The government can execute war criminals or get full international support—but not both.
Foreign Policy
75
12 min read
0 views
When Syrian authorities recently captured Amjad Youssef, also known as the “Butcher of Tadamon,” residents of the Damascus suburb celebrated in the streets. Few could doubt his complicity in war crimes because at least some of his horrors were captured on video.
In several gruesome sequences, shot by the perpetrators in 2013, Youssef and others are seen herding 41 bound and blindfolded civilians, including seven women, to a pre-dug pit lined with tires. There they execute their captives. When one man still shows signs of life after two gunshots, Youssef yells at him while firing a third shot: “Die, you bastard! Haven’t you had enough?” In another case, Youssef beheads his victim. When the killing is done, the tires are set on fire. Researchers who obtained the evidence, including many other videos, estimate that roughly 288 civilians in all were killed in the Tadamon area, including a dozen children.
It’s perhaps easy to understand why many Syrians who suffered under the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad have openly called for the execution of Youssef and other alleged perpetrators of atrocities. In a region torn by communal violence, justice is sometimes equated with retribution. “We need the highest accountability,” said Jad Nouri, a recent law school graduate in Damascus. “The people really need those kinds of criminals getting justice. They should be hanged.”
But that demand presents a potential dilemma for the government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has led Syria since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024.
Sharaa desperately needs the cooperation of the international community to bring stability to his country—to establish a semblance of justice and bring some peace of mind to families of the dead and missing while also reviving a struggling economy. Specifically, he needs the help of international organizations including the United Nations Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic (IIMP) and the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), an intergovernmental organization based at The Hague that has the necessary technology, including DNA testing, to identify victims buried in at least 66 suspected mass grave sites around the country.
“The U.N.’s missing persons institution, the IIMP, holds the key to identifying the tens of thousands who vanished into Assad’s prisons,” said Reed Brody, a human rights lawyer and prosecutor with wide experience representing victims of brutal dictatorships. “But that institution operates under U.N. rules that prohibit cooperation with states that apply the death penalty.” In particular, information the IIMP collects on victims would not be available as evidence in a Syrian court of law that executes convicted prisoners.
ICMP rules are less clear. But if its help were hindered, the government could struggle to identify the “forcibly disappeared,” partly because sanctions imposed during the Assad era prevented Syria from acquiring DNA testing kits and partly because the current government cannot afford to buy them itself. Hanging perpetrators of atrocities now, Brody added, could “cut off the international cooperation Syria needs.”
A close-up profile shot of a man's face with short hair and light stubble, viewed through the dark metal bars of what appears to be a gate or window.
Atef Najib, the former head of political security in Syria’s southern Daraa province and cousin of toppled leader Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus on May 10.
A wide shot inside a multi-level building with an open central courtyard. On the lower level, a line of security personnel in dark uniforms and helmets stand behind a concrete railing. On the upper balcony, several civilians look down over the edge.
Observers and security personnel crowd the Palace of Justice in Damascus for Najib’s trial on May 10.
A woman wearing a headscarf and a striped button-down shirt talks on a mobile phone while walking past a line of riot police. The officers are dressed in full black tactical gear, helmets with visors, and hold clear shields that read "POLICE" and "SECURITY."
Syrians arrive for Najib’s trial in Damascus on May 10.
Syria’s efforts at “transitional justice”—the attempt to achieve both accountability and stability while recovering from a period of dictatorship and gross human rights abuses—have only just begun. It’s an unfathomably difficult task, in part because the separate needs for popular justice and international legitimacy are sometimes pulling in opposite directions.
The first trial of an Assad-era official charged with crimes began in April. Atef Najib, a cousin of Assad’s, commanded the security branch that allegedly helped spark the uprising against the regime in the spring of 2011. The indictment against Najib charges him with, among other things, overseeing the arrest and torture of children in the southern province of Daraa for writing anti-Assad graffiti on school walls. Seventy-five plaintiffs have lined up to testify in the case. Najib has denied the charges.
