Civil regime departments force people of the Eastern Ghouta to register the casualties who died as a result of regime’s military operations when the factions controlled the Ghouta as a “natural death”

Rif Dimashq Province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights: local sources within the Eastern Ghouta reported to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that the civil departments informed families of the people who died at the hands of the Syrian regime through ground or airstrikes or the clashes of civilians and militaries since the beginning of the Syrian revolution; that they need to start working on registering the death of their relatives as a “natural death” and hand over their personal documents, they are also required to register the marriages and children, and in the details: that the civil departments demanded the families through the heads of Municipalities and Mukhtars to start working on registering all the people who died in clashes and bombings and those who died due to diseases caused by the siege; as natural deaths, they also demanded them to register births and marriage contracts as fast as possible, under the penalty of paying a fine for delaying the registration of each incident, and because of that a large number of residents registered what they were requested to register, and when they went to register the deaths they had to take 2 witnesses with them to confirm the occurrence of the death, without indicating its cause or location.

The civilians are facing the risk of working on transactions related to their relatives who are wanted by the security services, as this may lead to arrest of the one working on these papers and the witnesses if any, and in a related context, the security services arrested a woman with her children for 45 days for trying to register the marriage contract and register her children in the civil department, where her husband was a former leader who was killed in one of the battles of the Ghouta, and the woman and her children were released from detention after her relatives paid 2 million Syrian pounds, it worth mentioning that people of the Eastern Ghouta previously depended on papers issued by the Syrian interim government of the Syrian Coalition with all their transactions, even the school certificates were issued by the interim government, and the regime’s government rejected them, and now the official papers issued by the interim government became a sufficient reason for arrest.