For days no news on Kinan Wakkaf after rumors of his arrest. Reporters Without Borders calls for immediate release from the Damascus authorities
ROME. Criticizes Assad, it vanishes into thin air. Sos for a Syrian journalist. Kinan Waqqaf was formally not arrested but declared “missing”, as has been the case for many of his Syrian colleagues for decades. The journalist had said that he had already been subjected to strong intimidation and pressure from the authorities.
Deterioration
In the days preceding his disappearance, Kinan Waqqaf had publicly denounced the fact that the disputed President Bashar al Assad had received a well-known actor and his wife at the presidential palace, in a context of prolonged and rapid deterioration of socio-economic conditions in the country tormented by 11 years of war and crossed by the worst economic crisis in recent years. The Syrian journalist Kinan Waqqaf, whose traces have been lost for days after rumors about his possible arrest by the authorities in Damascus, must be released immediately: this is the appeal of Reporters Without Borders, an international organization for the defense of freedom of the press. .
Will
The story of Waqqaf, a reporter from the coastal city of Tartus and employed in a government newspaper, aroused interest in Syria after the journalist published a video, last February 6 on social networks, in which he left what he called “a will “. “Someone take care of my children,” he said in the video, claiming that he was wanted by the police and that he would be arrested shortly thereafter. His colleagues and family say they have lost track of Kinan since that evening. Government bodies do not confirm or deny the circumstances of the affair. Armed violence in Syria broke out in the spring of 2011. And internal and regional warfare killed about half a million people and forced 12 million Syrians to flee their homes.
Violations
Since 2019, Syria has been hit by the financial crisis that has already manifested itself in neighboring Lebanon. Here the banking system failed, on which the Syrian economy was also partly based. Human rights violations in Syria are well documented well before the outbreak of the conflict. And humanitarian organizations have reported for decades of arbitrary arrests, torture and killings of activists, journalists and dissidents in detention centers run by enforcement and repression agencies.
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