One summer evening in a Dutch village in the rural province of Drenthe, Raid Sadek, 37, stares in stunned silence at the screen of his phone. On it, a picture has just appeared of a man carrying a bullet proof vest and an automatic assault rifle.
ogether, and the man sometimes stops by his home afterwards. As far as Raid knows, he used to be a hairdresser in Damascus and lost his right arm in a traffic accident.
There are more photos. The man appears in a uniform carrying the insignia of Syria’s Military Security. A walkie talkie is placed on the table in front of him. In another picture, he poses with a German Shepherd and two other men, also in uniform. In yet another, he and seven others stand in front of a white minivan parked next to a bare concrete wall with small windows high above the ground.
Raid knows these minivans all too well. Back in Syria, he was arrested four times by the security services because of his opposition to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. On each occasion, he was tortured while his wife and two young daughters were left at home wondering if he was still alive. After the fourth time, in late 2015, Raid decided to escape to Lebanon and from there to the Netherlands. His wife and children followed a few months later.
The family has lived in this Dutch village for four years now. A third daughter and a first son were born here. The children speak better Dutch than Arabic and consider a Dutch couple in the neighbourhood their grandparents. The oldest daughter spends an hour a day cycling to and from her high school in Groningen, the youngest girl is receiving speech therapy. She frolics around the front garden while Raid repairs his bicycle. “The Netherlands is my second homeland”, he says.
But Syria won’t let him go. Raid is often restless, his wife tells, especially when he spends hours on end scanning his phone for news from loved ones in Syria who are at risk of arrest. At night, he is haunted by nightmares about his own torture. And even when he wakes up in his new Dutch home, Raid now realises, Assad’s henchmen may be just around the corner.
“These are the people we fled from”, he says. “In Syria they get away with anything. But here in the Netherlands, there are rules and laws. If they aren’t punished there, it should be done here.”
Assad’s henchmen roam freely
This September, the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stef Blok, launched an ambitious plan. The Netherlands may take the Syrian state to court using an unusual legal pathway: an international treaty against torture that was co-signed by Syria in 2004.
Blok didn’t come up with the idea himself. A young, inventive Syrian lawyer from a British barristers’ chambers came up with the proposal early this year. The chambers then presented it to Canada and three European countries. The Netherlands were the first to get on board.
The road to actual court proceedings is a long one, Blok admits, but he feels the Netherlands must take an international lead. “If we don’t take the first step, nothing will ever happen,” he said. „We owe it to the victims and have to show the world that we don’t let such things go unpunished.”
Closer to home, however, such promises remain unfulfilled. While the Netherlands says it wants to prosecute the Syrian regime, Assad’s henchmen continue to roam freely in Dutch towns and villages. So far, all three war-crimes related cases against Syrian nationals put forward by the Dutch Public Prosecutor concerned members of terrorist or Salafist organisations. Unlike Germany, the Netherlands hasn’t prosecuted a single individual who fought for the Assad regime.
And yet, it is this regime which has caused by far the most civilian casualties. According to a report published by the Syrian Network for Human Rights in June 2020, it is responsible for a staggering 98.9 per cent of the 14,388 documented cases of death under torture between March 2011 and June 2020.
Might it be the case that Assad’s henchmen simply don’t live in the Netherlands? The Dutch immigration authority IND, for one, doesn’t seem to have noticed them. The IND has a special department, the so-called ‘1F Unit’, which is tasked with tracing refugees who may have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. Recently, the Unit reviewed every single file of all 12,570 Syrian men aged 17-35 who were granted asylum in the Netherlands between January 2011 and January 2016.
In late June, the Dutch Minister for Migration Ankie Broekers-Knol presented the surprising results: in only a single case did the IND find sufficient grounds to revoke a residence permit.
In the past seven months, NRC interviewed over 90 sources – including victims, jurists, activists and government officials – and scoured the social media accounts of Syrian men who may have committed criminal acts in the name of Assad. Their victims refer to them as the ‘shabiha’, a common term in Syria referring to regime loyalists who arrested, raped, tortured and killed political opponents. According to one expert, there are dozens of such shabiha living in the Netherlands and several hundred across Western Europe.
Their presence causes great alarm in the Syrian community in the Netherlands. On numerous websites, Syrians warn each other about what they know – or say they know – about the atrocities perpetrated by their fellow countrymen. Moreover, some of the shabiha are still in touch with the regime and use those connections to threaten and blackmail other Syrians living in the Netherlands. NRC has identified multiple victims of such practices.
“You should go to the police”
The one-armed man is called Bashar. He drives a silver BMW – an automatic – in which he delivers meals for a nearby fast food restaurant in the weekends. After seeing his photos, Raid decides to ask around about Bashar. He soon stumbles on stories from mutual friends who sometimes enjoy a beer – or a joint – with him. They say that on such occasions, Bashar likes to brag about his past in Syria, and has told them that he used to work for a high-ranking officer, was a member of Military Security and joined its ‘Raid Unit’, dragging regime opponents from their homes. A second source who knows Bashar personally, confirms that he indeed tends to brag about all this.
These allegations are extremely serious. The ‘Raid Unit’ of military security in Damascus is the notorious ‘Branch 215’. In its prison complex, civilians have been tortured to death on an industrial scale.
Raid turns to his Dutch neighbour Gerda for advice. As they are sitting in his backyard one afternoon in June, he pulls out the pictures. “He was clearly upset”, Gerda later relates in her living room, a small dog panting on her lap. “Raid often speaks quickly, that’s how I know him. But that time, he was really scared. He showed me a photo of a man with a gun and said: ‘This man has killed people in Syria just like that’.” She mimics Raid running his hand across his throat. “He then asked: ‘Gerda, what should I do? I said: you should go to the police, Raid. ‘Really’, he asked? Really, I said, go to the police.”
Shortly after, Raid walks to the police office close to his home. He addresses an officer, but the office is about to close and they can’t go inside due to corona. His Dutch fails him. Raid leaves thinking that he has filed a criminal complaint, but when he returns to the office a few weeks later to follow it up, police officer Harry Prak says he can’t find any trace of the conversation in the system.
Raid is about to leave again, when Prak calls after him: “You’re here now anyway”, he says kindly. “Is there something you want to tell me?” He takes Raid to a small room inside the office, where he finally tells his story with the help of an interpreter.
Raid: “A photo and the name of a person were published on a Facebook page. That person is living here. Other Syrians are telling me about the crimes he committed in Syria.”
Prak: “And these crimes you’re talking about, are they serious criminal offenses?”
Raid: “Yes.”
Prak: “Against human life?”
Raid: “I have a picture of the man.” He shows the image on his phone.
Prak: “Do you know this individual personally? Have you been in touch with him?”
Raid: “Yes. But not any more.”
Raid isn’t the only one who warned the authorities about Bashar after seeing the alarming pictures. Another man also filed a criminal complaint. The subsequent investigation was terminated within two months due to “lack of evidence”. A third man sent an anonymous e-mail to the Dutch police’s ‘War Crimes Unit’ in late July.
NRC
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