In April 2011, another child in Daraa, 13-year-old Hamza al-Khatib, was arrested and tortured after attending a protest. His badly mutilated body was returned to his family 26 days later. Security agents warned relatives to keep quiet. Instead, the family released photographs and videos of his corpse to journalists, activists, and satellite television channels. The ensuing outrage spurred demonstrations across the country as protesters chanted Hamza’s name week after week.
A woman dressed in a black hijab and robe sits on a patterned floor cushion in a room. She holds a string of prayer beads in her lap. Two large, framed portrait photos of males are placed on the seating behind her.
Samira Hahami, the mother of Hamza al-Khatib, in al-Jizah on May 8.
I visited the Khatib family a day before Najib’s appearance in court. Samira Hahami, Hamza’s mother, said she felt relief at seeing the man she held responsible for her son’s horrific torture shackled in a metal cage in the courtroom. “The government is doing everything right,” she said. “We feel so much better now and dignified.”
At least the family knows where Hamza is buried—in a small cemetery behind his house, in a grave neatly kept by his younger brother, Suraqa al-Khatib. In 2019, Hamza’s eldest brother, Omar, died in Sednaya prison north of Damascus, which functioned as a regime slaughterhouse. Documents confirming his death were discovered in the prison after the regime collapsed, but they didn’t include details on where Omar was buried. “It’s more difficult because we don’t even have his body, we don’t know whom to blame,” Hahami said.
A man wearing a black shirt and black pants crouches in a dry, grassy cemetery. He looks down solemnly at a small grave marked by a modest stone headpiece and broken white tiles on the ground.
Suraqa al-Khatib visits the grave of his older brother Hamza in al-Jizah on May 8.
Hahami didn’t talk about legal niceties or what constitutes admissible evidence. Her focus was on the grave she can visit and the son she hasn’t been able to bury and wanting to be in the courtroom when “all the criminals” of the Assad regime are sentenced to death. She seemed unaware that a death penalty might hinder her ability to learn more about Omar.
“The cruelest irony here is that the families demanding executions and the families demanding answers about the disappeared are often the same families,” said Brody, the human rights lawyer.
An elevated view of a heavily devastated urban landscape filled with severely damaged and collapsed concrete buildings. Mounds of gray rubble and debris cover the ground, where two people can be seen walking along a cleared dirt path.
People walk through the war-scarred Yarmouk neighborhood of Damascus on May 9.
These are not the first war crimes trials connected to Syria. For more than a decade, European courts have handed down convictions in places including Germany, Sweden, France, and the Netherlands—countries where perpetrators have been apprehended.
In Koblenz, Germany, five men are now on trial for the siege of Yarmouk, a neighborhood near Damascus. This is the first prosecution anywhere to treat the deliberate starvation of civilians as a war crime. But Syria wants such trials to take place on Syrian soil, with Syrian judges, where victims’ families can attend and witness justice for themselves.
Several children play on a colorful plastic playground structure with a blue slide in a sandy courtyard. An adult woman wearing a grey coat and black headscarf watches over them. In the background, a row of large, multi-story concrete buildings stands heavily damaged with gaping holes, missing walls, and exposed interiors.
Palestinian children play in a park in Yarmouk against a backdrop of damaged buildings on May 9.
Here again, the death penalty in a Syrian trial would complicate matters. Nearly all European countries prohibit extradition to countries where the defendant faces execution, so they would not be able to send prisoners back to Syria. (Assad himself has taken refuge in Russia, which refuses to turn him over to face justice.)
Another challenge is the Syrian justice system itself. Many Assad-era judges have fled the country or have been forced out of their positions, and the existing penal code doesn’t specifically include crimes against humanity, war crimes, or command responsibility crimes.
