Although local sources disagreed at the time about the exact number of victims, all confirmed that a “massacre” had taken place, witnessed by residents of the village that lies just over a mile east of the buffer zone with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Those sources also confirmed that regime forces had thrown the dead bodies into a nearby valley.

From that point on, as the regime’s military campaigns intensified across the country, and as its forces and allies committed dozens of documented massacres, the massacre at Wadi Tuaim was set aside. Neither the victims nor their families were granted any measure of justice against the perpetrators who had killed their sons. But the fall of the Assad regime has finally given them the chance to raise their voices and demand the justice they have sought for 13 years, and to tell a story whose details they whispered among themselves for fear of the deposed regime’s retribution.

This investigation by SIRAJ reveals for the first time the names and faces of two officers of the former regime’s army accused of being responsible for the Wadi Tuaim massacre, in which 13 people have been confirmed killed, nine of them from a single family, including a child. Regime forces threw their bodies into the bottom of a valley estimated by experts to be between 650 and 1,000 feet deep.

The journalists working on this investigation, together with relatives of the victims, sought to reconstruct the events of the massacre. Witnesses and survivors took the investigative team to the edge of the steeply sloping valley and described for us, on camera, the details of what they call that “cursed” day in the history of Saida al-Golan.

Fieldwork, the journalists’ investigative methodology, and open-source research and analysis — facial recognition software, examination of social media posts and digital footprints, and satellite imagery going back more than a decade — helped to test, cross-reference and confirm the claims made in the field interviews. This ultimately led to contact with one officer accused of involvement in the massacre, who categorically confirmed that it had taken place and gave details of it.

Extended interviews with victims’ families, a survivor and eyewitnesses also revealed details of the massacre, the circumstances surrounding it and the identities of the officers involved, which had been absent from the record and lost from view for over a decade.

For six consecutive months, the SIRAJ team conducted lengthy interviews with victims’ families and survivors of the massacre, as well as with two witnesses to the killings. By cross-referencing every detail obtained from those encounters against information from official and public sources, we were able to establish the context that preceded the massacre, the conditions in which it took place and its precise date and location.

When the force from the 61st Brigade, headquartered in Daraa governorate, also in the south of the country, stormed Saida al-Golan, it was led by three officers holding the ranks of major-general, lieutenant-colonel and major. The raid coincided with a lunch banquet hosted by a member of the Harisi family, also known as Hijazi, to which a number of relatives and local residents had been invited.

Issa Harisi, a resident of Saida al-Golan, described to SIRAJ how the brigade’s soldiers surrounded the village: “The banquet was here that day. My brother and I were there, along with Muwaffaq and a man from the village of al-Ghadir. Before we knew it, the army had encircled us and were entering the houses one after another.”

The raiding force consisted of around 20 men of varying ranks. They surrounded the houses, and then began to storm them violently, leading away several young men from different families, handcuffed and blindfolded, to three military vehicles, two of them pickup trucks.

The residents’ pleas and the tears of the village women did nothing to deter the force from completing its task. A man from the Harisi family begged one of the officers taking part in the operation, only to be told that he should “forget” his family, before the officer climbed into the vehicles with the other soldiers, which then left the village.

“The officer came over to me here,” Issa Harisi recalled. “He said, forget that the Hijazis ever existed. Go and multiply in Zaatari,” a reference to the Zaatari camp in Jordan, where thousands of Syrians from the south took refuge during the regime’s military campaigns, particularly in Daraa and Quneitra governorates.

Three of Issa’s four sons — Imad, Ali and Mohammad — were killed that day.

Witnesses from the victims’ families and other villagers told SIRAJ how they watched military vehicles leave the village with their sons in detention, heading along the road toward Wadi Tuaim, some 1.2 miles from Saida al-Golan. The valley is one of the largest and deepest in Syria.

Traveling north, the military convoy stopped at a military position at the Saida al-Golan company outpost, also belonging to the 61st Brigade, then moved off again before stopping at the reservoir of the Raqqad Dam near the village.

At almost the same moment, another man named Fadi Sayyah was detained by regime forces 3 miles away for questioning. He did not know then that he would be the only survivor of a massacre.

Sayyah worked in a mobile phone shop. A Kia Rio taxi pulled up outside, and men in military uniform got out, asked him his name, pulled his shirt up over his face and led him to the car. There they handcuffed him and put a blindfold over his eyes.

“I was helping some soldiers defect from the regime’s army,” Sayyah said, recalling what happened 13 years ago. The men showed him photographs of soldiers he had helped to defect, but he denied any connection to the matter. “I said, ‘By God, I know nothing about it.’ I just wanted to clear myself.” The car took Sayyah to the Ain Dhakar Battalion of the 61st Brigade and stopped there briefly.

There, Sayyah heard the men talking to Warrant Officer Abu Ibrahim of Military Intelligence. “They asked him about the vehicles that had detained the young men in Saida, and he told them they had gone on ahead of them,” he said.

“The car stopped at the dam junction,” Sayyah continued. “My blindfold had slipped, and I was able to see. I saw two security pickups pass beside us with people lying face down in the back. Then a car known to belong to the lieutenant-colonel went past, heading toward the [Wadi Tuaim] valley.”

The vehicles Sayyah described carried the detainees along the dirt track leading to Wadi Tuaim near the village of Saida al-Golan. At the head of that force was Hafez Tomeh, the lieutenant-colonel Sayyah referred to and, under his command, Raed Saleem, another officer on the staff of the 61st Brigade with the rank of major, known among local residents as Maj. Salloum.

At that moment, Sayyah heard gunfire. Two shots, then one, then two more, as he recalled. He also heard a young man pleading: “For God’s sake, sir,” before his voice was gone. One of the soldiers said to Sayyah: “Did you hear him? We’ve thrown him into the valley.” Sayyah was brought to the site of the massacre to hear what was happening and was then released, apparently because the perpetrators wanted him to recount the terror he had experienced to the people of the area.

On the other side of the valley stood two local men, who found themselves by chance in a position from which they could watch the scene without being seen, and so became witnesses to the cold-blooded execution of 13 people, including one child.

Mahmoud Youssef al-Mohammad and Hussein al-Aqla al-Issawi described those moments of terror, and their accounts corroborated those of the victims’ families and of Sayyah.

The military vehicles carrying the detainees reached the edge of Wadi Tuaim at around 4 p.m., two hours after the raid and the detentions had begun.

The soldiers brought all the detainees out, still handcuffed and blindfolded, and lined them up at the edge of the valley. They then began shooting them, executing them one after another. The sound of gunfire carried across the area, and the two witnesses saw the victims thrown into the valley one by one.

“I saw the car park at the edge of the valley. They brought several people out, shot them and then threw them into the valley. I saw it with my own eyes,” said al-Mohammad, the first witness. Al-Issawi, the other, confirmed that he recognized the young men of the Harisi-Hijazi family the moment he saw them. “He would fire and then throw the person into the valley,” he added. “Sometimes he would shoot the person as he was falling into the valley.”

The regime soldiers noticed movement on the far side of the valley and opened fire toward the two witnesses, who crawled out of range and managed to escape without being identified.

The Harisi family lost nine of its sons that day, among them a 12-year-old boy. The regime cordoned off the area, and the bodies were left lying at the bottom of the valley for four months.

On July 18, 2013, factions affiliated with the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian opposition took control of the area, including Saida al-Golan and Wadi Tuaim, and residents were finally able to recover their sons’ bodies. According to witnesses, the operation took weeks because of the rugged terrain of the valley and the difficulty of getting machinery or vehicles down to the bottom. Some of the victims were difficult to identify. One woman recounted that she could barely recognize her husband’s body, because his features had been disfigured by decomposition.

In January 2014, activists posted two videos on YouTube showing people with blurred faces recovering bodies from Wadi Tuaim. Victims’ families confirmed their authenticity. According to one of them, the bodies were “bound and unidentified,” which matched the families’ accounts of their sons being handcuffed before being executed by the Syrian army.

These two videos helped establish an indicative timeline for the massacre and, subsequently, for the recovery of the bodies from the valley after regime forces withdrew from the area. The SIRAJ team received no response from the channel that uploaded them to YouTube, which would have allowed us to verify them independently or obtain the unblurred originals.

The investigative team met members of the victims’ families, in interviews that continued over many weeks, to document the time and place of the events and the identities and names of all the victims. Fathers, mothers and wives spoke of the tragedy they had lived with since the day of the massacre, of the long months they waited before they could bury their sons, and of the terror that gripped the village for years afterward.

Umm Hassan Harisi lost three of her sons in the massacre. The eldest, Hassan, was 25 and left behind a wife and two children. The youngest, Abdul-Ilah, was 12. “They told me he was crying out for me before they killed him,” she said. “He screamed ‘Mama,’ then they killed him.”

The investigative team documented the names and identities of the 13 victims killed in the massacre, whose bodies were recovered from the valley by their families. They are: Imad Issa Harisi (25), Mohammad Issa Harisi (22), Ali Issa Harisi (20), Hassan Moussa Harisi (25), Mohammad Moussa Harisi (15), the child Abdul-Ilah Moussa Harisi (12), Youssef Mohammad Harisi (23), Khaled Mohammad Harisi (20), Anwar Mohammad Harisi (21), Abdullah Eid al-Ziraie (27), Muwaffaq Mohammad Fankhour (52), Ismail Ahmad Uwair (25) and Firas al-Hamdani al-Barhoumi (23).

At the time of the massacre, Maj. Gen. Yasser Mualla Nofal commanded the 61st Brigade, which was then an independent formation within the Syrian army’s 1st Corps.

Nofal was killed weeks after the massacre, in April 2013. Numerous obituary posts on social media indicated that he had been killed by Syrian opposition forces.

The families of the massacre’s victims, however, mentioned only the names of the two officers who led their sons to their deaths, both of whom are still alive: Lt. Col. Hafez Tomeh and Maj. Raed Saleem “Salloum.”

From the moment Tomeh’s name was first mentioned, the investigative team searched for any trace of him in public sources, particularly military news and social media, without success.

The team approached officers and soldiers from the area who had defected from the regime’s army, along with retired officers and local sources. While the sources gave differing accounts of his real name and whereabouts, all of them confirmed that he was inside Syria. After months of searching, we reached a defector known as Abu Hussein, who had served alongside Tomeh in the 61st Brigade.

This officer proved to be the key to reaching Tomeh, who had kept himself out of sight. He provided us with information about the lieutenant-colonel’s military record, along with a description of his facial features and build, which helped us to construct a picture of his appearance and subsequently to begin a search for a photograph of him.

The investigative team reviewed civil and military documents that confirmed Tomeh’s identity as a native of Talkalakh in Homs governorate, and confirmed his military posting to the 61st Brigade. The photographs of Tomeh in the civil and military documents matched a photograph believed to be of him.

We showed the photograph of Tomeh to victims’ families, villagers and eyewitnesses, and to 15 former detainees, including people whom Tomeh had personally arrested. Thirteen of them identified his photograph with certainty, compared against a photograph of another man said to be him.

Tomeh’s photograph revived a painful memory for the wife of one of the victims. On the day of the massacre, she had begged Tomeh to release her husband, Muwaffaq Fankhour, who suffered from a mental illness. Tomeh had not listened to her pleas, and Fankhour ended up a lifeless body at the bottom of the valley.

The victim’s wife said that, during the arrests, “Hafez took me by the hand in front of my house here and told me he had nothing to do with it. I told him: You are the responsible one, and if you want to kill me, then kill me.”

“Yes, that’s him. He wore a uniform and had more hair,” another woman to whom we showed Tomeh’s photograph said. “He once drove a tank into my house,” she added, gesturing toward an open courtyard.

The search continued for weeks afterward. Acting on information from local sources in Homs governorate, we established that Tomeh was living on a farm in the Talkalakh area near the Lebanese border. The investigative team reached relatives of his, after which the journalists contacted him directly, and he agreed to be interviewed.

The interview with the investigative team took place in two parts.

On June 17, we were able to arrange a meeting with Tomeh. On the road from Damascus to Homs, the team received a call from someone close to Tomeh informing us that he had declined to speak to journalists. He then asked to meet late at night. In darkness, the journalists traveled with local notables to the agreed location, only for the lieutenant-colonel to refuse a face-to-face meeting once again, offering instead a brief telephone conversation from a number previously unknown to the team.

