Сириядағы адам құқықтарының аяусыз жағдайы

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The situation for human rights in Syria is considered one of the worst in the world and has been globally condemned by international organizations like the United Nations, Human rights Watch, Amnesty International, Civil liberties, political rights, freedom of speech and assembly are virtually non existent under the Ba'athist government of Bashar al Assad; which is regarded as "one of the world's most repressive regimes". The 50th edition of Freedom in the World, the annual report published by Freedom House since 1973, designates Syria as "Worst of the Worst" among the "Not Free" countries. The report lists Syria as one of the two countries to get the lowest possible score (1/100). Since the 1963 coup d'etat by its Military Committee that propelled the neo Ba'athists to power, the Syrian Ba'ath party has operated a totalitarian state in Syria. Following a period of intra party power struggles that culminated in the 1970 coup, General Hafez al Assad became the Syrian President; establishing a hereditary dictatorship of the Assad family. During the six decades of its rule, the security apparatus has banned all social, political and economic groups independent of the Ba'ath party or the regime; ensuring that the state has total monopoly over all forms of organizations. A state of emergency was in effect from 1963 until April 2011, giving security forces sweeping powers of arbitrary arrests and detentions of civilians; including prisoners of conscience. There is no independent judiciary, as it is mandatory for all judges and prosecutors to be approved members of the Ba'ath party. The armed forces has the power to arbitrarily arrest civilians and put them to trial. The authorities have been accused of harassing and imprisoning human rights activists and other critics of the government. Freedom of expression, association and assembly are strictly controlled, and ethnic minorities face discrimination. After an initial period of economic liberalization that failed to improve human rights in the early 2000s, Bashar al Assad launched a string of crackdowns that imprisoned numerous intellectuals and cultural activists; thereby ending the Damascus Spring. At the onset of the Arab Spring in 2011, the country's human rights situation remained among the worst in the world; characterized by arbitrary arrests, mass surveillance by the dreaded secret police and systematic repression of ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds. The government is guilty of crimes against humanity based on witness accounts of deaths in custody including extrajudicial executions, torture, rape, arbitrary detentions, ethnic cleansing, genocides, massacres, state terrorism and forced disappearances during the crackdown against the 2011 Syrian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War. The government has also conducted numerous chemical attacks against its own civilians.

From the early 1920s until 1946, Syria and Lebanon were under the control of a French Mandate, officially ratified by the League of Nations on 29 September 1923. Human rights concerns during this period included the colonialist treatment of the Druze within their autonomous state in the southern portion of the mandate, as prisoners and peasants there were often used for forced labor. During the Great Revolt, French military forces sieged much of Damascus and the countryside, killing at least 7,000 rebels and displacing over 100,000 civilians. Authorities would publicly display mutilated corpses in central squares within Damascus and villages throughout Syria as a means of intimidating opponents of the government. In 1926, the Damascus military court executed 355 Syrians without any legal representation. Hundreds of Syrians were sentenced to death in absentia, prison terms of various lengths, and life imprisonment with hard labour. Additionally, it was during this period that Syrian Women's Rights groups began to assert themselves, led by individuals like Naziq al Abid.

Jews in Syria have been discriminated against, especially since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. In 1948, Jews were banned from leaving the country and from selling their property. In 1953, all Jewish bank accounts were frozen and Jewish property confiscated. In 1954, Jews were temporarily permitted to emigrate, but they had to leave all their property to the government.

