The Assad regime in Syria has seized more than $1.5 billion worth of personal property from citizens accused of joining anti-government protests.
Homes, land, shops, cars, business properties, olive groves, electronics, jewelry, livestock, and poultry are among the property that the Syrian government has taken as its own according to a human rights group.
The Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) estimates that nearly half of citizens detained after the Syrian uprising in 2011 have been subject to property seizures.
The staggering amount of assets taken from detainees shows the Assad government exploits the suffering of people that it detains and disappears, ADMSP said.
The ADMSP report says that the Syrian regime has attempted to circumvent international sanctions through this revenue and that this tactic also ensures that former detainees in exile have absolutely nothing to return to if they are released.
Former detainees gave firsthand accounts of being forced to sign convictions against them while being blindfolded, after being tried on charges of terrorism for attending protests. Because they were blindfolded, they had no idea that they were being forced to sign away both civil rights, as well as anything they owned.
ADMSP says that this is an example of how the Assad regime has honed legal methods to confiscate property as part of a broad, brutal crackdown against public protests.
People accused of attending demonstrations or protests were convicted under anti-terrorism laws. ADMSP says this is akin to a revenge or scare tactic.
The Assad regime’s detention centers are notorious for the horrific treatment of prisoners, with the widespread use of torture and killing. Tens of thousands of civilians are being held in Syria’s prisons and detention centers, more than a decade after the uprising first began in 2011. Tens of thousands more have been tortured and killed in the centers over the past decade.
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