24 executed over wildfires

BEIRUT: The Syrian government has executed 24 people and sentenced 11 others to life in prison with hard labour for lighting wildfires that burned across the country’s northwest last year, the Syrian Justice Ministry announced in a statement on Facebook on Thursday.

The people convicted were accused not of arson but of terrorism, the government said, because their actions caused death, as well as extensive damage to infrastructure, private and public property, farmland and forests.

The harshness of the sentences, which were imposed on Wednesday, shocked even human rights campaigners who have tracked the brutality of the country’s 10-year civil war. During that time, the government of President Bashar Assad has bombed Syria’s own cities and imposed suffocating sieges on rebellious communities, and an unknown number of people have disappeared into the country’s prisons.

“The idea that 24 people were executed in relation to wildfires just smacks of the farce that Bashar al-Assad has made of the justice system over the last decade,” said Sara Kayyali, a Syria researcher with Human Rights Watch.

She noted that the fires were centred in parts of the country’s northwest that are generally loyal to Mr Assad and where residents have some leeway to criticise the state. As the blazes raged through their communities last fall, destroying homes, crops and forests, many took to social media to blast the government for failing to rein in the fires and for offering only minimal compensation to the victims.

The executions may have been intended to show loyalists in these areas that Mr Assad was taking the issue seriously, Ms Kayyali said. “This strikes me as a move designed to shore up Assad’s popularity and the government’s popularity in these areas,” she said.

The executions were not, however, likely to help Mr Assad’s efforts to diminish his status as an international pariah. In recent months, he has been reestablishing ties with his neighbours, many of whom are resigned to the failure of an uprising that sought to oust the Syrian leader but instead led to civil war.

Mr Assad recently spoke by phone with King Abdullah II of Jordan, one of the United States’ closest partners in the Middle East, for the first time in 10 years. And on Thursday, he spoke with another close US partner, Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, about how to increase cooperation between their “brotherly countries,” according to the Emirati state news agency.

The Syrian state news agency, SANA, did not report on the executions but published an article about the fires. Its headline: “One year after the crime that broke the hearts of Syrians.” It said the fires had burned parts of four provinces, destroyed 32,000 acres of crops and damaged more than 370 homes.