The coup d'etat in 1963 staged by the Military Committee of the Syrian Ba'ath party overthrew the Second Syrian Republic headed by President Nazim al Qudsi, ushering in decades long Baathist rule. The new regime implemented social engineering policies such as large scale confiscation of properties, state directed re distribution of lands and wealth, massive censorship, elimination of independent publishing centres, nationalization of banks, education system and industries. A state of emergency was declared which abolished all other political parties and bestowed sweeping powers upon the military; effectively ruling the country as police state. Purges were carried out throughout the civil society, bureaucracy; and the army was packed with party loyalists. Syrian Ba'athists were highly influenced by Akram Hawrani's Arab Socialist party which adhered to Marxism. In March 1964, Jews were banned from traveling more than from their hometowns. Jews were not allowed to work for the government or banks, could not acquire drivers' licenses, and were banned from purchasing property. Although Jews were prohibited from leaving the country, they were sometimes allowed to travel abroad for commercial or medical reasons. Any Jew granted clearance to leave the country had to leave behind a bond of $300–$1,000 and family members to be used as hostages to ensure they returned. An airport road was paved over the Jewish cemetery in Damascus, and Jewish schools were closed and handed over to Muslims. The Jewish Quarter of Damascus was under constant surveillance by the secret police, who were present at synagogue services, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other Jewish gatherings. The secret police closely monitored contact between Syrian Jews and foreigners and kept a file on every member of the Jewish community. Jews also had their phones tapped and their mail read by the secret police. After Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War, restrictions were further tightened, and 57 Jews in Qamishli may have been killed in a pogrom. The communities of Damascus, Aleppo, and Qamishli were under house arrest for eight months following the war. Many Jewish workers were laid off following the Six Day War. After purging rival Baathist factions through a coup in 1970, General Hafez al Assad established total dominance over the Ba'ath party and established a dictatorship centred around his personality cult. Structure of Assad's police state revolved around the Ba'ath party organization, Syrian military establishment packed with Ba'athist elites and Assad family's Alawite loyalists. Hafez ruled Syria for 3 decades with an iron first; deploying repressive measures ranging from censorship to violent methods of state terror such as mass murders, deportations and practices such as torture, which were unleashed collectively upon the civilian population. In 1982, Hafez al Assad responded to an insurrection led by the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama by sending a paramilitary force that indiscriminately killed between 10,000 and 55,000 civilians including children, women, and the elderly during the Hama massacre. State violence perpetrated by Assad's reign have targeted women extensively, subjecting them to discrimination and gender based violence. Between 1980 and 2000, more than 17,000 Syrian civilians were subjected to forced disappearance from the Syrian regime. During Baathist occupation of Lebanon, numerous Lebanese, Palestinian and other Arab civilians went missing. More than 35 torture techniques were reported to be employed in Syrian prisons and military detention centres during this time. A 1983 report published by Amnesty International revealed that Assad regime routinely committed mass executions of alleged dissidents and engaged in the extensive torture of prisoners of conscience. Various torture methods in Syrian prisons include electrocutions, ablazing, sexual violence, castration, etc. In 2000, Bashar al Assad inherited the totalitarian system of Ba'athist Syria following the death of his father. His regime was characterized by even more systemic violence and repression than that of Hafez al Assad. This has been widely attributed to Bashar's inexperience in security and political affairs, in addition to personal insecurities regarding the survival of his family regime. 2006 Freedom House report listed Syria amongst the worst countries to restrict civil liberties and political freedoms; giving it the lowest possible scores in both measures. In 2023, Freedom House rated people's access to political rights in Syria as the lowest on its Freedom in the World annual report on 210 countries. Syria ranked " 3" in political rights – lower than its scale of 1 to 7, alongside South Sudan and Western Sahara – and Syria was given a rating of "Not Free." Since 2022, Syria has the lowest ranked country in report. According to the 2008 report on human rights by the U. S. State Department, the Syrian government's "respect for human rights worsened". Members of the security forces arrested and detained individuals without providing just cause, often held prisoners in "lengthy pretrial and incommunicado detention", and "tortured and physically abused prisoners and detainees". The government imposed significant restrictions on freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association, amid an atmosphere of government corruption. According to Arab Press Network, "despite a generally repressive political climate", there were "signs of positive change," during the 2007 elections. According to a 2008 report by Reporters without Borders, "Journalists have to tightly censor themselves for fear of being thrown into Adra Prison." In 2009 Syria was included in Freedom House's "Worst of the Worst" section and given a rating of 7 for Political Rights: and 6 for Civil Liberties. According to Human Rights Watch, as of 2009 Syria's poor human rights situation had "deteriorated further". Authorities arrested political and human rights activists, censored websites, detained bloggers, and imposed travel bans. Syria's multiple security agencies continue to detain people without arrest warrants. No political parties were licensed and emergency rule, imposed in 1963, remained in effect. The scale of the brutal violence and state terrorism unleashed by the Assad regime and his foreign backers across the country after the eruption of the 2011 Syrian revolution was unprecedented, far outstripping the actions of other Arab autocrats who repressed the Arab Spring. It even exceeded the brutal violence unleashed by Hafez al Assad during the Hama Massacre. By pursuing scorched earth policies to crush the armed resistance, Bashar had destroyed majority of Syria's civilian, cultural and economic infrastructure. Unlike his father, Bashar killed far more Syrian civilians and has also lost significant amount of his political independence to foreign actors like Russia and Iran. As of 2023, more than a third of Syrian territories remain outside the control of the Ba'athist regime. In April 2017, the U. S. Navy carried out a missile attack against a Syrian air base which had been used to conduct a chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians. This attack is also known as the 2017 Shayrat missile strike. In 2018, coalition forces including United States, France, and the United Kingdom also carried out a series of military strikes in Syria.

