Syria releases confession of key suspect in civil war massacre

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Syrian interior ministry on Sunday released a video confession of Amjad Youseef, key suspect in the April 2013 massacre of at least 41 people in the Tadamoun neighborhood south of Damascus, two days after his arrest.

“We placed tires under them, then more tires on top, and set them on fire so that no smell would spread in the area,” said Youssef in the video, describing how they dug a pit by a bulldozer and shot the victims individually before placing them in the mass grave.

The ministry posted the confession footage on X under the title “The Tadamoun Butcher”.

Youssef was arrested on Friday in the west-central city of Hama in a “tightly executed security operation,” said Mulham al-Shantout, commander of Hama’s security forces, in the video.

He served as a warrant officer in the military intelligence directorate under the ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad. He was responsible for security operations in southern Damascus during the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2024.

The key suspect became visible in April 2022 when a leaked video footage showed him and other military men forcing blindfolded and bound individuals to run before opening fire and disposing of their bodies in a mass grave.

“We brought about 40 individuals assuming they were, back then, terrorists or funding terrorism,” Youssef said in the video, adding that he was not ordered by his superiors to commit the slaughter, but the victims were selected based on intelligence reports.

A team from Human Rights Watch visited the site in December 2024 after the overthrow of the Assad regime. It confirmed finding “scores of human remains” in the areas and suggested that it could have been a spot for more summary executions.

The interior ministry announced on Friday that earlier arrests of former military personnel for the same case have led them to place the total death toll in the neighborhood at around 500.

“We promise the Syrian people that we are determined to fulfill transitional justice and to arrest every criminal who spilled the blood of Syrians,” Hama’s security commander said.

Tadamoun was split by early 2013 following the outbreak of an intense series of battles in July 2012 between the Syrian government and opposition forces. The neighborhood was one of the primary entry points the rebels seized.

Because it was a frontline, the area was saturated with checkpoints run by Branch 227 of military intelligence, in which Youssef served, and pro-regime militias. The checkpoints were used to screen, arrest, and execute the people who were attempting to cross between the different zones of control.