By Feras Dalatey<\/p>\n
April 24 – Syria’s Interior Ministry said on Friday it had arrested the main suspect in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, one of the worst acts of violence \u200cattributed to the former government of Bashar al-Assad, in which 288 civilians were killed.<\/p>\n
The ministry \u200creleased footage of Amjad Yousef\u2019s arrest in the Al-Ghab Plain area of Hama province in western Syria, near his hometown. Yousef \u200bhad been hiding there since the overthrow of Assad at the end of 2024, a security source told Reuters.<\/p>\n
U.S. Special Envoy for Syria Tom Barrack welcomed the arrest in a post on X, calling it an important step towards accountability for atrocities committed during Syria\u2019s war.<\/p>\n
DOCUMENTING THE MASSACRE<\/p>\n
Yousef, 40, a former member of \u200cmilitary intelligence under Assad, was thrust \u2060into the spotlight in April 2022 when the UK’s Guardian newspaper published videos provided by two academics that they said showed him forcing blindfolded civilians to run \u2060towards a pit in the Tadamon neighbourhood of southern Damascus before shooting them.<\/p>\n
Annsar Shahoud, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam Holocaust and Genocide Centre and one of the academics, spent four years documenting the massacre.<\/p>\n
Posing \u200bas an \u200bonline fangirl, Shahoud gained Yousef’s trust and ultimately obtained \u200bhis confessions both on video and audio \u200crecording.<\/p>\n
Reuters was unable to reach Yousef for comment as he has been taken into custody.<\/p>\n
The massacre is one of the most egregious documented incidents of violence attributed to the Assad government during the 14-year bloody war that began in 2011.<\/p>\n
After Assad’s fall at the end of 2024, civilians, media outlets and international organisations went to the site of the massacre to inspect it and interview witnesses. Locals refer to \u200cthe site as “Amjad Yousef’s Pit”. It has been marked on \u200bGoogle Maps as “The Site of the Tadamon Massacre”.<\/p>\n
Ahmed Adra, a \u200bTadamon resident and a member of the \u200bneighbourhood committee, said victims’ families had been celebrating in the streets since morning.<\/p>\n
“We will \u200ctake white roses and plant them at \u200bthe site of the massacre \u200band tell the victims that their memory is alive and that justice is being served,” he told Reuters.<\/p>\n
Shahoud said she now felt safe with Yousef in custody, but added the path \u200bto justice in Syria was \u200cunclear and did not include all perpetrators.<\/p>\n
“I feel safe now, despite the distance, because I \u200balways felt for years that this person was after me,” she told Reuters.<\/p>\n
(Writing by \u200bFeras Dalatey; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Feras Dalatey April 24 – Syria’s Interior Ministry said on Friday it had arrested the main suspect…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":82326,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[29343,29501,1613,3539,95,29450,29282,29500],"class_list":{"0":"post-82325","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-syria","8":"tag-amjad-yousef","9":"tag-annsar-shahoud","10":"tag-bashar-al-assad","11":"tag-interior-ministry","12":"tag-syria","13":"tag-tadamon","14":"tag-tadamon-massacre","15":"tag-the-massacre"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116461916882983596","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}