Syria has a long history of arbitrary arrest, unfair trials and prolonged detention of suspects. Thousands of political prisoners remain in detention, with many belonging to the banned Muslim Brotherhood and the Communist Party. On 18 September 2020, Netherlands demanded that the Syrian President Bashar al Assad be held accountable for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the civilian war. The Dutch officials sent a notice to the Syrian regime on the legal actions to be taken and submitted a case at the International Court of Justice on the Syrian government's failure to negotiate under the UN framework.

August 2016, Amnesty International released a report tackling the issue of torture and ill treatment in Syrian government prisons which amount to crimes against humanity. Since the crisis began in March 2011, the international organization estimated that 17,723 people have died in custody in Syria – an average rate of more than 300 deaths each month. According to the report, governmental forces have used torture to scare the opponents. But today, they use it as a part of systematic attack against opposition members. According to testimonies of some survivors, detainees were subjected to numerous kind of torture aiming at dehumanizing them, and in many cases killing them. Amnesty international said that those, who are responsible for these atrocities, must be brought to justice. In Sednaya Prison alone, up to 13,000 detainees were executed extrajudicially in secret between 2011 and 2015, mostly through mass hangings. This was part of Assad's push to eliminate all dissent to his rule. On 6 July 2020, families of detainees in Syrian government prisons found the pictures of their dead relatives in the media graphics of a forensic police photographer turned whistleblower, codenamed, Caesar. The photos are among tens of thousands of images of torture victims, smuggled out of Syria in 2013. Numerous European citizens were also revealed to be among the torture victims. Chilling revelations of torture, rapes, massacres, extermination were revealed through the 2014 Caesar Report, which documented photographic evidences of industrial scale atrocities occurring in Syrian military prisons. The report documented a total of 55,000 digital images of tortured or dismembered human bodies of around 11,000 detainees. Describing some of the torture techniques unleashed on Syrians held captive in military prisons, the military defector Caesar states: <blockquote>"It was very clear that they were tortured, not tortured for a day or two, tortured for many, many long months. They were emaciated bodies, purely skeletons. There were people, most of them had their eyes gouged out. There was electrocution, you could tell by the dark spots on their body that was used there. There was utilization of knives and also big cables and belts that was used to beat them. And so, we could see every type of torture on the bodies of these individuals. 'Every type of torture,' but the depravity of the gouged eyes leaves to the imagination how maiming was calculated to coerce information. By 2013, the bodies overflowed the morgues and spilled across a parking garage at a military hospital." In a separate statement, Dutch Foreign Ministry accused Bashar al Assad of committing severe human rights violations, war crimes and inhumane tactics against the Syrian people "on a grand scale". The joint proceedings were after repeated Russian vetoes in the UN Security Council that blocked efforts to prosecute Bashar al Assad over war crimes in International Criminal Court.

