One spring morning three years ago, a rookie in a loyalist Syrian militia was handed a laptop belonging to one of Bashar al-Assad’s most formidable security wings and asked to repair it. He opened the screen and curiously clicked on a video file, a bold move, given the consequences if someone caught him curiously.
At first, the shots were unstable before locking themselves in a freshly dug pit in the ground between the bullet-riddled shells of two buildings. An intelligence officer he knew was kneeling near the edge of the hole in a military uniform and fishing hat, brandishing an assault rifle and barking orders.
The rookie policeman froze in terror as the scene unfolded: a blindfolded man was led by the elbow and told to run to the giant hole he did not know lay in front of him. Nor did he expect bullets to hit the swaying body as he bumped into a pile of dead men below him. Unsuspecting detainees followed one by one; some were told they were fleeing from a nearby sniper, others were ridiculed and abused in the last moments of their lives. Many seemed to believe that their killers were somehow keeping them safe.
The armed man with a fishing hat in the frame of the video. Photo: Guardian video Photo: Guardian video
At the time of the assassination, at least 41 men were lying dead in a mass grave on the Damascus suburb of Tadamon, a battlefield at the time in the conflict between the Syrian leader and rebels lined up against him. Along with the accumulated piles of soil that would soon be used to complete the work, the killers poured fuel on the wreckage and set it on fire, laughing as they literally covered up a war crime just miles from Syria’s headquarters. The date of the video is April 16, 2013.
Paralyzing nausea gripped the rookie, who immediately decided that the footage should be seen elsewhere. That decision took him three years later on a perilous journey from one of the darkest moments in Syria’s recent history to Europe’s relative security. It also brought him together with two scientists who have spent years trying to keep him – the main source in an emergency investigation – safe, while identifying the man who led the massacre and persuading him to acknowledge his role.
Hidden war crime: footage sheds light on horrors of war in Syria – video explanation
This is the story of a real-time war crime captured by one of the Syrian regime’s most notorious security forces, branch 227 of the country’s military intelligence service, which also describes the diligent efforts to turn the masses against its perpetrators – including how two Researchers in Amsterdam deceived one of Syria’s most notorious security officials through an online alter ego and seduced him into revealing the sinister secrets of Assad’s war.
Their work has shed unprecedented light on crimes believed to have been massively committed by the regime in the midst of the Syrian war, but have always been denied or blamed on rebel groups and jihadists.
Photo: Video of the Guardian
Nine years later, while the war is raging in Ukraine, Russian forces are redistributing the book on state terror against civilians, rehearsed in Syria, as Vladimir Putin’s so-called special military operation turns into a brutal occupation of parts of the east. Military intelligence there was at the forefront of savagery, instilling fear in communities through mass arrests and assassinations of the type that characterized Assad’s brutal attempts to regain power.
Photo: Video of the Guardian
Trained by Soviet and Stasi officers in the 1960s, Syrian security services have learned the art of intimidation well. Often the loyalty of those who have been grabbed at checkpoints is of little importance; fear was the regime’s deadliest means of seizing power, and he used all available means to plant it. In this case, the victims are not rebels, but civilians who are not tied to any country and have accepted Assad’s defense. Their killings were widely accepted in Tadamon as a message to the whole suburbs: “Don’t even think of opposing us.”
Prof. Ugur Umit Ungor. Photo: Alex Attack
With the video leaking first to an opposition activist in France and then to researchers Ansar Shahhud and Prof. Ugur Yumit Jungor of the University of Amsterdam’s Holocaust and Genocide Center, the source had to overcome fears of being caught and possibly killed. and the suffering of potential expulsion from his family, prominent members of Assad’s Alawite sect, which holds the main levers of power in what remains of Syria.
Eventually, he will learn that even when hundreds of people around the world work to bring Assad to justice, the video will prove to be excellent evidence in the case against the Syrian leader.
But first Ansar and Ugur had to find the man in the fisherman’s hat, and they turned to the only thing they believed could help: the alter ego.