Speaking to SIRAJ, Tomeh did not deny that the massacre had taken place. He confirmed that there had been no fewer than 13 victims, as we had documented, and confirmed that they had been executed and their bodies thrown into the valley, as described by residents and eyewitnesses. He denied, however, any role of his own in the massacre, arguing that his continued presence in Syria was proof of his innocence, and saying that he had left military service in 2016 and had received no compensation.

On June 20, the team received a call from Tomeh from an unknown number, in which he asked to meet a single journalist accompanied by the officer Abu Hussein at a Homs church at midnight, without offering any explanation for the request. He then ceased responding to any further attempts at contact.

Tomeh’s denial of his role in the massacre has not erased his face and his uniform from the memories and testimony of victims’ families and eyewitnesses, who recalled how he had led young men from the village, along with one child, to their deaths at the bottom of Wadi Tuaim.

Upon checking the numbers Tomeh used to contact the journalists, we found that they were not registered in his name. He used phone numbers registered to other people, which complicated the task of reaching and speaking to him.

Alongside the name of Tomeh, the residents and witnesses we interviewed repeatedly mentioned a major in the 61st Brigade named Raed Saleem, known among local people as Maj. Salloum or, simply, Salloum. According to the testimony, he was extremely violent and brutal toward local residents, particularly at checkpoints, and he was among the foremost participants in the massacre.

Unlike Tomeh, Saleem, who comes from the village of Beit Ana in the Jableh countryside of Latakia, has a substantial presence on social media. The team’s open-source research turned up numerous posts naming the major as one of the regime soldiers involved in crimes against civilians, including the Wadi Tuaim massacre.

When we asked Tomeh about his fellow officer Saleem during the telephone call, he described him as “filthy, and a collaborator with Military Intelligence and the National Defence Forces in the area.”

The investigative team found a photograph of Saleem posted on Facebook on April 12, 2013, roughly two weeks after the massacre, showing that he was still serving in Daraa governorate, one of the areas where the 61st Brigade was deployed.

By comparing satellite imagery against distinctive markers in the photograph, the team was able to determine that it had been taken near the municipal building in Tasil, with the former al-Huda bookshop visible, along with, in the background, the minaret of the Omar bin al-Khattab Mosque, some 8 miles from the site of the massacre in Wadi Tuaim.

Searching social media, the team documented a Facebook account believed to belong to Saleem, under the name al-Uqab al-Uqab (Eagle Eagle). The account features a photograph of Saleem standing on top of a rock, aiming a Kalashnikov rifle down toward the floor of a valley surrounded by green hills.

The team received no reply after messaging the al-Uqab al-Uqab account, whose last activity dates to 2019. Our research established that no other accounts or phone numbers are linked to it.

According to an informed source, after the massacre Saleem was transferred to complete his military service in the al-Kiswah area in the countryside of Damascus.

The team contacted several local sources, who indicated that Saleem had left Syria several months before the fall of Assad to take part in a military training course for regime forces in the Sultanate of Oman. A source in the Counterterrorism Directorate of the Syrian Interior Ministry confirmed this, adding that he had left Syria four months before the fall of the regime and had not returned since.

Neither the Omani Embassy in Damascus nor the Omani Foreign Ministry had responded, at the time of this writing, to SIRAJ’s queries about Saleem’s presence in Oman, why he had been allowed to remain there after the fall of the regime if his presence is confirmed and what the Omani authorities’ position would be should their Syrian counterparts request his extradition.

While the victims’ families live with the bitterness of loss and continue to wait for a justice that might restore some dignity to them after the fall of the Assad regime, those accused of the massacre carry on with their lives as normal.

Among the local residents is Ruqayya al-Barhoumi, who lost her husband and her brother on the day of the massacre and lives in the hope that the killers will be held to account. Speaking to SIRAJ from her home in Saida al-Golan, she said she had waited years to be able to speak about her family’s tragedy without fear of the Assad regime’s retribution.

Abu Imad Harisi, who lost three of his four sons, placed all his hopes in his story prompting the Syrian government to arrest and prosecute the accused. “If I were the judge, I would sentence him to death, just as he killed them,” he said. “Throwing [the victims] into the valley is worth a thousand murders.”

In an interview with SIRAJ, the lawyer Anwar al-Bunni, head of the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research, said that “the Wadi Tuaim massacre falls within the category of war crimes, and may fall within crimes against humanity if it is established that it took place as part of a chain of orders from above.”

Al-Bunni noted that the Syrian penal code contains no provisions on war crimes or crimes against humanity, and that the laws currently applied are the homicide provisions of the penal code, under which cases such as this are treated as the murder of more than one person, something he regards as “a trivialization of the crime and of the victims, and an obstacle to any prospect of pursuing the orders and the chain of command leading to the crime.”

The investigative team contacted the Syrian Interior Ministry and shared its findings with it.

On that basis, and in particular in light of the information disclosed here for the first time, Brig. Gen. Nayef Abdul Majid, director of the ministry’s Counterterrorism Directorate, said that “Hafez Tomeh is on the Interior Ministry’s wanted list. The information and inquiries provided to us by the SIRAJ investigative unit have supported security efforts to determine his whereabouts. Acting on the information you provided, the authorities went to the location indicated, but he was not present there. Initial indications suggest he may have fled the country.”

Regarding Saleem, he confirmed that should his presence in Oman be confirmed, the Interior Ministry will submit a formal extradition request through official channels, including the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), “within the framework of the established mechanisms for pursuing fugitives outside the country.”

The Wadi Tuaim massacre is one of dozens committed by the forces of the deposed Syrian regime across the country that have gone for years without the documentation needed to expose those responsible and hold them to account. It is further testament to the reach of the regime’s bloody arm, from the furthest point in northern Syria to the furthest point in the south, and into a remote village in the Quneitra countryside.

Thirteen years after the massacre, and in the absence of accountability for the criminals who killed their sons, despair is seeping into some of the victims’ families and pushing them toward revenge. Asked what she would say if she came face to face with her family’s killers, Ruqayya, who lost her husband and brother, said: “If it were up to me, I would do to them what they did to my brother and my husband. I was pregnant when they killed them, and because of all of it my child was born disabled and is still suffering to this day.”

• A group of field journalists, researchers and whistleblowers working with SIRAJ took part in preparing this investigation. Contributors include: Sanad al-Hindawi, Omar al-Bam, Osama al-Qaeed.
• Photographs of the victims were published with the consent of the victims’ families or relatives.
• Creative direction and visual solutions: Radwan Awad.

The post Unmasking Two Butchers of Quneitra.. How officers in Assad’s army turned the deepest valley in southern Syria into a mass grave appeared first on SIRAJ.

The small cavity soon widened, exposing the sewage pipes buried beneath the road. According to Khaled Hijazi, Said’s uncle, who owns a shop nearby, municipal workers responded by simply filling the hole with construction debris.

“When I tried to question what they were doing, they told me not to interfere,” he recalled. “One of them just said, ‘Mind your own business.’“

In the weeks that followed, sewage water began surfacing through other sinkholes that appeared unexpectedly across the same neighborhood, particularly after the heavy winter rains that swept across Syria earlier this year.

Among the most striking incidents was a massive sinkhole that opened in Ain Tarma’s main road during the Eid al-Fitr holiday in late March 2026.

Similar ground collapses have since been reported throughout Eastern Ghouta. The latest involved a 10-meter-deep sinkhole that opened in the middle of the main road in Zamalka, while numerous other collapses have been documented in Douma and several neighboring towns.

Through field reporting, along with the collection and verification of dozens of social media posts, photographs, and videos, the SIRAJ and Daraj investigative team documented at least 10 sinkholes and ground collapses across towns and cities in Eastern Ghouta between the beginning of 2026 and the publication of this investigation.

The Legacy of the Siege

What unites the communities now grappling with recurring ground collapses is a shared history: all endured years of siege by Bashar al-Assad’s forces and allied militias between 2013 and 2018, while coming under relentless bombardment. To survive, residents dug an extensive network of tunnels beneath their towns—creating underground routes that allowed them to move, seek shelter, and stay alive.

As Hamed al-Zein, who remained in his hometown of Hamouriyah until he was displaced to Idlib aboard the regime’s so-called “green buses“ in 2018, recalls:

“After the massive offensive against Eastern Ghouta between 2015 and 2018, people had no choice but to dig tunnels by hand—from inside their homes or from nearby basements—to protect themselves and their children. Entire apartment buildings were collapsing on civilians because of the shelling.”

Speaking to SIRAJ and Daraj, al-Zein said residents worked collectively to excavate what became known as “civilian tunnels.” These existed alongside tunnels dug by opposition factions to transport supplies and fighters, as well as specialized underground passages serving medical facilities.

One of the architects of that underground infrastructure was Samir Bouydani, a civil engineer who lived through the siege of Douma and helped dig three underground medical facilities. Bouydani says he was also the first to propose the idea of civilian tunnels in 2013.

“The armed groups’ commanders didn’t embrace the idea at the time,” he recalled.

His vision was ambitious: to create underground spaces where civilians could not only shelter but also live and even shop, as markets had become one of the regime’s most frequent targets.

Bouydani remembers one attack in 2015, when an airstrike on Douma’s marketplace killed 120 people.

During the siege, Eastern Ghouta was divided into two principal sectors. The northern sector—including Douma and Misraba—was controlled primarily by the Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam-JAI). The southern sector, encompassing towns such as Arbin, Kafr Batna, and Jisreen, was controlled by the Rahman Corps (Faylaq al-Rahman) and the al-Nusra Front, later known as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), while Harasta remained under the control of Ahrar al-Sham.

Having lived in Douma from 2013 until his forced displacement in April 2018, and while serving with the city’s municipal council, Bouydani worked alongside local opposition authorities to oversee the construction of several underground medical facilities.

Among them were tunnels beneath the Cave Hospital in Kafr Batna, another beneath al-Shifouniyah Hospital, and the largest of them all: the Damascus Countryside Specialized Hospital, known locally as “Point One.”

The latter underground complex included long passageways wide enough for ambulances, operating rooms that Bouydani describes as “state-of-the-art,” backup power generators, a water well, and a dedicated ventilation system.

To prevent its collapse, engineers covered the structure with approximately 1.5 meters (five feet) of earth and reinforced the surrounding area with additional soil. Access to the operating rooms was concealed through tunnel entrances hidden inside nearby residential buildings.

“It was so well equipped that the hospital continued operating for six to eight months after Assad’s forces captured Douma,” Bouydani said. “Later, soldiers looted the entire facility and stripped much of the steel reinforcement.”

Bouydani says he was not involved in constructing military tunnels, which were managed by separate engineering teams. His work focused on medical facilities, while also advising civilians who decided to excavate tunnels beneath their own neighborhoods to protect their families.

According to Bouydani, civilian tunnel construction accelerated in 2015. Residents dug directly beneath their homes—particularly in informally built neighborhoods—or connected the basements of adjacent buildings to create underground escape routes.

Asked where such engineering expertise came from, Bouydani answered with a laugh:  “Douma was different. We turned plastic into diesel, gas, and gasoline. We used solar heat to boil water. We had electricity for 22 hours a day using generators that ran on vegetable shortening.”

In a besieged enclave cut off from the outside world, he said, survival depended as much on ingenuity as on endurance.

Stolen Steel: The Final Blow

The airstrikes, barrel bombs, and artillery attacks carried out by Assad’s forces, backed by Russian air power and allied Iranian militias, have long since ended.

But for many residents of Eastern Ghouta, a new danger now lurks beneath their feet.

The ground is collapsing.

In the wake of these sinkholes, stagnant pools of sewage have begun spreading through neighborhoods due to ruptured sewer lines shattered as the collapsing tunnel network gives way underground.

Wael Salam, mayor of Ain Tarma, says the tunnel network began taking shape in 2015, constructed primarily by the Rahman Corps (Faylaq al-Rahman) and the JAI.

“They were enormous tunnels,” he said. “A vehicle could drive through them.”

According to Salam, many of the tunnels lie 10 to 12 meters (33 to 40 feet) below ground and extend for long distances.

