AZAZ, Syria (North Press) – A video allegedly showing the beating and torture of a small child by Syrian opposition groups was shared on a Telegram group on Thursday.
Local activists from Syria’s northern Turkish-held Azaz region claim that a Turkish-backed Syrian opposition group known as the Elite Army had enlisted the help of a local woman and several men to kidnap the child and hold it for ransom.
The group is said to be led by Khaled Zuhair, a militant well known in the past two years in the Azaz and Jarabulus regions held by Turkey for kidnaping women, children, and the elderly and asking their families for ransom, the activists said.
“[Zuhair] escaped from prison; he was wanted in Euphrates Shield areas,” a local activist said anonymously over Telegram, referring to the Turkish-held areas in northern Syria.
“With a woman and other people, they kidnapped children and filmed them while they tortured them and sent the videos to their families to extort them to pay ransom,” he added.
“This woman had kidnapped the child and sent a video while torturing the kid to his family asking for money,” another local resident said, adding that the leader of the group responsible “is from Maa’rat, and called Khaled Zuhair, or Khaled Zaied.”
In another video circulated on Telegram, a bearded man claiming to know the child personally stated his belief that the video shows a mentally ill mother beating her child. The man added that “witchcraft” was to blame for the woman’s mental state.
Local activists refuted the bearded man in the video, saying the group’s leader Zuhair and his group are well known in Azaz for kidnapping and torturing children.
Multiple human rights and media reports have documented several credible claims that, since Turkey seized areas of northern Syria, including Jarabulus in 2016 and Afrin in 2018, Turkish-backed armed groups have regularly committed various violations and war crimes, including the destruction of property, looting, rape, kidnapping, extortion, murder, and ethnic cleansing.
In February 2019, the United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria released a report charging that Turkish-backed armed groups in northern Syria were guilty of war crimes including “hostage-taking, cruel treatment, torture, and pillage.”
It stated that “the most common violations perpetrated in Afrin involved frequent abductions by armed groups and criminal gangs.”
As recently as early March of this year, the commission again released evidence that it had found reasonable grounds to believe that the militias “perpetrated the war crime of murder and repeatedly committed the war crime of pillaging, further seriously contravening the right to enjoyment of possessions and property.”
The UN concluded that “if any armed group members were shown to be acting under the effective command and control of Turkish forces, these violations may entail criminal responsibility for such [Turkish] commanders who knew.”