AT LEAST 28,000 people have vanished in Syria, victims of a state campaign to terrorise President Bashar al-Assad’s subjects into submission, human rights groups say.

Employing a tactic reminiscent of the enforced disappearances during Stalin’s Soviet Union or Idi Amin’s Uganda, agents of the regime are seizing suspected opposition sympathisers from their homes or off the street, campaigners say.

Avaaz, a global campaign network that aids opposition activists in Syria, said the names of 18,000 missing people had been collected, along with another 10,000 cases of unnamed victims spirited into secret detention and torture centres. . .