“We’re not afraid of the tunnels themselves,” he said. “Had Assad’s forces not stripped out their steel reinforcement, they might even have become tourist attractions—or another means of transportation.”

Instead, he argues, the way the former regime dealt with the tunnels made their collapse almost inevitable.

“When the regime removed the reinforcing steel, the surrounding soil began to cave in. The collapse eventually reached the sewer network. The pipes lost their support, leaving them suspended with space beneath them.”

Once the pipes failed, sewage began pouring into the abandoned tunnels, accelerating erosion below ground.

That process, Salam says, has increased the risk not only of further tunnel collapses but also of damage to buildings above them.

It has also created a new environmental hazard.

“During periods of heavy rainfall, groundwater levels rise and mix with sewage,” he said, raising concerns about contamination of underground water sources.

Dr. Nidal Jouni, a professor of geology and seismology at the University of Damascus, says the removal of steel reinforcement has a direct impact on tunnel stability.

“If tunnels were not excavated according to proper engineering standards,” he said, “removing the steel significantly weakens their structural integrity, increasing the likelihood of collapse and causing the overlying ground to subside.”

Ahmad Saryoul, a resident of Douma who lived through both the siege and the subsequent takeover by Assad’s forces, says the regime troops deliberately destroyed the major tunnels connecting Eastern Ghouta to Damascus after recapturing the area.

Smaller tunnels, however—including those inside towns and villages that had been used to transport wounded civilians—were largely left untouched.

“The authorities left those for residents to deal with,” he said.

Most families, he added, are already struggling simply to repair their damaged homes.

“They’re asking the government and aid organizations to help rebuild their houses,” he said. “So how can they possibly afford to fill in underground tunnels—especially when their homes are sitting on top of tunnels that could collapse at any time?”

The danger often remains hidden until chance reveals it.

Abu Nimer, a shepherd from Eastern Ghouta, recalls losing one of his goats and spending hours searching for it.

As he walked along a nearby stream, he heard the animal bleating.

Following the sound through dense vegetation, he eventually found the goat trapped inside a water channel.

Only then did he realize that an abandoned tunnel lay concealed beneath the riverbed—another unseen remnant of the siege, still hidden beneath the landscape years after the war.

Tunnels Without Maps

When sinkholes linked to Eastern Ghouta’s underground tunnels appear, the most obvious solution seems straightforward: those who dug the tunnels should fill them in.

Today, however, that solution is largely impossible.

Many of those who excavated the tunnels are no longer alive. Others remain outside Syria. And even among those who have returned, many no longer know precisely where the tunnels lie. Years of military operations after Assad’s forces recaptured Eastern Ghouta in 2018, coupled with the deliberate sealing of many tunnel entrances, fundamentally altered the landscape.

A former commander in the JAI—who requested anonymity because he now works for Syria’s Ministry of Defense and is not authorized to speak to the media—said it was the former regime that ultimately erased many of the tunnels’ identifying features.

“The regime approached the tunnels strictly as a security issue, not as infrastructure that people would one day have to deal with,” he said.

“They were afraid opposition fighters might still be hiding inside them. They didn’t care if a building collapsed as a result.”

After spending more than eight years displaced in northern Syria, he said, returning to Eastern Ghouta revealed just how dramatically the terrain had changed.

“When we came back, we realized the landscape was completely different. The situation is extremely dangerous. At any moment, a building could collapse, and people could be killed or seriously injured.”

He added that many tunnels were dug haphazardly during the early years of the siege. Only later did local municipal bodies establish a formal licensing process intended to regulate excavation and improve safety.

“By then,” he said, “it was already too late.”

A Patchwork of Underground Networks

According to Imad al-Ajwa, mayor of Douma, one of the greatest challenges today is that no single entity ever built—or documented—the entire tunnel system.

“The tunnels were constructed by multiple parties,” he told SIRAJ and Daraj. “Some were dug by opposition factions, others by humanitarian organizations, and many by civilians.”

As a result, no comprehensive map exists.

To address the problem, Douma’s municipality has begun assembling what officials describe as the nucleus of a centralized database.

The effort combines whatever historical records remain—many dating back nearly eight years—with interviews involving residents and former tunnel builders who may still remember where underground passages were excavated.

At the same time, municipal teams are identifying the areas believed to face the greatest immediate risk to prioritize field inspections.

A similar effort is underway in Ain Tarma.

Mayor Wael Salam said municipal officials have been contacting former opposition fighters who have returned from Idlib in an effort to reconstruct the tunnel network from memory.

“So far we’ve been able to map roughly 60 percent of the tunnels,” he said.

He added that officials have repeatedly heard claims that Russian forces produced tunnel maps after the regime recaptured Eastern Ghouta.

“We’ve been told those maps were drawn by the Russians and kept in government offices,” Salam said. “But we’ve never received them. We don’t even know whether they actually exist. They may have ended up in one of the regime’s intelligence branches—or perhaps they never existed at all.”

Russia announced that Assad’s forces had regained full control of Eastern Ghouta on April 12, 2018, following the evacuation of the last opposition fighters from Douma, their final stronghold in the region, and the deployment of Russian military police.

The former JAI commander, however, doubts Russian forces ever produced a complete mapping of the tunnel network.

“They entered only the major strategic tunnels,” he said, citing one leading toward Harasta Suburb, another in Zamalka, and the large underground medical facility in Douma known as Point One.

The SIRAJ and Daraj investigative team contacted the Russian Embassy in Damascus by email seeking confirmation of whether such maps exist, but received no response by the time of publication.

Searching for What Has Been Lost

Samir Bouydani, who briefly served as mayor of Douma after the area’s liberation, said he contacted the engineer responsible for the JAI’s military tunnels during the siege.

According to Bouydani, the former engineer told him the faction had lost its tunnel maps during the displacement from Eastern Ghouta.

Bouydani said he later approached the Ministry of Defense, where officials likewise informed him that any remaining maps had disappeared during the displacement process.

He also criticized the way Assad’s forces handled the tunnels after retaking the area.

Using the underground medical complex known as Point One as an example, Bouydani said the facility originally had three entrances, but government forces sealed two of them.

Without maps—and after much of the steel reinforcement had been stripped—the remaining sections became extremely difficult to access safely.

A Complex Engineering Challenge

In response to questions from the SIRAJ and Daraj team, the Media and Communications Directorate of Syria’s Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management described the tunnel issue as “highly complex.”

The ministry said the region contains multiple categories of underground structures: large strategic tunnels, smaller passageways, vehicle tunnels, building-to-building connections, underground medical facilities, and numerous tunnels excavated independently by civilians—many of which were never documented.

Because of that complexity, officials say producing an accurate map of the underground network now requires coordination among four institutions:

• the Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management,
• the Ministry of Housing,
• the Syrian Engineers Association, and
• local municipal councils.

The investigation team was unable to obtain responses from representatives of the armed opposition factions that controlled Eastern Ghouta until 2018.

The former JAI commander acknowledged that even his faction possessed only partial documentation.

“Our maps covered only the areas under our control,” he said. “There was never a complete map of all the tunnels dug by the factions, institutions, and civilians. Given the conditions of war, no one can accurately account for the entire network.”

Technology: the Only Way Forward

According to Dr. Nidal Jouni, locating the remaining tunnels is still possible using modern engineering geophysical methods.

Technologies such as ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and seismic surveys, he said, can identify the location, direction, dimensions, and structural condition of underground voids.

“These techniques make it possible to map a tunnel’s extent and evaluate the risks it poses,” Jouni said.

He argues that authorities should undertake both short- and long-term geological and geophysical studies to determine the types of rock surrounding each tunnel, assess the likelihood of future collapse, and develop engineering measures capable of preventing further sinkholes before additional buildings—or lives—are lost.

A Mere Emergency Measures

For now, local authorities in Ain Tarma are relying on emergency repairs rather than permanent engineering solutions to address the growing number of sinkholes.

According to Mayor Salam, a comprehensive response remains beyond the municipality’s financial and technical capacity.

“When a sinkhole appears, we widen the opening slightly and fill it,” he said. “My priority is protecting the infrastructure—making sure the road doesn’t collapse again and safeguarding the sewer, telephone, and electricity lines. We reinforce the area with solid materials and asphalt, but I can’t fill an entire tunnel that runs beneath residential buildings.”

Meanwhile, the municipality is waiting for funding from the Damascus Countryside Governorate to implement a more substantial intervention.

The proposed plan focuses on five locations where tunnels intersect with the sewer network. At each site, crews would excavate down to the tunnel level, pump out accumulated wastewater, fill the cavity with engineered materials designed to prevent future collapses, and then rebuild the damaged sewer, water, electricity, and telecommunications infrastructure before resurfacing the road.

Officials in Douma face similar financial and technical constraints.

Imad al-Ajwa, the city’s mayor, said that only days before speaking with the SIRAJ and Daraj investigative team, new sinkholes appeared above former military tunnels behind Douma Municipal Stadium.

Those tunnels, he said, had once been reinforced with steel that was later stripped by Assad’s forces.

“Every time a collapse occurs, we provide a temporary engineering solution,” al-Ajwa said. “But we don’t have the funding to enter and stabilize the entire tunnel network. We also don’t have the specialized personnel—and I’m not going to risk my workers’ lives.”

He believes the region narrowly escaped a much larger disaster.

“Last year wasn’t a year of drought—it was actually a blessing,” he said. “If we had experienced heavy rainfall immediately after liberation, the situation could have been far worse.”

The Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management says it is operating under similar limitations.

According to the ministry’s Media and Communications Directorate, current efforts are based primarily on incident reports and emergency response, with teams intervening only after sinkholes or structural collapses are reported.

Officials pointed to a recent operation in Douma, where several tunnels were filled in cooperation with the municipal council and the Syrian Engineers Association.

But ministry officials stress that filling abandoned tunnels is far more complex than simply dumping soil into an underground void.

“Large tunnels cannot be filled arbitrarily,” the ministry said. “The process requires pumping specialized concrete and carefully protecting building foundations under the supervision of engineering teams. Filling a tunnel is nothing like filling an ordinary hole.”

Homes Above Hidden Voids

According to Aghiad Othman, deputy mayor of Douma, backfilling sinkholes with ordinary soil is ineffective because the ground is likely to subside again.

Instead, municipal engineering teams excavate each collapse site as necessary before stabilizing it.

“But we’re treating the sinkhole—not the entire tunnel,” Othman explained. “Even when we discover an underground passage, we notify the governorate because dealing with the full tunnel requires heavy equipment and specialized engineering methods.”

The greatest concern, he said, is when tunnels pass directly beneath building foundations.

Those cases require special structural intervention.

As a precaution, the municipality has begun issuing evacuation notices for buildings considered at immediate risk.

According to Othman, two residential buildings were evacuated only recently.

In Ain Tarma, Mayor Salam estimates that around 50 buildings are situated above underground tunnels.

Municipal authorities have placed legal restrictions on those properties, preventing their sale or transfer, and have urged residents to leave.

Many, however, have refused. They simply cannot afford to.

One of them is Abu Mohammad, an elderly resident who discovered a void beneath his apartment building while renovation work was underway.

Despite the warning signs, he chose to continue the work.

“I need to get my son married,” he said. “Our home is still better than paying rent.”

Then, with visible frustration, he added: “We’ve already started, and we’re going to finish. If the building collapses, may God have mercy on us.”

For Abu Mohammad, leaving is not an option unless an alternative home is provided.

“This is our house—we’re not abandoning it,” he said. “If it’s dangerous, then let the municipality give me another home. We’re waiting for them to close the tunnel. We can’t afford to pay for that ourselves. We’re barely surviving as it is.”

Some residents have attempted to solve the problem on their own by filling cavities beneath their homes.

Mayor Salam acknowledges that no one knows whether such efforts are actually effective.

“We don’t really know the correct engineering method. Is pouring concrete into the tunnel enough? We’ve never dealt with a problem like this before.”

He argues that Syria urgently needs specialized engineering units dedicated to tunnel stabilization and structural rehabilitation—not only for abandoned tunnels but also for buildings damaged during the war.

“There should be a dedicated restoration authority,” he said, “so that the people carrying out these repairs know they’re doing them correctly.”

