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The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Tuesday said that the five Syrian pro-government activists were arrested for criticizing the Defense Ministry and Intelligence services over the deaths of soldiers and loss of important military bases.
Rami Abdel Rahman, the observatory’s director, said that they were arrested on Friday “aftercriticizing the role of the defense ministry and the intelligence services in the loss of key bases in the north, particularly the Tabqa military airport”.
All five men were members of the Alawite sect to which Syrian President Bashar Assad belongs. Four of them were arrested in the cities of Tartus and Latakia on the coast, both strongholds of the Alawite community and the Syrian regime. The fifth man, Mudar Khadur, was nabbed in the capital city of Damascus after launching an internet campaign asking for information on the soldiers stationed at bases overrun by extremists.
Militants from the Islamic State (IS) seized three army bases in the northern province of Raqa in July and August, killing dozens of Syrian regime troops, and some of them were decapitated.
Khadur had launched the “Eagles of Tabqa Military Airport” page on Facebook to rally support for soldiers when they were under attack, and then the #WhereAreThey and #Waynun campaigns on Twitter after Taqba was captured by the extremists.
Both the page and the campaign had direct criticisms of Defense Minister Fahd Jassem al-Freij, with posts referring to him as the “Minister of Death” and expressed anger at his reappointment in August.
“These men were not opponents of Bashar Assad.But they were angered by the lack of explanations about how these well-protected bases could have fallen so quickly and the large number of deaths”, Abdel Rahman said.
Khadur’s arrest was posted on the “Eagles of Tabqa Military Airport” Facebook page.
“Not a traitor, not an agent, not a terrorist”
“He was arrested by the air force intelligence on the evening of August 29, 2014 in Damascus”, a post on the page reads.
According to statistics from the Observatory, around 2,366 Syrian soldiers have been killed in the months of July and August, and over 800 of them were killed by extremist attacks.