An independent panel appointed by the United Nations to investigate rights abuses in Syria said Wednesday that the government's armed forces and loyalist militias were responsible for the worst known atrocity in the conflict, a massacre of 108 villagers, nearly half of them women and children, in the western village of Houla on May 25.
The Houla finding was contained in a highly incriminating 102-page report from the panel, created by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, that was based on testimony from hundreds of witnesses and survivors who had fled Syria, as well as medical evidence, satellite images and photographs, all of which contradicted the government's assertion that insurgents had carried out the massacre.
The Syria panel's report also recited a litany of murders, extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrests, crimes against children, sexual violence, pillaging and destruction that it sai d had been committed “pursuant to State policy†by the armed forces and thuggish militia members working with them, known as shahiba. The report asserted that the complexity and scale of these violations “indicate the involvement at the highest levels of the armed and security forces and the Government.â€
The complete text of the panel's report was made available online by the council. (Click at the lower right of the document viewer for an enlarged view.)
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The Houla finding was particularly significant, because responsibility for that atrocity became immersed in conflicting claims that have come to define the maelstrom of misinformation presented by antagonists in the nearly 18-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
The government and the insurgents reported diametrically opposite accounts of what happened in Houla, as they have in many other instances of mass killings in Syria.
Mr . Assad said in an interview on German television last month that his armed opponents, whom he calls terrorists, had dressed up in Syrian army uniforms and carried out the Houla killings in order to vilify him and his government. Reports in the German press had also questioned whether Mr. Assad's critics had prematurely concluded the Houla killers were really supporters of Mr. Assad.
The Syria panel's report also said it had found “reasonable grounds†to believe that war crimes, including murder and torture, had been carried out by anti-Assad groups, but that their abuses “did not reach the gravity, frequene and scale of those committed by the Government forces and the shahiba.â€
Despite repeated requests by the Syria panel's chairman, Sergio Pinheiro, a veteran human rights investigator, Mr. Assad refused to grant the panel permission to enter Syria, which meant that all of its firsthand accounts were based on depositions from people who had left the coun try.
Established in September 2011, Mr. Pinheiro's panel is to present its final report on Syria at the Human Rights Council session on Sept. 17.
As The Lede noted last week, a reporter for the German magazine Der Spiegel visited Houla last month and returned with videotaped testimony from a number of witnesses who blamed shabiha militants for the killings.