As winter rains have exposed the hidden tunnel network beneath Eastern Ghouta, officials warn that the coming summer may bring a different threat: foul odors, rodents, and worsening public health conditions as damaged sewer systems continue leaking underground.

For now, residents can do little more than wait—uncertain how long it will take before permanent solutions replace temporary repairs.

• A version of this investigation was also published by Daraj Media
• Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awad

The post Collapse of “Siege Tunnels” in Eastern Ghouta: Widespread Cave-Ins and Lost Maps Endanger Civilians appeared first on SIRAJ.

Weeks earlier, Barakat had received an eviction notice after businessman Mohammad Khair al-Halabi, the owner of Planning Parcel No. 36, pledged to provide him with a replacement apartment within the city of Damascus. The commitment was based on Decision No. 695/M.T., which regulates the allocation of grant housing to eligible occupants through the Damascus Governorate under specific conditions before residents are displaced.

“I turned down the cash compensation,” Barakat told the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism – SIRAJ. “They offered me 25 million Syrian pounds, but I asked for a home in Damascus, just as the decision stipulates.”

He was later assigned an apartment in the Tabbaleh–Ain Tarma area. But upon inspection, he found its entire facade demolished, leaving it uninhabitable. Barakat recalled al-Halabi telling him at the time: “Fix it yourself. It’s only a few stones.”

After his home was demolished, he sought possession of the replacement apartment. Barakat, however, was asked to submit a family registry extract. He says he was then informed that two of his sons were wanted by Syria’s former Assad government for allegedly evading mandatory military service, and that the required security clearance for the apartment “could not be approved.”

“Al-Halabi told me, literally: ‘You’ve lost it, Abu Jihad. Besides, you’re classified as non-compliant.’”

As a result, the apartment allocation was canceled, and Barakat was placed on the governorate’s list of “non-compliant” applicants—a designation used by the Damascus Governorate for individuals who, according to its records, failed to complete the procedures for receiving compensation or alternative housing, or who declined the options offered within the legally prescribed timeframe.

Many of those affected reject that characterization. They insist they did not refuse alternative housing in principle, but rather objected to the conditions of delivery, the locations of the apartments, or their legal status and physical condition.

Some residents argue that the designation transformed what was fundamentally a dispute over housing rights and compensation into an administrative classification that effectively shut the door on any future efforts to pursue their claims.

Today, Barakat lives in a rented home in Damascus, paying about 2 million Syrian pounds (old currency)—roughly $150 a month. He says the cost far exceeds what he can reasonably afford as a construction laborer who depends on irregular daily wages.

A Permit That Reignited the Dispute

The roots of the current dispute in Diwaniyah al-Jawaniyah date back to mid-2022, when residents began receiving eviction and demolition notices. The notices came on the heels of amendments to Administrative Units Financial Law No. 37 of 2021, which imposed a deadline for holders of building permits who had not yet begun construction, requiring them to do so or risk having their permits revoked.

While some official documents list 32 occupied properties, others refer to 41 occupied units or 47 residential dwellings, indicating that dozens of families were ultimately displaced or became embroiled in disputes over eviction and compensation.

According to Mahmoud Hilal, Director of Urban Planning and Development at the Damascus Governorate, the owner of Planning Parcel No. 36 “reached settlements with and evacuated 42 families.” However, the Governorate officially recognized only 32 occupancies, arguing that only those cases met the criteria set out in the applicable urban planning directive.

Fourteen families interviewed for this investigation say the compensation they were offered fell far short of the market value of their homes or the realities of their financial circumstances.

Among them is Balqis al-Samakri, who received nine million Syrian pounds (old currency) in compensation for vacating her home. She described the payment as “charity.”

Another resident, Shahira Khadr Ghabn, said her entire house was demolished during the Assad era, even though only a small portion of the property fell within the boundaries of the disputed planning parcel.

“Al-Halabi refused to limit the demolition to the section inside the parcel,” she said. “The entire house was torn down.”

Ironically, the case returned to public attention after the fall of the Assad regime—not because the new authorities sought to resolve the legal disputes surrounding Planning Parcel No. 36, but for the opposite reason. The new government, through the Damascus Governorate, issued an additional construction permit allowing the project to expand vertically, despite ongoing objections from former residents and their continued demands for compensation.

Documents reviewed by SIRAJ show that nearly two years after Barakat’s home was demolished—and just months after the fall of the Assad regime—the Damascus Governorate granted Mohammad Khair al-Halabi, on July 16, 2025, a Construction Completion Permit No. 39.

The permit not only authorized completion of the existing project but also allowed the developer to add four additional stories to the building.

That raises a central question: On what legal basis was Permit No. 39 issued? Did the Governorate rely on the applicable planning and construction regulations, or was the permit granted under interpretations and administrative procedures that exceeded the limits of the law?

Beyond the Legal Limit?

According to documents reviewed by SIRAJ, the approved zoning plan for the site limits development on Planning Parcel No. 36 to one basement, a ground floor, and three additional stories.

However, Memorandum No. 2800/W of 2025, prepared by Diaa Khalifa, the Damascus Governorate legal supervisor, recommended approving four additional stories, citing Decision No. 7/M.D of 2020 as the legal basis.

The same recommendation was echoed in Memorandum No. 20653/W, dated March 18, 2025, issued by the Complaints and Grievances Committee, chaired by Fadi al-Razzouq and established by the Damascus Governorate on January 8, 2025.

The committee concluded that the additional floors should be approved because the owner of the parcel had provided alternative housing for occupants and because the measure would reduce the financial and administrative burden on the Damascus Governorate associated with evictions and compensation.

However, Decision No. 7/M.D—which became the primary legal foundation for Permit No. 39—has itself become the focus of substantial legal criticism.

Issued in 2020, the decision was intended to resolve the status of certain parcels within planned development zones and facilitate urban development projects that existing occupancies had stalled. Under specific conditions, it allows developers to receive additional planning incentives—including increased building heights or extra stories—in exchange for compensating occupants at the project site and completing construction in accordance with the approved zoning plan.

The committee concluded that the additional floors should be approved because the owner of the parcel had provided alternative housing for occupants and because the measure would reduce the financial and administrative burden on the Damascus Governorate associated with evictions and compensation.

However, Decision No. 7/M.D—which became the primary legal foundation for Permit No. 39—has itself become the focus of substantial legal criticism.

Issued in 2020, the decision was intended to resolve the status of certain parcels within planned development zones and facilitate urban development projects that existing occupancies had stalled. Under specific conditions, it allows developers to receive additional planning incentives—including increased building heights or extra stories—in exchange for compensating occupants at the project site and completing construction in accordance with the approved zoning plan.

According to the documents reviewed by SIRAJ, those conditions do not seem to apply to Planning Parcel No. 36. The property has held a valid building permit since 1989, and that authorization was subsequently renewed through Permit No. 225/1 in 2024.

Documents and video footage recorded by affected residents also show that the site was not vacant land or an undeveloped project, but an existing building.

The legal dispute extends beyond Decision No. 7/M.D to its relationship with Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982, which governs amendments to zoning plans, building envelopes, height restrictions, and permitted floor counts.

Under Article 5 of Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982, any amendment affecting zoning regulations must follow a formal process that includes:

Public announcement of amendments to the general and detailed zoning plans.
Display of the revised plans at the administrative authority—in this case, the Damascus Governorate
A 30-day public objection period.
Review by the Regional Technical Committee
A formal decision on submitted objections.

Only after those procedures have been completed can Decision No. 7/M.D be applied to authorize additional floors.

In urban planning terms, increasing a building’s height or adding stories constitutes an amendment to the property’s building envelope and planning parameters, rather than a routine administrative adjustment.

According to attorney Nabil Hussein, Decision No. 7/M.D “conflicts with Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982 and its amendments unless the procedures required by the decree—including public notice, publication of the amendments, and an opportunity to file objections—are fully implemented.”

An internal document obtained by SIRAJ appears to reinforce that interpretation.

In a letter dated March 9, 2025, the Directorate of Urban Planning and Development instructed the Complaints and Grievances Committee that the provisions of Legislative Decree No. 5 must be applied before approving any increase in building height, raising questions about the legal basis on which the permit was ultimately granted.

Nevertheless, only days later, the committee issued Memorandum No. 20653/W, recommending approval of the additional stories and directing the Directorate of Urban Planning and Development to complete the licensing process.

The legal controversy does not end there.

The Committee also appears to have overlooked Prime Ministery Circular No. 17/15/B, issued in 2023, which suspended approvals for amendments increasing the number of building stories. According to official records, that suspension remained in force until it was lifted in June 2026 by the General Secretariat of the Presidency.

Yet the documents reviewed by SIRAJ indicate that officials justified issuing the permit by arguing that Decision No. 7/M.D was “broader in scope” than the Prime Ministery Circular.

Responding to SIRAJ’s questions, Mahmoud Hilal, Director of Urban Planning and Development at the Damascus Governorate, argued that applying the Circular literally “would effectively halt reconstruction,” adding that “most building permits would be frozen” under such an interpretation.

He said the Circular had originally been issued to address urban planning violations and that the governorate sought to balance regulatory restrictions with the practical demands of post-war reconstruction.

Legal experts interviewed for this investigation maintain, however, that a Prime Ministery Circular carries greater legal authority than a local administrative decision and therefore takes precedence unless it is formally repealed by a subsequent circular—which, they note, did not occur until June 2026.

Belated Amendment

Documents reviewed by SIRAJ indicate that the technical committee later cited by the Damascus Governorate to justify amending the building envelope regulations (Manhaj al-Waja’eb) for Planning Parcel No. 36 was established under Decision No. 2768, issued on June 2, 2025—more than a month before Construction Permit No. 39 was granted on July 16, 2025.

According to the documents, the committee met and discussed amendments to the zoning plan before the issuance of Decision No. 61/M.T on February 1, 2026, which formally approved the amendment to the building envelope regulations pursuant to Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982 and its amendments.

In Syrian urban planning, “waja’eb” refers to the mandatory setback areas within a property where construction is prohibited. The building envelope regulations (Manhaj al-Waja’eb) define the technical parameters governing development, including the building footprint, permissible construction area, maximum height, and the number of stories allowed.

The sequence of events, however, raises significant legal questions.

Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982 requires that objections to amendments of zoning plans be reviewed by a Regional Technical Committee consisting of seven members chaired by the governor.

Documents obtained by SIRAJ, however, show that the body which reviewed the file was not that committee. Instead, it was a 12-member committee, also chaired by the Governor, established before the zoning amendment and before the issuance of the decision that later relied on the same decree.

Decision No. 2768 of 2025 establishing the technical committee chaired by the Governor of Damascus

This raises a central legal question: If the Committee created under Decision No. 2768 was not the Regional Technical Committee required by Legislative Decree No. 5, on what legal basis was the building envelope amended? And how could Decision No. 61/M.T rely on the decree before the procedures it mandates had been completed?

 Minutes of the Technical Committee meeting discussing zoning amendments before the formal planning decision was issued

Attorney Ali al-Jundi said that while administrative authorities are entitled to amend zoning plans, such amendments must be carried out in accordance with the procedures established under Legislative Decree No. 5, including notifying the Ministry of Housing.

“The administrative authority has the right to amend the zoning plan as it sees fit,” al-Jundi said. “But the amendment cannot be used to legitimize an earlier legal violation.”

Attorney Nabil Hussein offered an even stronger legal assessment.

“Under established jurisprudence of the Council of State, any administrative decision issued without a valid legal basis is legally void,” he said. “A void decision cannot be cured or revived by subsequent actions.”

The documents also reveal a discrepancy between the Committee that reviewed the case and the Committee prescribed by law.

While Decision No. 2768 established a 12-member technical committee, including the Governor of Damascus, Legislative Decree No. 5 designates a seven-member Regional Technical Committee, also chaired by the governor, as the competent authority to approve amendments to zoning plans.

In an audio recording reviewed by SIRAJ, made during a meeting attended by Ibrahim Kouki, Director of the Damascus Governorate’s Media Directorate, Mahmoud Hilal, Director of Urban Planning and Development, acknowledged that the procedures and decisions adopted later were intended to correct an earlier mistake in the case file.

