Tadamon massacre: The crime, the arrested killer, and the long road to justice

Damascus, April 28 (SANA) On 16 April 2013, in a side street of Damascus’s Tadamon district, the Syrian revolution was reduced to a narrow strip of cracked asphalt, a white van, and a trench already filled with bodies and car tyres. Blindfolded men were led one by one to the edge of that pit, tricked into thinking they were crossing sniper fire, then kicked into the void and shot at close range. The man holding the rifle in most of those frames – laughing, directing, performing – was a Military Intelligence officer of the deposed regime, Amjad Yousef. Today, after years of impunity, he is finally in detention. But the story of Tadamon is not just about one man. It is a window into the deposed regime’s systematic murder, institutional violence, indiscriminate cold-blooded killing, and a culture of impunity, which shows a way of thinking that shaped an atrocious ideology, and ultimately revealing a full scene of a country that has yet to bury its dead or tell their stories fully.

A massacre hidden in plain sight

On that April day, Branch 227 of Military Intelligence – the “District Branch” responsible for Damascus and its countryside – carried out a choreographed killing operation in southern Tadamon, close to the front line with opposition areas. Civilians, including women and children, were rounded up at checkpoints and detention centres, loaded into a white van, and driven to a pre‑dug pit lined with tyres and fuel.

One six‑minute clip that later reached the world shows at least 41 blindfolded and handcuffed detainees forced to stumble down an alley, pushed into the trench and shot with an AK‑47. Afterwards, the bodies were doused with fuel, set alight and buried, as if the pit itself could erase what had happened. Researchers who later obtained 27 related videos estimate that about 288 civilians were killed in the Tadamon killings – among them at least seven women and twelve children. For many families, the last trace of a son or brother is a blurred frame of that ditch. 

The man with the rifle

The main executioner in the video is Amjad Yousef, an officer in Branch 227, born in 1986 in Nabe al-Tayeb village in Hama countryside, central‑western Syria. From 2011 until mid‑2021, he was the security officer responsible for Tadamon, Yarmouk, al‑Hajar al‑Aswad and surrounding districts – neighbourhoods that lived the revolution, the sieges and the disappearances.

He is recognisable in the footage by a horizontal scar over his left eyebrow. In several shots, he looks directly into the lens, smiling, adjusting his body so the camera can see him clearly. In one moment, the cameraman turns the phone towards himself and jokes, “This one is for you, boss,” sending greetings up the chain of command. In another, Yousef stands in front of the burning pit and says, “We’ve shown these dogs,” treating the massacre as a performance to be admired later.

When two researchers, Uğur Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud, secretly contacted him on Facebook in 2021, he agreed to speak, thinking he was talking to sympathetic academics interested only in “the conflict”. He appeared first in uniform at his office, with the deposed Bashar al‑Assad’s portrait behind him, and later relaxed at home in a vest, chain‑smoking, drinking and snacking.

In those conversations, he spoke about his career: joining intelligence straight out of high school in 2004; his rise through the branch; and the death of his younger brother, a soldier killed on 1 January 2013. That loss, he said, changed him. At one point he fidgeted with his lighter and confessed: “I took revenge, I’m not lying to you, I took revenge. I killed. I killed a lot. I killed a lot, I don’t know how many I killed.”

Only later did the researchers confront him, carefully, with the fact that they had seen him executing civilians in Tadamon. At first he denied it, then feigned doubt – “Is that me?” – before falling back on the justification of someone who sees killing as a job: he was only following orders, doing what had to be done. The videos and his own words however leave no room for ambiguity: he is not only involved but a fully implicated perpetrator, captured on camera, speaking in his own voice.

A performance of violence

What distinguishes Tadamon from so many other massacres of the Syrian revolution is not only the scale, but the cold deliberation with which it was staged and filmed. In the leaked clips, Yousef is not just a gunman; he is a director. He cues the cameraman with his hand before kicking victims into the pit. He arranges the scene so the trench, the bodies and his own figure fit into the frame. His colleague Najib – the second executioner, later identified as National Defence Forces militiaman Najib al‑Halabi – turns the camera towards himself to send a message “to the boss, for your beautiful eyes and your olive uniform”.

