(18 Feb 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
++PLEASE IGNORE STORYLINE SENT EARLIER AND REPLACE WITH FOLLOWING++
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tadamon (suburb of Damascus), Syria – 17 February 2025
1. Syrian security forces running up stairs
2. Syrian security forces walking out with arrested person
3. Suspects, Somer Mohammed Al-Mahmoud and Imad Mohammed Al-Mahmoud, in back of pickup truck
4. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Lt. Col. Abdul Rahman Al-Dabbagh, Damascus Security Chief: ++SOUNDBITE STARTS ON SHOT 2 AND IS OVERLAID BY SHOT 3 & PARTIALLY BY SHOT 5++
“After following up and arresting one of the people involved in the Tadamon massacre, and after the initial investigations, it was revealed that several people were still present in the Tadamon neighbourhood. This morning, we diverted the patrols and arrested the suspected people to refer them to investigation.”
5. Various of security forces entering neighborhood in vehicles and on foot
6. SOUNDBITE( Arabic) Lt. Col. Abdul Rahman Al-Dabbagh, Damascus Security Chief: ++SOUNDBITE STARTS ON PREVIOUS SHOT AND IS OVERLAID BY SHOT 7-8 AND PARTIALLY BY SHOT 9++
“At first, he confessed to several massacres at different times in the Tadamon neighbourhood, where they would bring detainees to security checkpoints and security branches and drag them to places in the Tadamon neighbourhood. Then they executed them in the field, and after that they would blow up buildings over their heads.”
7. Wide of Al-Dabbagh walking with detainee, Monzer Al-Jazairi
8. Wide of security forces looking at evidence on ground
9. Various of security forces in neighborhood
STORYLINE:
Security forces in Syria on Monday arrested three people said to have been involved in the killing of hundreds of civilians by government forces in Damascus in 2013, two years after the country’s 13-year civil war began.
Dozens of police and security trucks lined the streets of Tadamon, a Damascus suburb near the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, as offices carried out the arrests in the same streets that once bore witness to mass killings.
Masked, rifle-wielding men moved through hollowed-out buildings, remnants of a war that turned the district into a front line between government forces and opposition fighters.
In 2022, a leaked video dated April 16, 2013, appeared to contain harrowing footage of the killings.
The near seven-minute clip showed members of Syria’s notorious Military Intelligence Branch 227 leading a line of about 40 blindfolded prisoners, their hands tied behind their backs, into an abandoned building in Tadamon.
One by one, the gunmen pushed or kicked the prisoners into a trench filled with old tires, shooting them as they fell.
One of the three men arrested was Monzer Al-Jazairi, a resident of the Zahira neighborhood and a former operative with the military security that operated before the fall of President Bashar Assad in December.
Flanked by security men, Al-Jazairi estimated that he and his colleagues killed about 500, but it was unclear whether he spoke under duress or voluntarily.
Damascus Security Chief Lt. Col. Abdul Rahman Al-Dabbagh corroborated the number, citing additional confessions from those arrested.
The two other arrested suspects were identified as Somer Mohammed Al-Mahmoud and Imad Mohammed Al-Mahmoud.
Years after the Syrian war’s worst massacres and mass disappearances, most alleged crimes have not been investigated and remain unpunished.
AP Video by Omar Albam
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