants of the separatist Syria’s Democratic Forces (SDF) against Arabs escaping from Raqqa due to the recent battles.
The recording shows militants put a wood chair over the back of an enchained civilian. After that, a militant sits on the chair and starts kicking the civilian violently in the back and legs, whereas another militant beats a second civilian in a barbaric way.
In the recording, an SDF militant informs the civilians that he knows that they are not affiliated with ISIS, and explains that the torture is to extract confessions about the places where ISIS fighters are entrenched, but the civilians respond that they do not know anything about it.
The video emphasizes the racist and systematic persecution practiced by SDF, which imitates Assad’s regime in terms of detaining and torturing civilians to death in order to obtain information from the tortured and terrorize others.
Leaking the recording is synchronized with a military campaign by SDF that aims at capturing Raqqa city, one of the main strongholds of ISIS in Syria, with an overwhelming support by the international coalition.
During the campaign, hundreds of breaches against Arab and Turkmen civilians have been recorded. SDF has prevented the escaping civilians from residing in its areas and detained dozens of them in Manbij on the pretext of belonging to ISIS or the Free Syrian Army. They were also forced to sign pledges of leaving the city as a part of the demographic change policy in the Arab and Turkmen villages.
Alternatively, the militia established several camps, which are actually big detention centers for the displaced people, where they undergo a systematic and organized humiliation.
Many civilians and activists revealed that the recording is “a drop in the ocean,” referring to dozens of massacres perpetrated by the Kurdish militias that have even gone to the level of slaughtering with knives. This also adds to the attacks of the international coalition forces that aims at destroying villages and displacing their residents, in an exposed use of the methods Assad’s regime tp fight terrorism and spread democracy.