The Constitution provides for freedom of religion. However, the Government restricts this right. While there is no official state religion, the Constitution requires that the president be Muslim and stipulates that Islamic jurisprudence, an expansion of
Sharia Islamic law, is a principal source of legislation. According to the U. S. Department of State's "International Religious Freedom Report 2007", the Constitution provides for freedom of faith and religious practice, provided that the religious rites do not disturb the public order. According to the report, the Syrian Government monitored the activities of all groups, including religious groups, discouraged proselytism, which it deemed a threat to relations among religious groups. The report said that the Government discriminated against the Jehovah's Witnesses and that there were occasional reports of minor tensions between religious groups, some attributable to economic rivalries rather than religious affiliation. There is some concern among religious minorities that democratic reforms will result in oppression of religious minorities by Islamist movements that are now repressed. Syrian Sunnis are subject to heavy discrimination from the Alawite dominated Baathist apparatus; since the regime elites associate them with the Syrian opposition. As a result, Syria's Sunni community has suffered the vast majority of the brutalities and war crimes perpetrated by the Ba'athist regime during the Syrian Civil War.

The Syrian regime discriminates against women through administrative measures that silence their voice and deploying political violence disproportianety against women. Sexual violence has long been a strategy of the regime to enforce the compliance of the populace. During the Syrian civil war, mass rapes have been weaponised as a large scale war tactic by the Assad regime and the Ba'athist militant forces across Syria. Sexual violence against women on a political and sectarian basis has been described as a fundamental pillar of the regime's military strategy. Anti Sunni Shabiha and other pro Assad deathsquads carry out this policy on a sectarian basis, against Sunni women and girls. Many women suspected of pro opposition sympathies are rounded up by Ba'athist paramilitaries and sexually assaulted in government detention centres and military prisons. Rural and poor women get disproportionately raped, assaulted, beaten and tortured in military prisons. Several women get abducted by dreaded Mukhabarat and raped in the offices of the secret police. According to many survivors, they can't return back to their society without justice against the perpetrators. Article 520 of the penal code of 1949, prohibits having homosexual relations, i. e. "carnal relations against the order of nature", and provides for up to three years imprisonment. In 2010 the Syrian police began a crackdown that led to the arrest of over 25 men. The men were charged with various crimes ranging from homosexual acts and illegal drug use, to encouraging homosexual behavior and organizing obscene parties. In the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), there exist Mala Jins (Women's houses) in more than 60 localities where women can seek refuge and demand justice. There the women get support in matters like divorce, rape, beatings and other forms of domestic violence. Underage marriage is banned within the territory of the AANES

