Tadamon massacre

The massacre took place on the 16th of April 2013, when the rebel factions were preparing to enter the capital, Damascus, and start the battle to overthrow the regime[6]. At that time, the Syrian regime forces controlled two-thirds of the Al-Tadamon neighborhood, while the opposition controlled the rest of the neighborhood. The massacre took place in the southeastern part of the neighborhood, specifically in an area that was close to the line of contact with the opposition on Daaboul Street, opposite the Othman Mosque.[7]

On the 27th of April 2022, the British newspaper The Guardian published a lengthy investigation in which it dealt with the details of the massacre from all sides. The massacre took place on the 16th of April of 2013, when soldiers affiliated with the Syrian regime executed 41 people near the Othman Mosque in the Tadamon neighborhood, by throwing them into a hole prepared in advance in the middle of an uninhabited street[8]. After they finished shooting the victims one by one, the regime soldiers set the bodies of the victims on fire by burning tires that had been previously placed at the bottom of the pit. This whole massacre took place in one day, and the soldiers filmed the details of the massacre in full, and the Guardian newspaper published many excerpts from it in its report. During the executions, the victims' eyes were blindfolded with either duct tape or plastic wrap, and their hands were tied with a plastic strap usually used to collect and fix electrical cables[9][10].

The Guardian newspaper described the massacre in some detail, as it first talked about the executions of the victims and how they were carried out routinely[11], then described the massacre and the “perpetrators” who were taking the victims, blindfolded, out of a small white car designated for mass transportation, and then taking them to the large pit completely furnished with tires. Then a second soldier of the Syrian armed forces opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle. During the video of the massacre, which was published by the British newspaper, one of the soldiers carrying out the executions addresses the camera lens, addressing his boss in the Syrian dialect, saying, “For your eyes, teacher, and for the eyes of the oil suit you did not wear.[12]”

The Guardian newspaper researchers were able to identify some of the perpetrators of the Al-Tadamon neighborhood massacre, as the British newspaper confirmed in its report that the soldier who appeared in the video it published was called Amjad Youssef[13], a member of the Military Intelligence Division. Amjad executed a number of Syrians, as appeared in the clip, and with others he piled the bodies into a pit on top of each other and burned them. Amjad joined the Military Intelligence School located in the Maysaloun area in the Dimas suburb of Damascus in 2004, where he spent nine months of intensive training. In 2011 he joined Branch 227, which is notorious for being responsible for the arrest, torture and killing of a number of political opponents of the regime[14].