Syria: Leaked video exposes Assad killing machine

In late April 2022, a Syrian defector leaked a video of the Tadamon bloodbath. Hundreds of Syrian households watched the clip, hoping to be taught what had occurred to their lacking sons.

The Siyam household watched it, too. Their son, Waseem Siyam, left his dwelling in Damascus within the early morning of April 14, 2013. He had been ordered by the federal government to ship flour to a state-run bakery within the metropolis’s southern Tadamon neighborhood. The 34-year-old by no means returned from what ought to have been a routine process.

For a few years, the Siyams, who now stay in Germany, believed Waseem had been arrested at a checkpoint and brought to a authorities jail. Yet the leaked video lastly revealed to them the grisly particulars of his disappearance.

The clip exhibits a blindfolded man in a white t-shirt and denims being led via an empty alley to a pit full of corpses.

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“My father was the first to recognise him [in the video],” says Tasnim Siyam, Waseem’s sister, including that her father recognised his son by his gait. “He looked so different, they had beaten him already, maybe it was also the fear.”

A city close to Damascus after Syrian authorities and Russian airstrikes in 2018. (AP file picture)

They made Waseem leap into the pit and shot him useless.

“It is surreal, how can I process the fact the man being killed in the video is my brother,” asks Tasnim Siyam.

Toying with victims
The leaked video was recorded on April 16, 2013, simply days after Waseem’s disappearance. It exhibits two uniformed males methodically kill 41 individuals. Each time, one of many two will get a blindfolded particular person from a white supply van, leads the particular person to a big pit that already accommodates a number of corpses and automotive tires. They are pushed in and shot useless. Then, the our bodies are doused in gasoline and set alight.

The Syrian conflict has now been raging for 11 years, throughout which numerous atrocities have been dedicated by all events concerned within the preventing. The Tadamon bloodbath video, recorded in what was then government-controlled Damascus, nonetheless, stands out for the deliberate nature of the callous brutality it exhibits.

It is evident from the video that the 2 executioners are having fun with their “work.” They homicide civilians in broad daylight in a relaxed, routine method. They play a twisted recreation with their victims, falsely telling them the alley they’re passing via is being focused by snipers, so the blindfolded victims run alongside and fall into the pit. Before they know what has occurred, they’re shot.

The murderers, feeling untouchable, documented their crimes by filming high-definition footage. Sometimes they wave on the digicam and crack jokes. Why did they document their crimes? Did they need to produce “war trophies”? Or present their superiors they have been doing as they have been ordered? Whatever the explanation, it’s extremely unlikely they thought the video can be seen by the general public.

Identifying the killers
Ugur Umit Ungor, a professor of Holocaust and genocide research on the University of Amsterdam, was among the many first to obtain a replica of the clip in 2019. Working along with his colleague Annsar Shahhoud, the 2 have been capable of determine the 2 killers within the video: Najib al-Halabi, who’s now useless, was a part of a militia loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad; the opposite man, seen carrying a fishing hat, is Amjad Youssef. He is an officer in Assad’s secret service.

“The last two years were hellish for us,” Ungor tells DW. “Imagine you know of a horrible massacre, need to watch this video again and again, but cannot tell anyone else about it.”

Analysing the video to determine the murderers was nothing like atypical tutorial analysis. They got down to do what thus far few have managed to attain: Produce definitive proof that the Syrian state is straight answerable for a number of the worst atrocities dedicated within the conflict.

‘I killed many people’
Ungor and his Syrian colleague Shahhoud used unconventional analysis strategies. Shahhoud adopted a faux on-line id to dupe the Syrian regime and discover out extra concerning the males behind the bloodbath.

Shahhoud pretended to be a younger Alawite girl from Homs by the title of “Anna Sh” who supported Alawite President Assad. The Guardian newspaper first coated how, over the course of two years, Shahhoud succeeded in speaking to a whole lot of Assad staffers and successful their belief. One day, she stumbled throughout Amjad’s on-line profile. Shahhoud, as Anna, befriended the person. Occasionally, they might chat on the cellphone, with Ungor secretly listening.

According to the leaked video, the killers have been near Bashar al-Assad. (AP)

Amjad Youssef informed her he felt lonely and pressured. Shahhoud’s assumed character lent him her ear. After a number of months, he confided in her: “I killed many people.” The two teachers had lastly achieved their purpose.

The two handed the recorded conversations to Dutch and German prosecutors, and described their findings in New Lines journal.

“We could not lean back and say: We are academics, we do research, let this revelation blow up on social media and not get involved,” says Ungor. “We had to take responsibility.”

Solid proof of conflict crimes
The leaked six-minute video presents stable proof of crimes as they have been dedicated by identifiable perpetrators and victims. It additionally exhibits the killings have been a pre-mediated bloodbath. A mass grave had been ready, each killers acted in a routine style and tried to hide their victims’ identities.

The video suggests the killings adopted a scientific sample, mentioned Alexander Schwarz, an skilled on worldwide prison regulation with Amnesty International. “A systematic attack on civilians, as seen in this video, is one criterion for a crime against humanity.”

Still, it’s unclear whether or not these revelations will result in a trial. A life sentence handed all the way down to Syrian officer Anwar Raslan in January by a German courtroom in Koblenz, nonetheless, exhibits the surviving executioner within the video might be prosecuted.

Additionally, the video is of nice political significance, based on Fritz Streiff, who gives authorized counsel to Mnemonic, a corporation documenting human rights abuses. He argued that its stunning nature exhibits that nations mustn’t normalize ties with the Assad regime.

“This is not just about Amjad Youssef,” says Ungor. “This is also about the system that creates people like him.”

Closure for households?
Schwarz and Streiff work with individuals whose kin have vanished in Syria. Shedding gentle on the disappearance of family members, because the Anwar Raslan case did, can carry closure to some households.

Tasnim, the sister of murdered Waseem, is just not so hopeful.

“I know you need to stay positive in life, but we have lost all hope,” she says. “We’re alive solely as a result of we need to be.

“I want people to understand why some of us need months, or years, to settle down [in Germany],” she says. “Some never settle down, because they endured things in Syria that were so horrific no normal person could ever imagine them.”