Syrians can not leave the country without an "exit visa" granted by the authorities. Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides for the human right of Freedom of Movement as such "(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country." Bans have been said to have increased significantly since 2006, though exact statistics are hard to come by as secret security agencies are commonly the ones issuing the bans. The Syrian Constitution, in Article 38(3), allows freedom of movement "within the territories of the state unless restricted by a judicial decision or by the implementation of laws of public health and safety." After winning the 2007 presidential election in Syria with 99.82% of the declared votes, Bashar al Assad implemented numerous measures that further intensified political and cultural repression in Syria. Assad government expanded travel bans against numerous dissidents, intellectuals, authors and artists living in Syria; preventing them and their families from travelling abroad. In 2010, The Economist newspaper described Syrian government as "the worst offender among Arab states", that engaged in imposing travel bans and restricted free movement of people. More than 400 individuals in Syria were restricted by Assad regime's travel bans in 2010. During this period, the Assad government arrested numerous journalists and shut down independent press centres, in addition to tightening its censorship of the Internet. From 2011 to 2015, the last four years of the Syrian war, the freedom of movement has been most widely restricted in certain areas and on certain individuals. Restrictions vary between regions, partly because of continuous fighting in certain areas. In rebel held areas there are severe restrictions on the movement of government supporters (or people thought to be government supporters). Foreign diplomats are unable to visit a majority of Syria, and are often not allowed outside of Damascus (Syrian capital). In the areas of Jindires in Afrin, and Ras al Ayn, curfews were executed in 2012 and 2013 as rebel groups put in place a curfew of 5 pm, after which nobody could be seen in public. Then in December 2014, a travel ban was announced on Syrian men aged 18 to 42 (military age). The memorandum supposedly states that all Syrian males must have special permission to leave the country, obtained from army officials. An example of an individual travel ban is Louay Hussein, president of an opposition group in Syria (Building the Syrian State, or the BSS party), was unable to attend peace talks in Moscow in April 2015 because the government refused to rid of his lifelong travel ban, however on 26 April 2015 Hussein managed to evade his ban and flee to Spain. Also Syrian human rights defenders are having their movement restrained by being held in arbitrary arrest. The human rights defenders Mazen Darwish, Hani Al Zitani, and Hussein Gharir were arrested in February 2012 for 'publicizing terrorist acts'. The United Nations General Assembly has repeatedly called for their release. Al Furat University in the city of Deir ez Zor has been facing movement restrictions by ISIS recently. In January 2015 circulars were issued to ISIS checkpoints in the area to scrutinize all university students passing. To encourage students to abandon their studies and join the ranks of ISIS, the rebels have been restricting the students from traveling between government areas and ISIS held areas, preventing many students from entering or exiting the university grounds. Further from this, there are certain restrictions on movement placed on Women, for example, Syrian law now allows males to place restrictions on certain female relatives. Women over the age of 18 are entitled to travel outside of Syria, however, a woman's husband may file a request for his wife to be banned from leaving the country. From July 2013, in certain villages in Syria (namely Mosul, Raqqu and Deir el Zour), ISIS no longer allow women to appear in public alone, they must be accompanied by a male relative/guardian known as a mahram. Security checkpoints in civilian areas set up by the government and by ISIS have allowed them to monitor these restrictions. With the males of Syria often being involved in the fighting, no matter which side, this is leaving many Syrian women at home alone with the children, stranded and unable to leave to purchase food and supplies. Further, women in Tel Abyad and Idlib city have been banned from driving by ISIS and Jabhat al Nursa. Other countries have begun closing their borders to Syrian refugees. On 7 October 2013, Turkey built a two meter wall on the Syrian border in the Nusaybin district where there was frequent fighting with the rebels. Then on 9 March Turkey closed a further two of its border crossings from Syria, Oncupinar and Cilvegozu, in response to the escalating violence and worries of a terrorist plot. Up until this date Turkey had accepted nearly 2 million Syrian refugees. Aid trucks are still welcome to cross the border, but it is strictly closed to individuals. The Syrian government continues its practice of issuing exit visas with strict requirements. They have also closed the Damascus airport frequently because of growing violence. Bans on travel are frequently used against human rights activists and their associates, often these people would not learn about their travel ban until they were prevented leaving the country. Usually no explanations are given for these travel restrictions. The government often bans members of the opposition and their families from traveling abroad, and they are targeted if they attempt to, causing opposition families to fear to attempt to leave Syria for fear of being attacked at the airport or border crossing. Though this action is illegal under international law, Syrian courts have been known to decline to interfere in matters of national security. Article 38(1) provides that "no citizen may be deported from the country, or prevented from returning to it". Human Rights Watch report in October 2021 that refugees who went back to Syria by their own choice suffered severe "human rights abuses and persecution at the hands of Syrian government and affiliated militias, including torture, extra judicial killings, and kidnappings."

The number of news media has increased in the past decade, but the Ba'ath Party continues to maintain control of the press. Journalists and bloggers have been arrested and tried. Internet censorship in Syria is extensive. Syria bans websites for political reasons and arrests people accessing them. Internet cafes are required to record all the comments users post on chat forums. Websites such as Wikipedia Arabic, YouTube and Facebook were blocked from 2008 to 2011. Filtering and blocking was found to be pervasive in the political and Internet tools areas, and selective in the social and conflict/security areas by the OpenNet Initiative in August 2009. Syria has been on Reporters Without Borders' Enemy of the Internet list since 2006 when the list was established. In addition to filtering a wide range of Web content, the Syrian government monitors Internet use very closely and has detained citizens "for expressing their opinions or reporting information online." Vague and broadly worded laws invite government abuse and have prompted Internet users to engage in self censorship to avoid the state's ambiguous grounds for arrest. The Syrian Centre for Media and Free Expression was closed by the government in September 2009. It was the country's only NGO specializing in media issues, Internet access, and media monitoring during election campaigns. It had operated without government approval, and had monitored violations of journalists' rights and had taken up the cause of the ban on the dissemination of many newspapers and magazines. Even pro regime loyalist journalists who are allowed to report within the country are arrested by security forces over social media posts or ambiguos charges like being "out of line".

