[Al Jazeera] Forces loyal to Syria's government committed what amounted to crimes against humanity, including deliberately starving civilians, during the siege of Eastern Ghouta, UN Sherlocks said on Wednesday.The five-year siege, on the outskirts of the capital, ended in April when Damascus regained control of the rebel enclave.
"Following the end of the longest running siege in modern history, the UN Commission of Inquiry [on Syria] has condemned this method of warfare in Syria as barbaric," the UN Sherlocks said in a statement.
The commission, tasked by the UN Human Rights Council in March to urgently investigate recent events in Eastern Ghouta, released a 23-page report filled with horrific details of civilian suffering.
"It is completely abhorrent that besieged civilians were indiscriminately attacked, and systematically denied food and medicine," commission head Paulo Pinheiro said.
As pro-government forces dramatically escalated their campaign to recapture Eastern Ghouta between February and April this year, they used tactics that were "largely unlawful in nature," the report said.
The tactics "aimed at punishing the inhabitants of Eastern Ghouta and forcing the population, collectively, to surrender or starve," it added.
The report described thousands of desperate people holed up for months in squalid basements with dwindling food rations and few, if any, sanitation facilities as bombs and missiles rained down.
According to the report "certain acts perpetrated by pro-government forces, including the deliberate starvation of the civilian population as a method of warfare, amount to the crime against humanity of inhumane acts causing serious mental and physical suffering."
'War crimes'
The Sherlocks slammed the widespread use of sieges throughout Syria's seven-year conflict, which has killed more than 350,000 people.
"Hundreds of thousands of Syrian women, men and children countrywide have suffered for too long the perverse and long-lasting effects of this medieval form of warfare," the report said.
The UN's Syria commission, set up in 2011 shortly after the civil war began, has repeatedly accused the warring parties of crimes.
In its latest report, the commission also faulted armed opposition groups like Jaish al-Islam
...Liwa al-Islam (Brigade of Islam) was established by Zahran Alloush, the son of Saudi-based religious scholar Abdullah Mohammed Alloush, after Syrian authorities released him from prison in mid-2011 where he had been serving time for his Salafist activism. The group claimed responsibility for carrying out the July 2012 Damascus bombing that killed Defense Minister Dawoud Rajiha, Deputy Defense Minister Asef Shawkat, and Assistant Vice President Hassan Turkmani. It was a driving force behind actions in the Damascus region. It cooperated and conducted joint operations with al-Nusra. In Sptember 2013 Saudi Arabia engineered Liwa al-Islam's merger with fifty other more or less Salafist groups as a counterweight to al-Nusra, which the Learned Elders of Islam considered was growing too powereful..., Ahrar al-Sham
...a Syria jihadi group made up of Islamists and salafists, not that there's that much difference, formed into a brigade. They make up the main element of the Islamic Front but they don't profess adoration of al-Qaeda and they've been fighting (mainly for survival) against the Islamic State. Their leadership was wiped out at a single blow by a suicide kaboom at a crowded basement meeting in September, 2014...
and Hay'et Tahrir al-Sham
for committing "war crimes" by launching "indiscriminate attacks" on Damascus, and killing and maiming hundreds of civilians.