The video is more than documentation. It is a self‑portrait – a “cinema of the murderer” where the camera is a weapon, an archive and a mirror. Years later, Yousef and his colleagues could sit at a branch laptop and replay their “achievement”, seeing themselves as the regime’s frontline in the “defence of the nation”. That mindset – a mixture of loyalty, sectarianism, and a craving for recognition – is essential to understanding how a man can joke and smile while shooting at defenseless neighbours in a pit that has been prepared to be their grave in a street in the middle of their neighbourhood.

The other men in the shadows

Amjad did not act alone. The investigation by Üngör and Shahhoud, along with testimonies from Tadamon residents, identified several layers of responsibility around him, as well as others who were implicated but have not yet been arrested.

The second executioner visible in the main video is Najib al‑Halabi, born in 1984, a member of the National Defence Forces militia. He has since been reported killed, but in 2013 he was Amjad’s partner at the edge of the pit.

Above them stood Saleh al‑Ras, known as “Abu Muntajab”, the Shabbiha commander for Tadamon. Colleagues described him as “the Hitler of Syria”; several women later identified him as their rapist. Witnesses say he could call a direct radio line to Assad – code 001 – and once received an order; “bomb the neighbourhood by every means you have”.

In later years, Syrian authorities also arrested several other men connected to Tadamon, including Munther Ahmad al‑Jazairi and two brothers, Somer and Imad Mohammed al‑Mahmoud, who confessed to participating in executions that killed over 500 civilians in the neighbourhood. Their cases confirm what Tadamon residents had always whispered: the massacre captured on one video was only one part of a wider campaign of rounding up and killing detainees on that ground.

How the crime surfaced

For almost six years, the Tadamon videos remained buried on an official computer inside Syria’s security apparatus. In 2019, a young conscript newly assigned to that office discovered the files when he was given a laptop. Horrified by what he saw, he copied 27 unedited clips onto a memory stick and smuggled them out, eventually passing them to a Syrian activist in Europe.

At a conference in Paris, that activist showed one of the videos on his phone to Professor Üngör. The academic, used to violent footage from Syria, still found these six minutes uniquely chilling: the routine cruelty, the absence of emotion, the casual aside to the camera – “This one is for you, boss.”

From there began a painstaking investigation: frame‑by‑frame analysis, geolocation of the alley and the pit, reading graffiti on walls, cross‑checking the date stamp (16‑4‑2013), and combing through pro‑regime Facebook pages for the faces of Branch 227 personnel. Eventually, the scarred eyebrow and facial features of the executioner in the video matched photos of a Military Intelligence officer named Amjad Youssef, who was still in service.

On 27 April 2022, The Guardian and New Lines Magazine published the findings, showing edited footage and naming Amjad and Najib as the main executioners. They also revealed that Amjad had privately admitted to “killing a lot” in his 2021 Facebook conversations with the researchers. That publication made Tadamon a symbol of the deposed regime’s killing machinery – but inside Syria, nothing changed back then. 

Years of silence and a culture of denial

After the leak, the deposed regime did not acknowledge the massacre, let alone open a public investigation. Instead, it continued a familiar pattern: denying, minimising, describing evidence as fabricated, and attacking the credibility of survivors and activists.

For Syrians in Tadamon, there was no mystery. Local sources describe Yousef as a feared presence for years – a man who could decide who passed through a checkpoint, who disappeared, and who returned. And there were those who saw Amjad take women from a bread queue; they were never seen again. Others accused Branch 227 under his watch of carrying out multiple unrecorded massacres, part of a sectarian and ethnic cleansing of the residents of Tadamon and southern Damascus.

Tadamon is distinctive because the killers turned the camera on themselves. But it is not unique. Mass graves at Sednaya and elsewhere around Damascus suggest that thousands of other detainees were killed out of sight, their bodies recorded only in the “Caesar” torture photographs and in the paper trail of the intelligence archives. For every frame from that ditch in Tadamon, there are countless killings with no video and no name. 