Ba'athist government has been ruling Syria as a totalitarian surveillance state, policing every aspect of Syrian society for decades. Commanders of government's security forces – consisting of Syrian Arab Army, secret police, Ba'athist paramilitaries – directly implement the executive functions of the Syrian state, with scant regard for legal processes and bureaucracy. Security services shut down civil society organizations, curtail freedom of movement within the country and bans non Ba'athist political literature and symbols. During the Ba'athist rule, militarization of the Syrian society intensified. The number of personnel in the Syrian military and various intelligence entities expanded drastically from 65,000 in 1965 to 530,000 in 1991; and surpassed 700,000 in 2004. Ba'athist secret police consists of four wings: general intelligence and the political security directorates, which are supervised by the Syrian Ministry of Interior; military intelligence and the air force intelligence directorates, which are supervised by the Syrian Ministry of Defence. The four directorates are directly controlled by the National Security Bureau of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and heads of the four branches report directly to the Syrian president, who is also the secretary general of the Ba'ath party. The surveillance system of the Mukhabarat is pervasive, and over 65,000 full time officers were estimated to be working in its various branches during the 2000s. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands of part time employees and informers in various Syrian intelligence departments. According to estimates, there is one member of various branches of the Ba'athist secret police for every 158 citizens, which is one of the largest ratios in the world. The general intelligence, political security, and military intelligence divisions of the Ba'athist secret police have several branches in all governorates controlled by the Assad regime, with headquarters in Damascus. With state impunity granted by the Assad government, Mukhabarat officers wield pervasive influence over local bodies, civil associations, and bureaucracy, playing a major role in shaping Ba'athist administrative decisions. Additionally, intense factional rivalries and power struggles exist among various branches of the secret police. Several academics have described the military, bureaucratic, and secret police apparatus of the Ba'athist state as constituting a pyramidal socio political structure with an Orwellian surveillance system designed to neutralize independent civic activities and political dissent from its very onset. Syria is one of the five countries on Reporters Without Borders organization's March 2013 list of "State Enemies of the Internet", countries ruled by governments that perpetrate pervasive surveillance of news providers, resulting in harsh restrictions on access to information and personal lives. Assad government has intensified its web censorship and cyber monitoring during the course of the Syrian civil war. Assad government's cyberforces engage in several social engineering techniques and surveillance measures such as phishing, malware attacks, interception of Skype calls, etc.

Since the start of the civil war in 2011, more than 100,000 people have been detained, forcibly disappeared or went missing in Syria as of 2019. At least 90,000 of them are thought to have been detained or forcibly disappeared in Syria's state prisons. Other reports estimate that more than 128,000 civilians have been kidnapped or forcibly disappeared by the regime forces by 2019. Amnesty International stated in a 2019 press release: <blockquote>"Until today, the Syrian government has failed to disclose the fate, names and location of people arbitrarily detained and disappeared by Syrian security forces. Some families were notified about the death of their relatives in detention, or were eventually able to find out that their loved one died in custody. Those who receive a death certificate – the only piece of "evidence" provided – are legally bound to then register the person's death in civil records, in order to obtain an official death certificate." Between March 2011 and March 2023, an estimated 154,000 civilians have been forcibly disappeared, abducted or subject to arbitrary detentions in Syria; with over 135,000 individuals being tortured, imprisoned or dead in government detention centres as of 2023. In June 2023, UN General Assembly voted in favour of establishing an independent body to investigate the whereabouts hundreds of thousands of missing civilians who have been forcibly disappeared, killed or languishing in Syrian government prisons. This was after increasing demands to establish a UN approved body by more than a hundred Syrian civil society groups and human rights organizations like the Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and International Committee of the Red Cross. The objective of the new body is to ensure better co ordination to collect information of disappeared individuals. Assad regime denounced the vote as "flagrant interference" in Syria's domestic issues.

