DAMASCUS: Kurdish activist Mahmud Safo, a member of a banned leftist party in Syria, has been arrested by security forces in the north of the country, a Syrian rights group said on Tuesday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a statement that Safo was arrested Sunday evening near the village of Al-Malkiya "and has not returned home since."
The London-based rights group demanded the Syrian authorities "unconditionally release Mahmoud Safo immediately, along with all prisoners of conscience being held in Syrian jails."
The statement identified Safo as a member of the political office of the Kurdish Left Party of Syria, which is outlawed.
The group also called on Damascus to "end arbitrary detention by the security services of political opponents, as well as of civil rights and human rights activists."
The New York-based Human Rights Watch late last year issued a similar call, charging that the security forces frequently attack Kurdish gatherings and detain Kurdish activists.
In a report entitled "Group Denial: Repression of Kurdish Political and Cultural Rights in Syria," HRW documented what it said are efforts by the authorities to "ban and disperse" Kurdish gatherings and "the detention of leading Kurdish political activists and their ill-treatment in custody."
Kurds represent around nine percent of Syria’s 20-million population.
Living mainly in the north, near the border with Turkey and Iraq, Syria’s Kurds are demanding recognition of their language, culture and political rights but deny they are seeking secession.
HRW last week called on the Syrian authorities to probe shootings by security forces during Kurdish New Year celebrations in northern Syria on March 21 that killed at least one person and wounded several.
It said a crowd of Kurds had gathered near the town of Raqqa for Nowrouz celebrations for the Kurdish New Year organized by the unlicensed Syrian Democratic Union Party closely affiliated with Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
It quoted Kurdish participants as saying Syrian security forces and police in civilian clothes asked the Kurds to remove Kurdish flags and pictures of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is jailed in Turkey.
When the Kurds refused to comply they were sprayed with water cannon, before security forces began firing into the air and then into the rock-throwing crowds, HRW said.