That acknowledgment appears to contradict the official narrative portraying the subsequent measures as part of a routine planning process. It raises further questions about whether the later amendments were required from the outset under existing law—or whether they were introduced to remedy legal deficiencies associated with the original issuance of Permit No. 39.

Compensation for displaced residents also appears to have been far more than a secondary administrative issue.

It formed one of the principal justifications for granting the project four additional stories.

Paragraph (d) of Decision No. 7/M.D allows developers to receive an additional floor in exchange for compensating eight occupants displaced by a project.

But according to documents and residents’ testimonies reviewed by SIRAJ, the treatment of occupants varied considerably. Some received financial compensation, others were allocated replacement housing, while several affected residents say they received no compensation at all, or that the compensation offered was inadequate or never fully processed.

A New Cause of Dispute

Alongside the legal and regulatory controversy surrounding Permit No. 39, the Damascus Governorate established a local committee whose stated purpose was to coordinate between residents, government agencies, and the developer, while helping resolve outstanding issues related to replacement housing, compensation, and unresolved claims.

Residents interviewed by SIRAJ, however, describe the committee very differently.

In a memorandum submitted to the Governor of Damascus in October 2025, several residents said the committee failed to hear from all affected families, limiting its review to only a small number of cases.

Some residents argue that, in practice, the Committee became a mechanism for managing the dispute rather than serving as an independent body to resolve it.

Jihad Barakat said the committee initially offered several displaced families replacement apartments in the Barzeh Housing Complex. The proposal was later withdrawn after one resident challenged the legal status of the properties, arguing that ownership was based on a court judgment rather than a final registered title deed.

According to Barakat, the objection resulted in the entire process being frozen for all remaining families without consultation or the presentation of alternative housing options.

Several residents also told SIRAJ that the Committee relied primarily on the neighborhood mukhtar (local administrative head) to assess individual cases, without involving independent legal or technical experts. Some viewed this as evidence that the Committee did not provide balanced representation for all parties affected by the project.

In response to SIRAJ’s questions, the Damascus Governorate said the remaining cases are legally classified as “non-compliant applicants” because the individuals failed to complete the required procedures within the legally prescribed deadline. The Governorate added that it would implement any court rulings issued in their favor in the future.

The Developer’s Response

The SIRAJ investigative team contacted Anas al-Halabi, son of businessman Mohammad Khair al-Halabi, the owner of Planning Parcel No. 36, by telephone, through WhatsApp, and later met him in person in Damascus.

During the meeting, Anas al-Halabi declined to allow the interview to be recorded or to provide written responses. He maintained, however, that he and his father had compensated approximately 50 families.

He said the eviction and compensation process was carried out lawfully and documented through notarized agreements. He presented only one example—a release and discharge agreement signed by Faisal Mohammad Sweid, whom the investigation team also interviewed.

When contacted by phone, Sweid confirmed that he voluntarily vacated his home in 2023 and signed the release without coercion. He said al-Halabi gave him the choice between receiving an apartment in Ain Tarma or accepting financial compensation, the amount of which he declined to disclose. Sweid said he chose the cash payment so he could rent a home within Damascus.

Responding to residents who insist they never received compensation, al-Halabi argued that some were making such claims in an attempt to obtain additional financial benefits to which they were not entitled.

“I have fulfilled my obligations before God and before the occupants,” he said.

He further argued that responsibility for carrying out the evictions rested with the Damascus Governorate under Article 46 of Urban Planning Law No. 9 of 1974.

Regarding his father’s commitment to provide alternative housing under Decision No. 695/M.T, Anas al-Halabi said the undertaking was consistent with the decision’s provisions, which state that when an occupant is deemed non-compliant, the Governorate may allocate one of its designated replacement apartments, provided the beneficiary pays its assessed value according to the applicable procedures.

Addressing claims that some of the donated apartments were uninhabitable, al-Halabi rejected the allegation.

“The Damascus Governorate does not accept a donated apartment without first inspecting it and verifying that it meets all technical and legal requirements,” he said.

He also denied allegations that security restrictions affecting individuals classified by the Governorate as non-compliant prevented them from taking possession of replacement housing, specifically in the case of Jihad Barakat.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “His sons had nothing to do with obtaining a security clearance. In fact, no security approval is required before the ownership transfer.”

Al-Halabi cited Article 2 of Decision No. 492/M.T of 2022, which provides that when legal obstacles temporarily prevent the transfer of title, beneficiaries may instead submit a notarized declaration confirming their acceptance of the donated apartment and their agreement to vacate the occupied property until ownership can be formally transferred.

Asked why his father had originally undertaken the evictions under Decision No. 695/M.T of 2018, rather than Decision No. 492/M.T of 2022, al-Halabi said the newer decision superseded the earlier one and became the governing regulation once it entered into force.

When questioned about the alleged legal and administrative irregularities surrounding Permit No. 39, including the requirement to comply with Legislative Decree No. 5, he declined to comment.

“I am not the competent authority to assess those issues,” he said. “That is for the administrative authorities to determine and process.”

He added that his father had executed a notarized undertaking to vacate the occupied properties based on Decision No. 695/M.T and Decision No. 7/M.D, which, he said, authorized the granting of additional floors in accordance with applicable law before the eviction process began.

Regarding the lawsuit currently pending before the Cybercrime Court, al-Halabi said:

“I concluded that the proper course was to seek a fair legal remedy.”

Asked whether he had attempted to resolve the dispute before turning to litigation, he replied: “We complied with the process established by the body appointed by the governorate after liberation to resolve the dispute,” referring to the Al-Adawi Neighborhood Committee.

Finally, when asked whether he remained willing to reach a settlement with residents over the compensation claims, al-Halabi said that any future court ruling would be binding on all parties.

Cybercrime Charges Instead of a Settlement?

As residents’ protests intensified and some began using social media to share their accounts of the evictions and compensation process, the dispute entered a new phase—one that shifted from administrative conflict to the courts.

A group of affected residents created a social media page called “The Displaced of Diwaniyah”, where they published documents, personal testimonies, and updates related to the redevelopment project.

Those online activities were later followed by a series of legal actions.

Businessman Mohammad Khair al-Halabi filed a complaint before Syria’s Cybercrime Court, based on Cybercrime Branch Report No. 842, dated November 17, 2025, alleging “online threats.”

The case, which remained pending at the time this investigation was published, names several residents as defendants.

Court records reviewed by the SIRAJ investigative team while accompanying some of the defendants during court proceedings in May 2026 show that the charges include online threats, defamation, and libel.

Several residents told SIRAJ that the proceedings deepened their sense of pressure and intimidation, particularly because they see themselves as individuals seeking compensation, alternative housing, or legal review of the construction permit.

Additional documents reviewed by SIRAJ also reveal that in November 2025, the Al-Adawi Neighborhood Committee submitted a proposal to the Damascus Governorate recommending that the State Litigation Department and the Directorate of Legal Affairs pursue lawsuits for online defamation and libel against anyone found to have insulted the governorate, the governor, or the neighborhood committee through social media.

Ultimately, while the Damascus Governorate maintains that Permit No. 39 was issued as part of an effort to complete a long-stalled development project, many residents affected by the decision argue that the central issue extends far beyond the approval of four additional stories.

They contend that the real dispute lies in how the decisions on eviction, compensation, and the granting of additional planning privileges were made—without adequately addressing the rights and claims of those who lost their homes.

Jihad Barakat summarizes his experience in a single sentence that reflects the erosion of his hopes:

“I don’t want anything more than the home I was promised.”

• This investigation was produced as part of the 2026 SIRAJ Fellowship Program for Syrian Journalists, with support from the French Media Development Agency (CFI).
• A version of this investigation was also published by Daraj Media
• Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awad

The post The Untold Story of Permit No. 39: How Old Homes Were Demolished—Then Four Additional Floors Were Approved in Damascus’ Al-Adawi Neighborhood appeared first on SIRAJ.

In doing so, the regime revived an older model of parallel security formations dating back to the early years of Ba’ath Party rule. This model later evolved through the pro-Assad SHabiha militias closely associated with the Assad family before becoming a more structured network of paramilitary forces following the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011.

Why Was the Seventh Battalion Created?

As the Syrian uprising gained momentum after it erupted in March 2011—particularly with the emergence of armed opposition factions—the Assad regime increasingly relied on more flexible, locally embedded forces capable of controlling daily life at the neighborhood and street level.

This strategy rested on a clear premise: maintaining control required more than deploying conventional military units. It also depended on building local patronage networks that combined intimate knowledge of the terrain with the ability to monitor and dominate it.

This investigation, produced jointly by the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ) and Daraj, examines the Seventh Battalion as a case study of the NDF—pro-government militias established during the Syrian revolution years to operate alongside the regular army. As defections weakened the military, the regime increasingly turned to irregular formations considered more politically reliable. The Seventh Battalion is presented not as an isolated example, but as a window into the broader ecosystem of militias that emerged during the conflict.

Digital records and internal documents reviewed by journalists from Daraj and SIRAJ suggest these forces or militias were built not only on political loyalty but also on local ties. Their appeal lay in offering immediate protection for communities, property, and familiar territory, unlike the regular army, whose soldiers were often deployed far from their hometowns.

An internal document titled “Establishment of the Seventh Battalion,” identifying the unit’s headquarters at the summit of Nabi Yunis (Arabic for Prophet Yunis)  in Syria’s coastal region, outlines its primary objectives: constructing defensive fortifications adapted to the mountain terrain, deploying forward ambush positions, conducting surveillance and reconnaissance, fostering competition among fighters, and emphasizing discipline in appearance and uniform standards. Notably, the founding document even specifies requirements for clean-shaven faces and neatly trimmed hair—suggesting an effort to build a militia with a distinctive identity, image, and authority.

The Battalion formed part of the NDF, a nationwide network of locally recruited militias created to support Syria’s military and security services. By 2013, the NDF had evolved into a more institutionalized organization, receiving weapons, salaries, and ammunition while operating within a formal command structure that blended military and intelligence oversight.

Another internal paper, titled “Overview of the Seventh Battalion,” offers less of a coherent operational history than an example of the regime’s characteristic ideological language. Its rhetoric closely resembles Ba’athist political education manuals, combining Arab nationalist themes with Islamic references to portray the state not merely as the source of political legitimacy but as the guarantor of Syria’s very survival.

The document begins with sweeping references to Syria’s territorial integrity, the country’s central national cause, defending the homeland, and confronting the external enemy represented by Israel. It then narrows abruptly to a much more localized focus: the battlefield becomes the summit of Nabi Yunis and its surrounding areas, and the battalion’s mission is framed simply as “defending our areas.”

In other words, the rhetoric starts as a defense of the nation but ultimately becomes a defense of a specific locality. The regime’s national discourse was thus translated in practice into localized, community-based warfare—a dynamic that reflected and reinforced the territorial and sectarian fragmentation characteristic of Syria’s civil war.

In 2015, reports circulated claiming that the Seventh Battalion had established a suicide unit whose stated mission was to “defend Islam, which had been distorted by terrorist groups, and defend the homeland through martyrdom operations.” The reported initiative illustrated an apparent contradiction: while seeking to reclaim religious legitimacy from jihadist organizations, the battalion simultaneously embraced one of their most notorious tactics.

Who Served in the Battalion?

As the Syrian military struggled to maintain control across the country, the regime increasingly relied on locally recruited fighters familiar with the terrain. These recruits received training that combined conventional combat skills with intelligence and security practices while remaining directly linked to the military establishment.

The documents also show that civilian government employees were temporarily released from their official duties to participate in combat operations. Military priorities took priority over civilian bureaucracy, reshaping the relationship between the state and society in favor of security institutions and armed authority. In one example, a battalion fighter is identified as a municipal employee in civilian life.

An internal administrative memorandum outlining the requirements for building the ideal fighter in the Seventh Battalion bears the slogan: “We believe in the principle: Give the fighter what he needs, and he will deliver victory.” Beyond its rhetoric, the document offers a glimpse into the battalion’s daily reality. Rather than describing military operations, it reveals a relationship built on dependence and exploitation.

The memo lists persistent shortages of basic supplies and equipment—including tea, sugar, wrenches, and even electricity. These deficiencies appear not as isolated logistical problems but as symptoms of how the unit itself was managed. Fighters were treated primarily as instruments of war, provided only the minimum necessary to survive in exchange for risking their lives in the name of defending the state. Rather than cultivating an independent professional soldier, the Battalion sustained a combatant whose continued participation depended on access to basic daily necessities.

