Amjad Yousef, the butcher of the Tadamon neighbourhood, is now in the grip of justice. Atef Najib, head of the Political Security Branch in Daraa when the revolution erupted and a cousin of Bashar al-Assad, is behind bars and standing trial. Brigadier General Adnan Halweh, one of those responsible for the 2013 chemical massacre in Ghouta, has been arrested. Syria’s process of transitional justice has begun.
These arrests have brought a measure of accountability to the country as Syrians are finally seeing those responsible for killing their children brought before the courts. Yet legal experts remain divided. Some have heavily criticised the arrests, while others argue that Syrian law does not account for war crimes and that it would therefore have been wiser to postpone the trials until the legislative council convenes and enacts laws to govern this path.
But just as this debate began to pick up steam, leaked videos of people being tortured and raped by the now-toppled Assad regime have resurfaced. Disturbingly, some doctors were even involved in the abuses, specifically organ theft.
In the first months of the revolution, the Assad regime itself leaked videos of violations committed by its own personnel. It deliberately ensured that all the leaked footage showed men speaking in the dialect of the Alawite community, in an attempt to divert the revolution from a struggle for freedom and dignity into an armed sectarian conflict.
