Atef Najib, former head of political safety within the Deraa province, is charged with ‘crimes in opposition to the Syrian folks’.
Revealed On 26 Apr 2026
Syria has begun its first public trial of officers who served beneath longtime chief Bashar al-Assad, 15 years after the beginning of the civil battle.
Trial proceedings opened in Damascus on Sunday for Atef Najib, the previous head of political safety in southern Syria’s Deraa province.
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He’s accused of overseeing a violent crackdown on protesters there in the course of the 2011 rebellion, and faces fees associated to “crimes in opposition to the Syrian folks”, in keeping with Syria’s state-run information company, SANA.
Najib, who’s a cousin of al-Assad, was the only defendant in courtroom for Sunday’s preparatory session of the trial set to proceed subsequent month.
Charged of their absence are Al-Assad and his brother, Maher, former commander of the Syrian army’s 4th Armoured Division. Together with different former high-ranking safety officers additionally charged in absentia, they’re accused of killings, torture, extortion and drug trafficking.
Crowds gathered outdoors the courtroom on Sunday in celebration, as households of victims, together with some from Deraa, attended the session.
Chatting with Al Jazeera Mubasher, a spokesman for Syria’s Justice Ministry stated holding the trial in public was vital to make sure transparency and judicial independence as a part of the transitional justice course of.
Najib oversaw political safety in Deraa when youngsters who scrawled antigovernment graffiti on a college wall in Deraa have been arrested and tortured, in a case that grew to become a catalyst for the broader rebellion.
Additional protests have been met by a brutal authorities crackdown and spiralled right into a 14-year civil battle that ended with al-Assad’s overthrow in December 2024 in a lightning insurgent offensive. Al-Assad then fled to Russia, and most members of his interior circle have additionally escaped Syria.
The federal government of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa has confronted criticism over delays in launching a promised transitional justice course of following the civil battle, through which an estimated half 1,000,000 folks have been killed. However authorities now look like shifting extra aggressively to prosecute officers linked to al-Assad.
On Friday, Syrian authorities arrested former intelligence officer Amjad Yousef, the primary suspect accused of the 2013 Tadamon massacre in Damascus, when not less than 41 folks have been killed.
In 2022, a leaked video appeared to indicate Youssef capturing civilians who had been detained and blindfolded, with their arms sure.
