[JURIST] Armed opposition groups are committing war crimes [press release] in Syria, Amnesty International (AI) [advocacy website] said in a report [report, PDF] Tuesday. While the report acknowledges that many violations of international human rights law have been committed by government forces, it focuses on the heavy reliance on the “rule of the gun” by opposition forces in quasi-government forms. It covers a total of 24 cases of abductions, five of which involved the torture of the captured individual. Several of those captured were journalists and others were lawyers, political activists, civilians and even some children. The report then discusses the torture and summary killings that many civilians have been subjected to and concludes with recommendations that opposition groups oppose “all human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law,” and stop arbitrary detention of individuals, especially when it is based solely on political or religious ideology. AI urged the international community to stop supporting such forces and to pressure them to stop committing such atrocities.

The Syrian Civil War [JURIST backgrounder] has been ongoing since 2011 when opposition groups first began protesting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and the increasingly bloody nature of the conflict has put pressure on the international community to intervene. In March AI reported that Russian and Syrian armed forces were deliberately attacking hospitals and other medical facilities as part of a military strategy to clear the way to northern Aleppo. Just prior, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee passed [press release] two resolutions calling for an international tribunal in the Middle East to address the alleged war crimes [JURIST report] committed by the government of Syria and its allies, specifically Russia and Iran. In February the UN reported that the Syrian government is systematically exterminating detainees [JURIST report]. In November Human Rights Watch released a report stating that the practice of caging captured soldiers and civilians constitutes hostage-taking [JURIST report] and an outrage against their personal dignity.