Rami Abdurrahman, the director of SOHR said: “Jaysh al-Islam is using these captives and kidnapped people-including whole families-as human shields”.
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“Moderate” rebels operating against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are using their captives as “human shields”, a monitoring group says.
“Your women are our women”, a teenage boy standing near one of the cages is filmed as saying. “If you want to kill my mother, you will kill them too”.
A video posted online by the Shaam News Network, an opposition media outlet, showed men and women in iron cages being driven on the back of pickup trucks through what it said was the area of Eastern Ghouta, northeast of the capital.
It is feared that the caged hostages may have been drawn from the hundreds of civilians, mostly from the same Alawite sect as Assad, abducted by Jaish al-Islam and the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra in December 2013.
Jaish al-Islam has not claimed responsibility for the stunt, but they are the dominant rebel group in the area that’s seen a major increase in Syrian regime airstrikes over the last week.
On Friday, Syrian military rocket strikes against the Damascus suburb of Douma, in the East Ghoula district, hit a marketplace, killing at least 89 people, including a number of civilians.
Syrian regime bombardments could become “even more horrific if it spreads to besieged areas around Damascus, where nearly a million people are trapped with no way to escape, few medical facilities, and no options for medical evacuations of seriously wounded”, MSF said in a statement.
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Human Rights Watch said the practice “constitutes hostage-taking and an outrage against their personal dignity, which are both war crimes”.