The state of human rights in territories controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has been criticized by many political, religious and other organizations and individuals. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights has stated that ISIL "seeks to subjugate civilians under its control and dominate every aspect of their lives through terror, indoctrination, and the provision of services to those who obey".

Human rights violations against Kurds included depriving ethnic Kurdish citizens of their citizenship; suppressing Kurdish language and culture; discrimination against citizens based on Kurdish ethnicity; confiscation of Kurdish land and settlement by Arabs. In the course of the Syrian Civil War, parts of Northern Syria gained de facto autonomy within the Kurdish led Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. In a report "'We Had Nowhere Else to Go': Forced Displacement and Demolition in Northern Syria", Amnesty International documented allegations of forced evictions of Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds and the destruction of their homes. According to Amnesty International, YPG accused them of having links with ISIL and other Islamist groupa. The report said that "in some cases, entire villages have been demolished", and that villagers were "ordered to leave at gunpoint, their livestock shot at". Some persons claimed to Amnesty that "they told us we had to leave or they would tell the US coalition that we were terrorists and their planes would hit us and our families. Threats by the YPG of calling in US airstrikes against villagers were reported. Amnesty International claimed that "these instances of forced displacement constitute war crimes". Some Arab and Turkmen claimed that YPG militias have stolen their homes and livestock, burned their personal documents and claimed the land as theirs, and that Turkmen "are losing lands where they have been living for centuries". During the Syrian civil war, several attacks by Arab or Kurdish Muslims have targeted Syrian Christians, including the 2015 al Qamishli bombings. In January 2016, YPG militias conducted a surprise attack on Assyrian checkpoints in Qamishli, in a predominantly Assyrian area, killing one Assyrian and wounding three others. In October 2015, Amnesty International reported that the YPG had driven civilians from northern Syria and destroyed their homes in retaliation for perceived links to ISIL. The majority of the destroyed homes belonged to Arabs, but some belonged to Turkmens and Kurds. Turkish "Daily Sabah" claimed that Amnesty International has said that Kurdish PYD conducted ethnic cleansing against Turkmens and Arabs after seizing Tal Abyad. However, Amnesty International has published only one report about the Syrian Kurdish forces and it is related to destroying villages and homes, not ethnic cleansing at all. The Amnesty International report concluded that there are documented cases of forced displacement that constitute war crimes. In 2015, Assyrian and Armenian organizations protested the enforcement of Kurdish self administration in the Hasaka province, including expropriation of private property by the PYD and interference in church school curricula and also criticized illegal seizure of property, and targeted killings Assyrians have also criticized the enforcement of revisionist curricula in private and public schools with a Kurdish nationalist bias. They have claimed that in textbooks the Kurds "alter historical and geographical facts", including Assyrian place names which are changed to Kurdish names, and students are taught that King Nebuchadnezzar from the Old Testament married a Kurdish woman. Of particular concern are the "harassment and arbitrary arrests of the PYD's Kurdish political rivals" and of civil society leaders noted by human rights organizations. The Y. P. G. is accused of having arrested hundreds of political prisoners. It is claimed that about 150 people were abducted by the Y. P. G. in 2013 alone. Human Rights Watch reported in 2014 that "there have been numerous cases of maltreatment in prisons in Rojava". Some dissidents were tortured and killed Amnesty International reported in 2015 that the PYD "is using a crackdown against terrorism as a pretext to unlawfully detain and unfairly try peaceful critics and civilians." The PYD has also shot demonstrators, arrested political opponents, and shut down media outlets. Ethnic tensions between Kurds and Arabs have been at the forefront of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq. In Syria, there are widespread reports of Kurdish abuses against Arab civilians, and reports of YPG forces razing villages. Similar reports of Kurdish forces destroying Arab homes have emerged in the fight for Mosul.