Syria executes 24 people for setting wildfires, calls it ‘terrorism’

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

Sara Kayyali, a Syria researcher with Human Rights Watch, noted that the fires were centered in parts of the country’s northwest that are generally loyal to Assad and where residents have some leeway to criticize 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 Assad was taking the issue seriously, 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 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, including olive and citrus orchards, and caused nearly $24 million in losses to farmers.

The Justice Ministry statement did not name the people convicted or provide any information about how or where they were executed.

In addition to those executed or given life sentences, nine others, including five adolescents, were given prison sentences, the statement said.

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