The sentences shocked rights groups, who saw it as a move by President Bashar al-Assad to appear tough after a crisis that hurt his loyalists.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian government has executed 24 people and sentenced 11 others to life in prison for lighting wildfires that burned across the country s northwest last year, the Syrian justice ministry announced in a Facebook post on Thursday. The convicted were not accused of arson but of terrorism, the government said, because their actions caused death, as well as extensive damage to infrastructure, public and private property, farmland and forests. The brutality of the sentences, 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 al-Assad has bombed Syria s own cities, imposed suffocating sieges on rebellious communities and disappeared an unknown number of people into its prisons. The idea that 24 people were executed in relation to wildfires just smacks of the farce Bashar al-Assad has made of the justice system over the last decade, said Sara Kayyali, a Syrian researcher with Human Rights Watch.
She noted that the fires were centered in parts of the country s northwest that are generally loyal to Mr. al-Assad and where residents have some leeway to criticize the state. As the fires 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 their victims.
The executions might have been intended to show loyalists in these areas that Mr. Al-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, however, not likely to help Mr. Al-Assad's efforts to diminish his status as an international pariah. In recent months, he has been re-establishing ties with his neighbors, many of whom are resigned to the failure of an uprising that sought to oust the Syrian leader, but instead led to civil war.
For the first time in 10 years, King Abdullah II of Jordan spoke to Mr. Al-Assad by phone with King Abdullah II of Jordan, one of the United States closest partners in the Middle East. And on Thursday he spoke with another close American partner, Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, 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 destroyed parts of four provinces, burned 32,000 acres of crops, including olive and citrus orchards, and caused nearly $24 million in losses to farmers. It also damaged more than 370 homes. The Justice Ministry statement did not name the people executed or provide any information about how or where they were convicted. It said they had held planning meetings and continued to light fires with flammable substances over a few months. In addition to those sentenced to life, nine others, including five adolescents, were given prison sentences, the statement said. The adolescents received between 10 and 12 years.
Syria does not appear in such rankings because of the opacity of its penal system. Executions are rarely announced, and many happen in prisons after little or no legal process, rights groups say. Often, even relatives of those who are executed are not informed. Ms. Kayyali said the use of the terrorism law in the wildfire cases was deeply problematic. Such cases, she said, are heard in a special counterterrorism court, where confessions are often coerced, the accused are not allowed proper legal representation and many suspects are punished for opposing the government. We have seen the counterterrorism law and this court be used to send dissent, to stifle dissent, to send hundreds of people to their deaths, Ms. Kayyali said. So the idea that this was referenced in relation to these executions is an immediate red flag.