In this system, those who controlled food, water, warmth, and other essentials also controlled the fighter’s ability to remain in service. What appears on paper as logistical support functioned as a subtle mechanism of control, fostering loyalty through dependency. Fighters’ ability to fight was shaped by what the system provided—and by what it demanded in return.

The language of the Battalion’s supply requests also points to deeper administrative dysfunction. The documents reflect chronic austerity, constant appeals for basic resources, and an inability to meet even fundamental needs, to the point where day-to-day survival itself became a persistent challenge.

Viewed in this light, the Battalion’s support system extended beyond food and shelter. It also offered recognition and belonging—but only on the condition of continued service. Acceptance within the organization was tied to the bare minimum required for survival, reinforcing a structure that was difficult to leave because it was intertwined with the defense of one’s immediate community and geographic area.

The Seventh Battalion can therefore be understood as a microcosm of what might be described as a failed armed welfare state. The Assad regime demanded loyalty, commitment, and combat readiness from its recruits, yet lacked the capacity to provide stable living conditions in return. What fighters received was not an entitlement but a conditional benefit linked to remaining in service.

In this context, the Battalion members emerge as more than military personnel. They became individuals bound to a closed economic and social system whose power rested on their own vulnerability. What appeared to be a simple exchange concealed a deeper structural imbalance: the resources provided were insufficient to sustain a dignified life but adequate to discourage defection. This dynamic also helps explain the wartime proliferation of checkpoint economies, extortion, and pro-regime militia racketeering, which functioned as informal incentives within a broader patronage system.

The documents further reveal chronic delays in salary payments. In 2014, fighters reportedly earned monthly wages of 20,000 to 25,000 Syrian pounds, supplemented by bonuses of 3,000 pounds. Even at the time, these were meager sums. With the Syrian pound trading then at roughly 170 pounds to the U.S. dollar, total monthly compensation amounted to little more than $20, underscoring the limited economic value of military service despite the risks involved.

What Were the Battalion’s Responsibilities?

The Seventh Battalion did not operate in isolation. Internal contact lists indicate that its members maintained regular communication with NDF commanders in other regions, as well as with members of the Desert Hawks militia and a group referred to simply as “the Friends.” The latter designation appears to refer to operatives affiliated with Lebanon’s Hezbollah or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), identified only by aliases such as Hajj Zuhair and Hajj Alaa, without full names. The Battalion also coordinated with commanders of regular Syrian Army regiments, reflecting the close integration of its fighters with official military units—a relationship also evident in inventory records documenting the battalion’s weapons and equipment.

Internal Fractures and Attempts at Recovery

One internal document labeled “Discussion” captures what appears to be a rare moment of institutional self-assessment, revealing growing cracks within the Battalion. It was written at a time when the Syrian regime, like the regular army, was increasingly struggling to sustain its allied militias. The very structures created to compensate for military weakness were themselves beginning to show signs of exhaustion and declining effectiveness in defending the areas under their control.

Rather than serving as a routine administrative record, the document reads like the minutes of an internal crisis meeting. It catalogs a wide range of organizational problems: declining trust, deteriorating fighter morale, unmet logistical needs, arbitrary personnel transfers, lack of compensation, damage to the battalion’s reputation, marginalization of commanders, tolerance of underperforming personnel, and neglect of wounded fighters and the families of those killed in action. Together, these complaints suggest not merely operational shortcomings but a deeper institutional crisis affecting the militia itself.

Even the document’s title—“Discussion”—is somewhat misleading. Rather than reflecting an open exchange of views, it appears aimed at containing organizational breakdown and preserving discipline. Repeated references to sidelined commanders, transfers made without consultation, and the protection of ineffective personnel indicate an effort to reassert a chain of command that was increasingly eroding from within.

The timing reinforces this interpretation. The document was produced during a period when the Assad regime was losing territory and becoming increasingly dependent first on Iranian and later Russian military intervention. The battalion’s internal dysfunction mirrored the broader deterioration of the regime’s war effort.

Perhaps most revealing is the contrast between the Battalion’s public rhetoric and its internal reality. While official documents celebrated steadfastness, discipline, and victory, this memorandum paints a very different picture: collapsing trust, exhausted fighters, and an inability to meet even basic operational requirements. Military advances, when they occurred, did not translate into stability but instead produced further disorder, withdrawals, shortages of weapons, and a lack of accountability.

Even the document’s language appears fragmented and disjointed, suggesting that the institution struggled not only to manage the crisis but also to construct a coherent narrative about it.

These internal discussions become more meaningful when placed within their broader historical context. Beginning in 2012, as defections weakened the Syrian Army and its ability to hold territory declined, the Assad regime expanded auxiliary militias to compensate not only for manpower shortages but also for eroding confidence in the regular military. Yet this expansion did not produce a more resilient security structure. Instead, it created new vulnerabilities, as the militias established to fill institutional gaps gradually developed crises of their own.

By 2014 and 2015, as regime forces lost significant territory and military setbacks mounted, these weaknesses became increasingly apparent. The regular army was under strain, allied militias were experiencing fatigue, and command structures struggled to maintain the stability they publicly claimed to represent. The growing reliance on Iranian support, followed by Russia’s military intervention, further underscored that these paramilitary formations were no longer capable of sustaining the war effort independently—or, in many cases, sustaining themselves.

The reporting team attempted to contact three individuals identified in the documents as members of the Seventh Battalion but received no response. Open-source research also confirmed that Battalion members were killed during the conflict, with photographs of some circulated online and memorial pages created in their names on Facebook.

The journalists also submitted questions to the Ministry of Interior in Latakia regarding the government’s postwar handling of NDF personnel, including whether reconciliation measures offered to former Syrian Army members also applied to militia volunteers or whether separate procedures existed. No response had been received by the time this investigation was published.

Following the fall of the Assad regime, however, the Ministry of Interior announced in October 2025 that it had arrested Colonel Qusai Wajih Ibrahim, identified as the commander of the Seventh Battalion, in Latakia. According to the Ministry, he was accused of leading military operations targeting the region in 2012 and of participating in attacks against the General Security Directorate prior to the outbreak of the 2025 coastal violence.

• A version of this investigation was also published by Daraj Media
• Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awad

The post “The Mountain Battalion”: The Story of a Military Unit That Fought for the Assad Regime Before Falling Apart Under Psychological Strain appeared first on SIRAJ.

To this day, his grandfather, Walid Al-Suwaidan Al-Sarhan, sits beside the very well that swallowed him. In silence, he runs his hands over the soil, struggling to comprehend how the family’s long-awaited return home after years of displacement turned into an open-ended tragedy.

Since 2017, the Al-Sarhans had lived in forced displacement after fleeing their village of Mazraat Al-Sarhan, in the Tal Al-Daman district between south of Aleppo and northern rural Idlib. Following the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, they finally returned home, hoping to rebuild the life they had lost. They began repairing their house, worn down by years of bombardment and neglect, believing that their suffering was finally coming to an end.

But on March 2, 2026, Walid accompanied his uncle, who had taken the family’s sheep to graze in the fields surrounding the village. The young boy, deeply attached to his uncle, followed him with small steps across farmland the family had not seen since their displacement years earlier.

“We adults didn’t even know there was a well in that field,” his grandfather told the investigation team. “It had been dug during the war.”

In a matter of seconds, Walid disappeared.

The child stepped onto a thin metal sheet covered with small stones. The makeshift cover gave way beneath his weight, sending him plunging into a narrow well just 40 centimetres wide and nearly 80 metres deep.

“His uncle told us the boy vanished in the blink of an eye,” his grandfather recalled. “He was simply gone.”

For hours, rescue teams tried every possible method to reach the child. Every additional metre underground increased the risk of the well collapsing and consumed precious time the rescuers simply did not have.

Gradually, what began as a rescue operation turned into an impossible mission. Despite attempts to dig a parallel shaft, large rocks lodged 20 to 30 metres below the surface blocked any access to the child.

Ibrahim Al-Hassan, head of the Search and Rescue Department of the Syrian Civil Defence (White Helmets), described the incident as one of the most complex rescue operations his teams had handled in recent months.

“A large rock fell into the well after the child and became lodged at a depth of around 30 metres,” he recalled. “It prevented us from reaching him despite using cameras and various search techniques.”

Today, Walid’s grandfather asks for only one thing: no other child suffers the same fate.

Looking toward his grandson’s grave, he says quietly: “An open well is a death trap for children.”

Deep beneath dozens of metres of earth and rock, the child still rests where he fell months ago. The well that claimed his life became his final resting place.

The grandfather says the owners of the well offered the family blood money (diya) after Walid’s death, but they refused.

“Our only request,” he said, “was that they leave a path leading to Walid’s grave, so we can visit him and mourn him whenever we miss him.”

Open Wells Left Behind by War

Walid’s death was not an isolated tragedy.

As SIRAJ investigated child falls into wells across northern Syria to assess the scale of a largely overlooked threat to children, particularly in agricultural areas, it became clear that what happened in Mazraat Al-Sarhan is being repeated in other parts of the country.

The investigation was based on extensive field reporting across the governorates of Aleppo, Idlib, and Hama. Journalists visited the sites where children had fallen into wells, interviewed victims’ families, survivors, and members of the Syrian Civil Defence, and reviewed legal documents, photographs, and rescue videos, verifying them through both field reporting and digital analysis.

The team also obtained official statistics covering well-related accidents over the past three years. It documented testimonies from 56 farmers describing how wells and underground cisterns had been looted during the war and left open and unsecured.

In Arabic, the words bi’r (well) and jubb (plural: jubab) are closely related but differ in usage. A bi’r refers generally to any excavation dug to access groundwater, while a jubb typically describes a deep, dark, often abandoned well lacking protective infrastructure. Historically, the term has also been used to describe a pit where objects—or even people were concealed.

Across northern Syria, hundreds of abandoned, damaged and unsecured wells and underground cisterns have become an escalating danger to children. Years of war, displacement, and the looting of infrastructure have left many of these sites uncovered and unprotected, while rescue and Civil Defence teams continue to operate with limited resources.

“The capabilities currently available are still insufficient to deal with this type of complex rescue operation,” said a relative of a child who fell into a well in the village of Tal Awar, south of Idlib.

“The Civil Defence does not have enough equipment for these operations. We need advanced cameras capable of reaching great depths, oxygen supply systems that can operate down to 100 metres, and more rescue ropes, the most essential tool used during these missions.”

A Split-Second Fall

On the morning of March 2, 2026, while Walid’s family in Mazraat Al-Sarhan waited for a miracle that would never come, another tragedy was unfolding more than 100 kilometres away in the eastern countryside of Hama.

In the village of Halban, the family of Dam’a Al-Baroush had barely begun to feel safe again after returning to their home following more than two and a half years of displacement from the Salamiyah area. Their long-awaited homecoming soon turned into the beginning of another nightmare.

Just one week after returning, Dam’a, who had not yet reached her second birthday, was playing near the family home while her parents were busy with work on the roof. In a single moment, they caught a final glimpse of their daughter before she disappeared into a nearby well.

On March 2, 2026, the very same day Walid fell into the abandoned shaft, Dam’a lost her life after falling into a well approximately 110 metres deep, more than 70 metres of which were filled with water, according to her father, Miqdad Al-Baroush.

Al-Baroush recalled the first moments after the accident: “Her mother and I were on the roof when we suddenly saw Dam’a fall. We couldn’t comprehend what had happened. We jumped off the roof ourselves trying to reach her, but everything happened within seconds.”

Rescue teams arrived in about twenty minutes and launched a complex recovery operation inside the deep well.

According to the girl’s father, Syrian Civil Defence teams used every available method—including ropes, steel cables and vertical rescue techniques—in an effort to reach and save Dam’a. But the well’s extreme depth and the presence of water made the mission exceptionally difficult.

After nearly six hours, rescuers managed to recover the child. She had not survived.

The tragedy devastated not only her family but the entire village. Following Dam’a’s death, residents began sealing and securing open wells throughout the area to prevent similar accidents.

