BEIRUT — The top U.N. human rights official warned opposition fighters in Syria on Monday that they would not be immune from prosecution for atrocities, as videos from the Syrian city of Aleppo appeared to show a mass execution by rebel fighters of bound and blindfolded Syrian government soldiers.
One of the videos, first publicized Monday on the Brown Moses blog, which curates and analyzes video evidence from Syria, showed at least 20 corpses lying in crooked row on a bloodstained street curb. The victims wore fatigues but no shoes. Several appeared to have been shot in the head.
In that video and another that captured the same scene, different rebel groups appear to take responsibility for the killings. It was impossible to immediately confirm the authenticity of the videos, or to determine when and where they were recorded.
If confirmed, the executions were likely to add to growing concerns about the conduct of the militias fighting to topple the Syrian president, Bashar Assad, and particularly their treatment of prisoners.
Speaking in Geneva on Monday, Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for human rights, warned of atrocities by both the government and its opponents. Both, she said, “deploy snipers that target civilians.”
Pillay also said the Syrian government’s attacks on civilians and destruction of homes “may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity,” according to a transcript of Pillay’s remarks. And in a stern warning directed at anti-government forces, Pillay noted the “undoubted climb in human rights violations” attributed to the rebels, including abductions and summary executions.
In one of the videos showing the executed soldiers, a narrator claims that a rebel battalion called Salam al-Farisi was responsible. In another posted by the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a man attributes responsibility to a different battalion.
The leader of the Syrian Observatory, who uses the pseudonym Rami Abdul-Rahman for safety reasons, said that the soldiers may have been part of a contingent from a military base in the Hanano district that rebel fighters attacked Friday.
Also Monday, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry announced that diplomats from Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are expected to meet in Cairo in the coming days.