A Syrian regime militiaman walks under anti-sniper screens on a devastated street near the Tadamon front line, January 2014. Photo: Sipa US / Alamy
“Anna Sh”
Ansar has been a staunch critic of Assad since the outbreak of war in Syria. Her family were members of a community that had largely maintained good relations with Assad, but the conflict and subsequent economic collapse strained the alliances, and Ansar was increasingly determined to keep an eye on Assad, regardless of personal cost.
She moved to Beirut in 2013 and then to Amsterdam two years later, where she met Ugur in 2016. They both shared a desire to chronicle what they consider to be genocide in Syria. Bringing together the stories of survivors and their families was one way to do it. Talking to the perpetrators themselves was different. However, violating the regime’s omer code was a task that was considered almost impossible. But Ansar had a plan: she decided to turn to the Internet and find her way into the inner sanctuary of the regime’s security officials, pretending to be a fan who had fully embraced their cause.
“The problem was that the Assad regime is very difficult to study. You don’t just go to Damascus, waving your arms, saying well, “Hey, I’m a sociologist from Amsterdam, and I’d like to ask some questions,” Ugur said in the large dark wood living room of the Holocaust and the Genocide Center. “We’ve come to the conclusion that we actually need a hero – and that hero must be a young Alawite woman.”
Anna Sh. Facebook page Photo: Facebook
Ansar found that Syrian spies and military officers tended to use Facebook, and despite their secretive working lives, they tended not to make their social media settings private. She chose the nickname “Anna Sh” and asked a friend photographer to take a seductive look on her face. She then turned her home page into a brilliant tribute to Assad and his family and set out to try to hire friends.
Day and night for the next two years, she roamed Facebook looking for possible suspects. When she found a candidate, she told them that she was a researcher studying the Syrian regime for her dissertation. In the end, she did well. She learned the mood of the regime at the time and, together with Ugur, created jokes and conversation points that could help with the approach. Anna W soon became known to the security services as an understanding figure – and even a shoulder to cry on.
“They had to talk to someone, they had to share their experiences,” she said. “We shared some stories with them. We listened to all the stories, not just focusing on their crimes. “
“Some of these people became attached to Anna,” Ugur continued. “And some of them started calling in the middle of the night.”
Photo: Video of the Guardian
For the next two years, Ansar lived and breathed new life. At times, she withdrew from what she had become — someone who had penetrated the consciousness of her prey and could sometimes understand them on a crude human level that overshadowed the clinical limits of her research.
But the return to reality was usually sudden. Many of those she spoke to were active parts of a killing machine, others were voluntary parts of the Kabbalah that allowed them. Her health was affected, as were her social life and common sense. However, the reward was worth it. If she manages to find the shooter in the video, she can start administering justice to the families of those killed. And perhaps she could begin what few others had succeeded in decades of conflict: begin a process that unquestionably linked the Syrian state to some of the war’s worst atrocities.
In March 2021, the breakthrough finally arrived. By then, Anna Sh’s followers on Facebook had won the trust of more than 500 of the regime’s most loyal officials. Among her trawls of their friends and photos stood out a distinctive moon face with a scar and facial hair. He called himself Amgd Yusuf and looked very much like the shooter with the fishing hat she was exhausted from looking for. Shortly afterwards, Ansar or Anna Sh – so far difficult to distinguish between the two – received confirmation from a source in Tadamon that the killer was a major in Syrian Military Intelligence Branch 227.
“The relief was indescribable,” she said. “Here is someone who held the key to all this. And now I had to get him to talk. “
Ansar remembers well the moment she pressed to send her request for friendship, and the excitement she felt when she accepted her booty. After all this time, the bait was placed. Now she had to wind it up. The first call was fleeting; Amjad was suspicious and quickly ended the conversation. But something in this initial conversation had piqued his curiosity. The hunter had become a hunter. Was it the thrill of talking to a stranger, the need to question someone who dared to approach him, or something else? Anyway, when …
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