Her father concluded: “Any open well is a real danger to children. No one imagines that a single moment can be enough to lose your child forever.”

From Isolated Accidents to a Pattern

Since the fall of the Assad regime, Aleppo, Idlib and Hama have witnessed a series of similar incidents that have forced Syrian Civil Defence teams to carry out highly complex rescue operations, some lasting many hours.

The danger posed by unsecured wells extends beyond children.

Just weeks after Walid’s death, Civil Defence teams responded to another incident in the village of Tal Halawa, southeast of Idlib, where 18-year-old Ahmad Hassan Al-Mutair fell into a narrow well approximately 100 metres deep.

According to the Civil Defence, the young man remained missing for more than 24 hours before his family located the site where he had fallen and alerted rescuers. When rescue teams lowered a camera into the well, they found no signs of life. The operation continued for approximately 18 consecutive hours, after which rescuers, assisted by local residents, recovered his body from a depth of around 56 metres.

These incidents suggest that falls into wells and underground cisterns are no longer isolated accidents but an increasingly recurring danger across several parts of Syria, particularly in agricultural areas where uncovered or poorly secured wells are widespread.

The investigation team obtained exclusive statistics from Syria’s Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management, which consolidated and reviewed records previously held by local institutions operating in opposition-controlled areas before the ministry’s establishment. The records cover child falls into wells over the past three years in northern Syria.

The data show that Aleppo, Idlib and Hama recorded the highest number of rescue responses related to these incidents, highlighting the scale of the problem in areas where open and unsecured wells remain widespread.

Ibrahim Al-Hassan, who supervised several of the rescue operations, said the repeated accidents are directly linked to the absence of even the most basic safety measures around open wells and deep excavations.

“Many excavation sites are left without covers, warning signs or protective barriers to keep children away,” he said. “As a result, they become permanent hazards.”

He added that preventing many of these tragedies does not necessarily require sophisticated equipment or significant financial resources. “Simple measures can save lives—placing warning signs during and after drilling, sealing well openings with metal covers or concrete slabs, or even installing barriers and large stones to prevent people from falling inside.”

Open Death Traps

As incidents continue to recur, a broader question emerges: How did hundreds of wells across northern Syria become exposed death traps? And who bears responsibility for leaving them in this condition for years?

In many agricultural areas across the countryside of Hama and Idlib, the proliferation of open wells and underground cisterns is linked to looting and the absence of basic safety measures.

Although Syria’s Water Legislation Law No. 31 of 2005 regulates the drilling and operation of wells and establishes licensing procedures, it contains no clear provisions requiring well owners—particularly on private land—to secure well openings or implement safety measures to prevent accidents and unauthorized access.

Behind the repeated tragedies, however, testimonies collected by SIRAJ reveal another factor that has significantly contributed to the problem: the systematic looting of hundreds of agricultural wells during the war, leaving them dry, abandoned and dangerously exposed.

According to testimonies and documents obtained for this investigation, following their capture of large parts of the Idlib and Hama countryside between 2019 and 2020, forces loyal to the former Syrian regime and affiliated militias dismantled and looted the equipment of hundreds of groundwater and surface wells in farming communities that depended on irrigation as their primary source of livelihood.

SIRAJ documented 56 consistent testimonies from farmers who returned to their hometowns in northern Hama after the fall of the Assad regime. They said they found their wells completely stripped after years of forced displacement.

During that period, units of the Fourth Division, commanded by Maher al-Assad, alongside the National Defence Forces (NDF), locally led by Simon Al-Wakil and Nail Al-Abdullah, maintained a long-term military presence across large parts of northern and western Hama after residents had been forcibly displaced.

In the Qalaat al-Madiq district alone, the journalists documented the looting of 638 groundwater and surface wells.

Groundwater wells are deep boreholes drilled to access underground aquifers, while surface wells are shallower excavations used to collect near-surface water to supply irrigation. According to this investigation, pumps, electrical cables, generators and metal infrastructure were removed from these wells before they were abandoned, often left open or heavily damaged in the middle of agricultural fields.

A similar pattern emerged in the town of Al-Habit in southern Idlib.

According to the head of the town’s Agricultural Association, Al-Habit contains approximately 350 groundwater wells. After returning home following years of displacement, residents found that most of the wells had either dried up, been destroyed or left open after their equipment had been looted. By then, nearly 95 percent of the town had been destroyed.

The investigation also documented the presence of former Iranian-backed militia positions in the surrounding area, including sites near the town of Ma’arrat Hurmah, where the team obtained photographs showing military compounds displaying militia flags and religious materials.

From Lifeline to Death Trap

Across the countryside of Idlib and Hama, thousands of farmers were forced to abandon their land and irrigation wells during successive waves of displacement. Many of those wells have since become abandoned, looted pits posing a danger to nearby communities.

Abdulsalam Al-Ahmad, from the Mhardeh area in northern Hama, shared one such story.

In 2006, his family drilled a 289-metre-deep agricultural well that supplied irrigation for their pistachio orchards. When regime forces advanced into the area in 2019, the family was forced to flee, leaving behind both the well and its equipment.

After the Assad regime’s fall, Al-Ahmad returned to discover that the well had been extensively looted.

“Almost nothing was left,” he said. “Even the floor tiles had been stolen.”

He purchased a new pump in an attempt to restore the well, only to discover that it had been deliberately filled with rocks, scrap metal and other debris to a depth of nearly 100 metres, making rehabilitation technically difficult and prohibitively expensive.

Faced with those conditions, Al-Ahmad abandoned the old well and drilled a new one to irrigate his land. The damaged well, however, remains open, like dozens, if not hundreds, of others that have fallen out of use after being looted or destroyed.

Testimonies from local residents, together with data collected duringthe investigation, indicate that many of the wells posing a threat to children and rural communities today were once productive agricultural wells that sustained local livelihoods before the war. Over time, however, many became deep, abandoned shafts after their owners lost the ability to restore or operate them. In the absence of any systematic efforts to seal or secure them, these wells have become permanent hazards across northern Syria’s agricultural landscape.

Seconds Between Life and Death

Not every child who fell into a well met the same fate.

In some cases, rescue teams managed to pull children from the depths before it was too late.

In the village of Tal Awar, south of Idlib, the family of Askar Al-Diab, aged seven, had been drilling a new groundwater well in June 2024, hoping to secure drinking water and irrigate their farmland.

Instead, the well they had dug in search of life nearly became a deadly trap for their own child.

On the evening of June 8, 2024, while the family was gathered outside their home, they suddenly heard Askar scream before disappearing into the open shaft.

The boy’s uncle told SIRAJ that the first moments were marked by shock before frantic calls for help began, amid fears that the child had already plunged to the bottom.

According to both the family and the Syrian Civil Defence, timing proved decisive.

The nearest Civil Defence station was only minutes away, allowing search-and-rescue teams to reach the scene almost immediately.

Rescuers later discovered that Askar had not fallen all the way to the bottom. Instead, he had become trapped approximately five metres below the surface, clinging to the steel cables and ropes connected to the water pump inside the well—an extraordinary stroke of luck that kept him alive.

Reaching him, however, was far from straightforward.

Rescue teams employed both vertical and horizontal excavation techniques alongside specialized rope-rescue equipment during a complex operation that lasted nearly four hours, while fearing that unstable soil could collapse or the child could slip deeper into the shaft.

In many such incidents, the difference between life and death amounts to only a few metres—or just a few minutes separating the arrival of rescue teams from a fatal delay.

Ultimately, rescuers succeeded in pulling Askar out alive before transferring him to Al-Rahma Hospital in the city of Darkoush, where the investigation team verified his admission to the emergency department and subsequent resuscitation and medical treatment.

Footage from the rescue operation of seven-year-old Askar Al-Diab after he fell into an artesian well in Tal Awar village, western Idlib, on June 8, 2024. Source: Syrian Civil Defence

Different Endings to the Same Story

In March 2026, Syrian Civil Defence teams operating as part of the Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management carried out another rescue operation after a young girl fell into a well in northern Aleppo.

Using specialized cameras and rope systems to inspect the shaft and attempt access, rescuers eventually recovered the child—but she had already died before reaching the surface.

Only days later, a nearly identical incident unfolded in northern Aleppo—but with a different ending.

In the town of Shamarikh, a three-year-old boy fell into a well 18 metres deep. Civil Defence teams launched a delicate rescue operation using rope systems and vertical rescue equipment. Assisted by a local volunteer who descended into the well, rescuers secured the child and brought him to the surface before administering first aid and transferring him to a hospital in Azaz.

Rescue of a three-year-old child after falling into an 18-metre-deep well in Shamarikh, northern Aleppo. Source: Syrian Civil Defence

These recurring incidents highlight the extraordinary challenges faced by rescue teams operating inside narrow, deep wells, where, according to multiple rescuers interviewed by SIRAJ, every passing minute can determine whether a victim survives.

The depth of the well, its narrow diameter, unstable soil conditions, the presence of water, rocks or internal collapses all combine to make rescue operations exceptionally complex, particularly given the limited technical equipment and resources currently available.

Ibrahim Al-Hassan, head of the Search and Rescue Department at the Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management’s Civil Defence, says the greatest obstacle often begins with the wells themselves.

“The biggest challenge we face is the narrow diameter of many wells,” he explained. “Their openings are often too small for a rescuer to enter and reach the victim, forcing us to rely on rope rescue systems and other specialized techniques.”

Poor ventilation presents another major danger.

“A lack of oxygen inside the well can cause victims to suffocate,” Al-Hassan said. “The extreme depth is another critical factor. Once a child falls more than fifty metres, rescue becomes extraordinarily difficult.”

While some incidents end with dramatic rescues after desperate races against time, others conclude far more tragically: bodies trapped deep underground, families returning home after years of displacement only to lose their children within moments, and entire villages living with the daily fear that a deadly shaft may lie only a few steps from their homes.

Al-Hassan urged residents of rural communities to focus on prevention above all else.

“The most important recommendation is to keep children away from areas where wells are being drilled, remain open or have been abandoned, and to ensure these wells are properly sealed using whatever simple means are available.”

Interview with Ibrahim Al-Hassan, Head of the Search and Rescue Department, Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management, April 2026 – SIRAJ

The testimonies collected from families, rescuers and official data obtained by SIRAJ indicate that these incidents are no longer isolated accidents. Rather, they are the cumulative consequence of years of war, weak oversight, and the abandonment of hundreds of wells and underground cisterns after their equipment was looted during the years when the former Syrian regime and its affiliated militias controlled large areas of northern Syria.

Despite the efforts of Civil Defence teams working with limited resources and technical capacity, rescuers insist that many of these deaths could have been prevented through simple precautions: a secure metal cover, a concrete slab, or even a large stone placed over the opening of an abandoned well.

Geologist and researcher Thabet Al-Kassha agrees that preventing falls does not require sophisticated solutions, but rather the consistent application of basic safety measures once wells are completed or taken out of service.

He says the most important steps include securing every well opening with a firmly fixed metal cover, whether the well is active or abandoned, and installing a metal casing extending at least 50 centimetres above ground level, reducing the risk of accidental falls.

Al-Kassha also noted that the diameter of a well plays a crucial role in rescue operations. Wells wider than 35 centimetres provide rescuers with greater room to operate, while narrower shafts significantly hinder access and increase the risk to victims, particularly young children.

As official records continue to document new incidents, children across northern Syria continue to play near uncovered wells—unaware that a single step may be enough to put their lives at risk.

Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awwad

The post Syria’s Abandoned Wells Turn into Death Traps for Children appeared first on SIRAJ.

However, the document signed by Tlass—widely regarded as one of President Hafez al-Assad’s closest and most trusted ministers—and endorsed by a Field Court ruling, was in fact an execution order. It authorized the public hanging of two civilians in Damascus’ Marjeh Square, Syria’s capital, for ordinary criminal offenses that could have been prosecuted in virtually any country under civilian law.

More than four decades later, following the collapse of the Assad dynasty, reporters from the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ) and the newspaper Zaman al-Wasl obtained a digital copy of the document. It sheds new light on the brutality of Syria’s notorious Military Field Courts, which were established after the Baath Arab Socialist Party came to power and remained one of the regime’s most feared instruments for most of the Assads era.

