23 May, 2017
Western monitors and watchdog groups said they have accumulated evidence of mass killings in Syrian government prisons.
The State Department said Monday the Assad government built a crematorium at the prison to rid itself of the bodies of the 50 or more prisoners it executes each day.
Jones, an acting assistant secretary of state, said Washington's information came from credible humanitarian agencies and from the U.S. "intelligence community" - implying that classified evidence beyond the commercial pictures exists.
Mr Jones said Mr Assad's Government had carried out air strikes, chemical attacks, extrajudicial killings, starvation, and other measures to target civilians and its opponents.
The revelations echoed a February report by Amnesty International that said an average of 20 to 50 people were hanged each week at the Sednaya military prison, north of Damascus.
Nicolette Waldman, who wrote the 48-page report after a yearlong investigation, said the number of people killed may be much higher.
United States claims that Bashar al-Assad's regime is using a prison crematorium to destroy the remains of thousands of murdered detainees are unfounded and disconnected from reality, Syria has said.
The intelligence community and local non-governmental groups helped find evidence about the crematorium.
" Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has carried out these atrocities and others seemingly with the unconditional support from Russian Federation and Iran, his main backers", he said in a special State Department briefing on Monday. "We believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Sednaya prison".
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it has recorded the first fatalities inside the country's four "de-escalation zones" since the agreement came into effect 10 days ago.
Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Gallant, a retired major general who led the Israel Defense Forces's southern command, argued that the time has come to "eliminate" Assad and eventually deal with his sponsors in Iran, Bloomberg reported.
"Our statement is that we want Assad to fall and the replacement of the Alawite (regime) with moderate Sunni rule", Gallant said.
"The continued brutality of the Assad regime, including the use of chemical weapons, presents a clear threat to regional stability as well as the national security interests of the United States", he said.
Most political prisoners said they had been held in the Red Building, a facility the regime largely emptied of mostly Islamist and jihadist prisoners in the early months of the anti-Assad uprising that began in early 2011.
United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura attends a meeting during Intra Syria talks at the U.N.in Geneva, Switzerland, Tuesday May 16, 2017.
