NEW YORK, 2 March, 2021 (TON): On Monday, the UN investigators said that during a decade of conflict, several thousand of people rounded up by the Syrian authorities have been missing, many tortured, raped or killed that has amounted to war crimes and against humanity crimes.  

The investigators said in their latest report, "The fate of tens of thousands of the victims who were subjected to the arbitrary and incommunicado detention and enforced disappearance by Syrian Government forces, and at a lesser scale, by ISIL, HTS and other armed groups remains unknown as we reach the end of a decade."

The issue of detainees represents a "national trauma" that would affect Syrian society for decades, they said.

However, the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has denied many previous U.N. accusations of war crimes and says it does not torture prisoners.

The UN investigators conducted 2,658 interviews, including with some former ex-detainees, and used official documents, photographs, videos, and satellite imagery to document crimes in more than 100 detention facilities run by all forces.

Emphasizing the situation in the country, the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, led by Paulo Pinheiro, called for perpetrators on all sides to be prosecuted and for the creation of an international mechanism to locate the missing.