Baladi News – Damascus (Hussam Mohammed)
Several sources in the areas that are still under Assad’s regime control indicated that the regime has been conducting since Thursday an arbitrary detention campaign in order to compulsorily conscript a large number of Syrian young men, especially in Damascus and its suburbs as well as Homs and Lattakia.
Media activist Mohammed al-Midani from Damascus told Baladi News that the regime forces detained a large number of young men over the previous couple of days. The detentions were arbitrary in several areas of Syria, but mainly targeted young men who had fled areas of Damascus countryside to the capital.
Al-Midani added that “Most men and youngster who had been detained were transferred by Assad’s military intelligence to conscription centers in order to subject them to intensive training courses for two weeks only, then sent later to the battle fronts to compensate the lack of soldiers in Lattakia and Aleppo.”
The speaker also pointed out that the detention of 35 people was documented over the last couple of days only, indicating that the arrest campaign was particularly intensified in the areas under Assad’s forces control in the middle and south of the country.
Suhaib Abdul Khaliq, a commander at the Free Syrian Army said that “the huge losses that were inflicted on the Assad and Hezbollah forces, as well as the Afghan and Iraqi militias and others in Aleppo and the Syrian coast, are large in every sense of the word.”
He also added that “the compulsory conscription conducted by Assad forces in their controlled areas since few days only aims at enlisting new numbers of fighters in their ranks as the regime, and its allies, are suffering lack of soldiers, which was also demonstrated by Hezbollah officials in statements to western media.”
It is noteworthy that the beginning of this year witnessed a large conscription and detention campaign by the Syrian regime forces of hundreds of Syrian young men. Many of them were recruited to fight the Syrian opposition, but some were returned as corpses to their families.