DamascusProsecutors detailed children tortured, fingernails pulled, ambulances blocked from the wounded.
Najib ran security in Daraa when schoolchildren were tortured for graffiti — he is the first Assad official tried inside Syria.
Assad is tried in absentia from Moscow; Russia has shown no intention of extraditing him.
Sources: Al Jazeera Online, The New Arab, The National
THE GRAFFITI THAT STARTED A WAR
In March 2011, fifteen schoolboys in Daraa spray-painted 'the people want the fall of the regime' on a wall — copying slogans from Tunisia and Egypt. Atef Najib, Bashar al-Assad's cousin and the city's political security chief, had them detained and tortured. When parents came to plead for their release, he reportedly told them to forget their children and 'make new ones.' The protests that followed became the Syrian revolution.
THE MUKHABARAT ARCHITECTURE
Assad's Syria ran four parallel intelligence services — Political Security, General Intelligence, Military Intelligence, and Air Force Intelligence — each reporting separately to the presidency. The redundancy was the point: agencies watched each other as much as the population. Daraa's branch under Najib was Political Security, the Interior Ministry's arm.
THE BLESSED LAND
Daraa sits in Hawran, the southern plain of historic al-Sham — Greater Syria. In Islamic tradition, multiple hadiths in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim describe al-Sham as a land under particular divine attention, and classical scholars including Ibn Kathir treated its fate as load-bearing for end-times geography. That a revolution against tyranny ignited there, and that accountability now begins there, registers in a register most Western coverage misses.
WHY IN ABSENTIA MATTERS
Civil-law systems (France, Germany, Syria's own code) permit trials without the defendant present; common-law systems (US, UK) generally do not. In absentia verdicts cannot compel custody but they create a documentary record, freeze assets in cooperating jurisdictions, and trigger Interpol Red Notices. Slobodan Milošević and Charles Taylor were eventually delivered; Idi Amin died comfortably in Jeddah. Russian extradition of Assad would require either a regime change in Moscow or a deal — neither is on offer.
THE CAESAR ARCHIVE
A Syrian military photographer code-named 'Caesar' defected in 2013 with 53,000 images of detainees tortured to death in regime custody — bodies tagged with branch numbers identifying which intelligence service killed them. The photographs underpinned the 2019 US Caesar Act sanctions and German universal-jurisdiction convictions in Koblenz. Najib's prosecution inside Syria draws on the same evidentiary base, but for the first time in a Syrian courtroom.
WHO ELSE FACES JUSTICE
Syrian accountability has, until now, run through European universal-jurisdiction courts. Anwar Raslan — a former Branch 251 colonel — was convicted of crimes against humanity in Koblenz, Germany in 2022 and sentenced to life. France issued an arrest warrant for Assad himself in 2023 over the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack. The novelty in Damascus is jurisdiction: a Syrian court trying a Syrian official for crimes against Syrians.