The arrest of Amjad Youssef was a moment in which many Syrians rejoiced. The officer in Assad’s intelligence services was said to be responsible for the brutal murder of Syrians and Palestinians during the country's civil war. We know this to be true from his own videos, in which he threw them into a pit and laughed as he burned them in April 2013.
For his part, Syrian researcher Ansar Shahhoud and Professor Uğur Ümit Üngör of the University of Amsterdam, together with an investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian, published excerpts from the massacre video in 2022, nine years after the atrocity.
Amjad is far from the only butcher who killed and tortured Syrians on behalf of the Assad regime. There are hundreds like him. Yet because he filmed himself, justice may come to him more swiftly than to other criminals.
But not all Syrians welcomed the news of Youssef's arrest. Instead of validating the feelings of happy Syrians, they chose to embrace conspiracy theories and shrug off the importance of his apprehension. They used it as an opportunity to criticise the new Syrian government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa. And while one is justified in viewing his rise to power with suspicion, given his jihadist background, it is another matter altogether to trivialise the feelings of Syrians who rightly celebrated some semblance of justice served.