The presiding judge in the high-profile Najib case, for instance—Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan—defected from the Assad regime in 2013 and was sentenced to death in absentia. He only returned to Syria from exile after Assad fled the country. The rest of the machinery of justice is similarly bareboned. At this point, the government still doesn’t have a functioning legislature that could pass new laws. That is probably one reason why the transitional justice process has taken so long to get going.
A close-up, angled shot of a large banner featuring rows of individual portrait photographs of various people. Each photo includes text printed in Arabic script underneath it.
A wall outside of a mosque in Damascus displays a poster of those missing on May 9. The United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the Syrian civil war.
The slowness and apparent hesitancy of the process, however, also raise questions in the minds of many Syrians who aspire to fundamental change. They worry that justice will focus on a handful of relatively low-level individuals without probing the systemic nature of their crimes. They believe that individuals such as the “Butcher of Tadamon” should be mined for evidence about their superiors and the brutal system of which they were only a small part.
“Amjad Youssef is more valuable alive before an independent court than if he were summarily executed,” Fadel Abdulghany, the director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, wrote soon after Youssef’s arrest in April. “His presence in state custody should be transformed into an opportunity to expose the broader network, locate the bodies, link the crimes to the chain of command, and widen the circle of accountability from the direct executors to those who ordered, covered up, enabled, and concealed.”
A confession by Youssef in custody, however, did not achieve that at all. In a recorded interrogation released by the Syrian Interior Ministry, Youssef claimed sole responsibility for the executions, saying they were his “own personal decisions.” Critics of the government worry about what one has called “selective and performative justice.”
Indeed, the government may have incentives to keep some doors to accountability closed. Powerful figures under Assad have struck deals, providing intelligence in apparent exchange for immunity from prosecution. These include Fadi Saqr, the former commander of the National Defense Forces, a militia created during the civil war to support the government.
After the fall of the Assad regime, Saqr reportedly worked with the new interim government to mediate with former regime loyalists. Yet many Syrian activists and human rights groups have linked him to the chain of command responsible for the 2013 massacre at Tadamon. Saqr has denied responsibility, saying he assumed command after the massacre occurred.
A deep, narrow trench cuts straight through a flat, arid landscape of dry dirt and sparse weeds. To the right of the trench is a long mound of excavated, light-colored soil. In the far distance, a person walks along a low concrete wall under a clear sky.
A deep pit used as a mass grave at the Najha Cemetery in Qatifa, north of Damascus, on May 7.
Tadamon residents say more killings took place right up until the government fell. How many bodies are in that one location, deposited there across more than a decade, is a question Syria’s National Commission for Missing Persons is trying to answer. The excavation of the site has just begun, spurred in large part because the trial of Youssef has been prioritized, said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues.
Rapp was in Syria recently to lead a seminar at Damascus University for law students learning how to build cases. He says early findings show as many as 200 busloads of people were picked up at checkpoints and brought to the Tadamon pit for execution. “They were buried in trenches with tires between the levels of bodies, the tires set on fire, to such an extent that the bodies were badly decomposed,” he said.
An outdoor shot of a large cemetery filled with rows of uniform white marble graves under a low sun. In the foreground, the vertical headstones of two graves have been shattered, leaving broken pieces of white stone resting flat on top of the grave markers.
Tombstones of former Assad regime military commanders and fighters are defaced at the Najha Cemetery in Qatifa on May 9. It’s believed that there are mass graves hidden under the regime gravesites.
Such scenes of horror were all too commonplace in Assad’s Syria. Researchers estimate that the largest such death site—at Qatifa, north of Damascus near a former military base—may hold the remains of 100,000 systematically murdered people.
Anas Hourani, who runs the Syrian Identification Center in Damascus, told the BBC that it will take many years to identify the dead. The remains often arrive in a condition designed to defeat identification. The volume is overwhelming.
Kate Brooks contributed photos to this essay. She is a photojournalist, filmmaker, and the author of In the Light of Darkness: A Photographer’s Journey After 9/11.