The long road to arrest

Outside Syria, the leaked videos sparked legal action. French prosecutors opened a preliminary investigation into the Tadamon killings as possible crimes against humanity and other grave international crimes, under universal jurisdiction. Human‑rights groups submitted the footage and research files to European courts, adding them to cases already built around the Caesar archive and survivors’ testimony.

Inside the country, the first crack appeared in 2025, when Syrian authorities announced the arrest of three men in Tadamon – among them Munther al‑Jazairi – who confessed to participating in mass executions there. But the man most visibly implicated, the one whose scarred face had become synonymous with the massacre, remained at large.

That changed this week. Syria’s interior ministry has now confirmed that Amjad Yousef has been arrested in a security operation in the western countryside of Hama, more than a decade after the killings and more than a year after the fall of the deposed regime. Images released by the authorities show him in a prison uniform.

For Syrians who have watched the Tadamon videos, and for the families who recognised loved ones stumbling to the edge of that pit, the irrefutable evidence of his role is already devastatingly clear. The legal process must run its course. Yet morally and historically, Tadamon has already fixed his place as the “Tadamon butcher” in the story of the Syrian revolution.

Inside the mindset of a perpetrator

What kind of person can commit such a crime, methodically, without visible remorse? The research into Amjad’s life offers a disturbing answer: not a monster outside society, but a man deeply embedded in an apparatus of violence, whose psychology has been shaped by ideology, career and “personal loss”.

In his interviews, he does not present as clinically insane. The researchers describe him as “normal”, capable of small talk and jokes, speaking about family and daily life. He insists he is a professional doing his duty, protecting the state from “terrorists”. He talks about revenge for his brother. He appears proud of his position, his office, the portrait on the wall behind him.

At the same time, the videos show someone acutely aware of the camera, almost intoxicated by his role in front of it. He breaks the “fourth wall”, sending greetings to superiors, laughing into the lens, controlling the timing of each shot so it fits the scene. In those moments, the performance seems as important to him as the killing itself.

This is the psychology of a man who has internalised a message repeated for years by the deposed regime: that some lives are disposable, that loyalty licenses cruelty, that erasing “enemies” is a service to the nation. Tadamon exposes not only individual sadism but a culture that rewards it – promotions, status, impunity – as long as it is exercised in the “right direction”.

Bearing witness, beyond one video

For the reader far from Damascus, it is tempting to see Tadamon as an isolated horror clip that briefly shook the internet in 2022. For Syrians, especially those who worked as journalists through the uprising, it is something else: a fragment of a much larger, darker film we were never allowed to watch in full. 

The trench in Tadamon is not just a crime scene; it is a symbol of all the alleys where there was no camera. The 288 estimated victims there stand for tens of thousands of disappeared who never had their last minutes recorded. The families who recognised a son by the way he walked in that clip speak also for those still searching graveyards and court lists for a name. During the Syrian revolution, there wasn’t just one Amjad Yousef… there were dozens, perhaps hundreds. Many of them remain free today, fugitives from justice—and for many, their crimes were even greater and more heinous than those of Amjad Yousef. The only difference is that the latter’s atrocities were captured on video and exposed to the world, while the final moments of thousands of victims from dozens of massacres across various regions of Syria were never filmed.

Writing about Tadamon today, with Amjad finally behind bars, is not only about justice. It is also about insisting that this chapter does not quietly fade. It is about honouring the men whose final steps, heads bowed and hands tied, were turned into a grotesque performance – and reclaiming those images as evidence, not trophies.

Justice will not happen in a single arrest or a single trial. It will require systematic investigation, fair courts, and the courage to look at more than one ditch. But Tadamon has already changed the record of the Syrian revolution. For once, the perpetrators became their own archivists. Our responsibility now is to ensure that archive is used for remembrance, for honoring the victims, and for holding accountable those who marched them to the edge of that pit—and every other pit like it.