The two civilians targeted by the execution order were convicted of stealing and selling subsidized food supplies. Yet rather than being tried before a civilian criminal court, they were sentenced to death by a Military Field Court. 

The tribunal had originally been created during the state of war with Israel following the Baath Party’s seizure of power in the March 1963 coup. Later, however, Hafez al-Assad expanded its jurisdiction, allowing it to prosecute civilians accused of ordinary criminal offenses.

In practice, legal experts say, these were courts in name only. They did not conduct genuine trials, offered no right to defense, and provided none of the guarantees associated with a fair judicial process. Instead, they became an effective instrument for eliminating Syrians deemed disloyal to Assad’s rule. They operated as a parallel judicial system, bypassing ordinary courts to dispose of political opponents through expedited proceedings cloaked in legal legitimacy, while instilling fear throughout Syrian society, according to Nawras Al-Abdullah, a legal researcher at the Syrian Dialogue Center.

“The Field Court was originally created to deal with serious wartime crimes and enforce strict military discipline,” Al-Abdullah said. “But from the outset, it reflected the Baath regime’s broader mindset, which prioritized the elimination of political opponents above all else.”

The use of these courts did not end with Hafez al-Assad. They continued to operate under Bashar al-Assad, particularly during the Syrian uprising. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), the Assad regime executed 7,872 people, including 114 children and 26 women, out of at least 14,843 death sentences issued by Military Field Courts between March 2011 and August 2023.

Field Courts formed part of Syria’s system of exceptional courts. Their proceedings were secretive and often lasted only minutes. They ignored even the procedural safeguards of military courts, denied defendants the right to legal representation, and issued unappealable judgments. Verdicts were based not on evidence presented in court, but primarily on security reports and confessions allegedly extracted under torture.

Baathist Ideology and Brutal Sentences

Although the offense attributed to the two defendants amounted to an ordinary criminal violation—one that would normally fall under consumer protection laws or the criminal code—the regime referred their case to a Military Field Court, which sentenced them to death by hanging.

The execution order approved by Mustafa Tlass begins with the handwritten instruction “Execute.” Classified “Top Secret,” it was issued by the Army General Command, specifically the Military Administration Branch – Military Discipline Division, and references Field Court Decision No. 59, dated June 19, 1983.

The document is filled with terminology characteristic of Baathist ideology under Hafez al-Assad. It accuses the two civilians of “committing criminal acts contrary to the implementation of the state’s socialist system” and of “stealing and distributing food supplies belonging to the Arab people in Syria.”

It also sets out, in meticulous detail, how the executions were to be carried out. The commander of the Southern Military Region was assigned responsibility for overseeing the executions and all logistical arrangements, while also serving as chairman of the supervisory committee. The executions were scheduled to take place in Marjeh Square, central Damascus, at 5:00 a.m. on July 18, 1983.

To ensure the executions proceeded as ordered, the document instructed officials to erect two gallows in Marjeh Square by 4:00 a.m. and to assign a military police unit to carry out the hangings under the supervision of the head of the Military Police Branch.

A non-commissioned officer was designated to blindfold the two prisoners immediately before the executions, while military police personnel responsible for guarding them were to be selected by the head of the Military Police Branch.

According to the order, responsibility for transporting the condemned men to and from the execution site also rested with the Military Police Branch.

The executions were to be witnessed by the Military Field Court’s prosecutor, one of the judges who issued the sentence, and the court clerk. Upon arrival at the execution site, the supervising officer was instructed to read the death sentence aloud before the prisoners were blindfolded and the executions carried out.

Afterward, the supervisory committee was required to prepare an official execution report, signed by all committee members. The Military Public Prosecutor’s Office would retain one copy, while another would be attached to the case file.

The document further assigns the Syrian Army Medical Services Administration the responsibility for burying the bodies. The same institution would later be implicated in the burial of thousands of detainees in mass graves during the Syrian conflict. Meanwhile, the Military Judiciary Administration was tasked with arranging the required religious rites before and after the executions.

Following the executions, the supervising officer was instructed to notify the General Command of the Army and Armed Forces immediately by telegram, followed within six hours by a written report accompanied by the signed execution record for inclusion in the official case file.

The order also stipulated that the executions be carried out under strict secrecy, with local authorities responsible for enforcing the directive.

At the end of the document appears the signature of an official identified as Jamil, along with distribution copies sent to the Field Court at the Air Force Command, the Ministries of Health and Interior, the Military Police Branch for coordination with the Interior Ministry, and the regional military commander.

The document concludes with the signature of Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass and the official seal of the General Command of the Army and Armed Forces – Organization and Administration Branch.

A Seven-Minute Trial

Samir Turko is among the few Syrian civilians known to have survived after being brought before a Field Court shortly after Hafez al-Assad expanded its jurisdiction.

On November 26, 1981, Turko, who is still alive today, was arrested by the State Security Directorate in Damascus because his maternal uncle was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan.

He was initially held at the Internal Security Branch before being transferred to the State Security Branch for interrogation. Over the next three years, he was moved through multiple security branches in Damascus and the southern city of Daraa. After years of detention and interrogation, he was finally brought before a Field Court.

What followed, he told SIRAJ, bore little resemblance to a judicial proceeding.

“There were 22 of us chained together,” Turko recalled. “The hearing was purely symbolic. It lasted no more than seven minutes before Judge Suleiman al-Khatib.”

According to Turko, the judge opened by asking only one question: “Are you Samir Turko?”

When Turko answered yes, the judge immediately launched into accusations.

“He called me a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and an American agent,” Turko said. “I replied, ‘I am a patriot. I love my country.'”

The response appeared to anger Judge al-Khatib, who signaled to security officers inside the courtroom. They immediately beat Turko so severely that his face began bleeding.

The judge then questioned him about his uncle, threatening to arrest every member of his family before concluding with the words:

“I swear I’ll have you executed.”

Turko said the courtroom itself looked nothing like a court of law. There was no defense lawyer, no public hearing, no examination of evidence, and virtually no questioning. Defendants were never informed of the verdicts issued against them. Instead, prisoners tried to decipher their fate from the judges’ gestures.

According to Turko, Judge al-Khatib would snap his pen after interrogating a defendant—a signal that he had decided on a death sentence. Another judge communicated his decision through hand gestures: pointing with his left hand meant execution; pointing with his right meant the prisoner had escaped execution, though often only to receive a life sentence.

“What remains etched in my memory is that they wanted to execute as many people as possible,” Turko said. “They wanted to eliminate anyone they considered an opponent. They forced people not only to confess to whatever they wanted, but also to implicate family members, friends, and anyone they knew.”

Turko was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment. He was transferred first to the notorious Tadmur (Palmyra) Military Prison and later to Saydnaya Military Prison, where he remained until his release in 2010.

During his years in detention, Turko endured repeated torture. The worst came after his arrival at Tadmur, where guards repeatedly beat the soles of his feet until they became severely infected.

“My foot became gangrenous and worms emerged from the wound,” he said.

According to Turko, the prison guards’ solution was to allow him to cauterize the wound with fire. More than four decades later, he continues to suffer permanent damage, including the loss of much of the tissue on the sole of his foot.

Legal researcher Nawras Al-Abdullah said the logic of Syria’s Field Courts rested on speed, repression, and the swift elimination of perceived threats to the Assad regime.

“Their purpose was to dispose of cases within minutes,” he said. “This pattern has been consistently documented by survivors from different periods, as well as by Syrian and international human rights organizations.”

Al-Abdullah added that Hafez al-Assad deliberately expanded the courts’ jurisdiction as the regime confronted growing opposition in the late 1970s.

“As the regime perceived an increasing threat from Islamists and other political groups, Legislative Decree No. 32 of 1980 extended the jurisdiction of the Field Courts to cover internal disturbances,” he said. “In practice, this transformed them into a tool for suppressing both civilians and members of the military.”

The Evolution of the Regime’s Most Feared Court

Syria’s Military Field Court was established on August 17, 1968, under Legislative Decree No. 109/3, based on Recommendation No. 2 issued by the Provisional Regional Command of the Arab Socialist Baath Party on February 25, 1966, which at the time held legislative authority.

The court remained in operation for more than five decades until September 3, 2023, when Bashar al-Assad issued a legislative decree formally abolishing it.

When it was first created, the court’s jurisdiction was limited to offenses within the authority of military courts, as referred to by the Minister of Defense. Its jurisdiction applied retroactively to the aftermath of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, reflecting its original purpose: to prosecute military personnel deemed responsible for wartime losses or offenses committed during military operations or armed confrontation with the enemy.

Its mandate, however, steadily expanded.

In February 1970, as Hafez al-Assad was rising to power, Legislative Decree No. 61/6 broadened the court’s jurisdiction to include crimes committed “in the presence of the enemy” whenever referred by the Minister of Defense, in addition to its existing authority over offenses committed during wartime or military operations.

A decade later, on July 1, 1980, Hafez al-Assad issued Legislative Decree No. 32/7, dramatically expanding the court’s powers to cover crimes committed “during internal disturbances.” The amendment enabled the Field Court to prosecute members of the Muslim Brotherhood during the violent confrontation between the regime and Islamist groups in the early 1980s, culminating in the 1982 Hama massacre. Decades later, the same legal framework was used to prosecute participants in the Syrian uprising that began in March 2011.

The amendment introduced broadly worded provisions that effectively opened the door for the prosecution of civilians. From that point onward, the Field Court could hear virtually any case already falling within the jurisdiction of military courts if the alleged offense occurred during wartime, military operations, or internal unrest, provided the Minister of Defense chose to refer the case.

According to Fawwaz al-Khouja, a lawyer and member of the Damascus Bar Association, these legislative changes were not intended solely to increase penalties or expand the use of the death sentence. They also created opportunities for corruption and political patronage.

Al-Khouja recalled one case in which a defendant charged with murder and rape before a criminal court had relatives who managed to reach Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass. Tlass allegedly ordered the case transferred to the Military Field Court, where the defendant received a sentence equivalent only to the time already served in detention.

According to Al-Khouja, many criminal cases were transferred to the Field Court through political influence or bribery. In some instances, serious offenders sought referral to obtain lighter sentences; in others, relatively minor offenses were transferred so that defendants could receive significantly harsher punishments.

“The defining characteristic of the Field Court,” Al-Khouja said, “was that it was not bound by the penalties prescribed in law. It could sentence someone to death for an offense punishable by only one year in prison, or impose only a short prison term for a crime that ordinarily carried the death penalty.”

The Mystery of the Number 22

To this day, no one knows why the number 22 became synonymous with the chains used to transport detainees to Field Courts.

For decades, beginning under Hafez al-Assad and continuing throughout the rule of his son Bashar, Syria’s security services insisted on shackling 22 prisoners together in a single chain before taking them to the Military Field Court.

Former detainee Fouad Naal, now head of the Association of Freed Saydnaya Prisoners, recalls that his own transfer was delayed simply because his group consisted of only 21 prisoners. Security officials postponed their appearance before the court until another detainee arrived, bringing the total to the required twenty-two.

Naal was arrested on April 13, 2004, in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He was transferred between Branch 227 (the Regional Security Branch), Saydnaya Military Prison, and later Adra Prison, where he remained until the collapse of the Assad regime.

According to Naal, after the invasion of Iraq, Syria’s Grand Mufti Ahmad Kaftaro, acting under the direction of the Assad regime, issued a religious ruling urging Syrians to wage jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq. Buses carrying volunteers began departing for Iraq under the supervision of Syrian intelligence.

Naal says he soon noticed that many of those buses were being targeted near the Iraqi border and that everyone aboard was killed.

He believes the operations were coordinated by Syrian intelligence.

“It was effectively a liquidation operation targeting anyone who embraced the idea of jihad,” Naal said.

In response, Naal publicly issued a religious opinion opposing Kaftaro’s fatwa. He began visiting the Damascus International Fairgrounds, where buses carrying prospective fighters assembled, and he urged young men not to travel through channels organized by Syrian intelligence.

“I told them: if you want to fight, don’t go through the Syrian regime. It’s a plan to eliminate you,” he recalled. “We tried every possible way to persuade them to turn back, and we succeeded in convincing some of them.”

The campaign soon made him a target.

After going into hiding inside Syria, Naal was arrested in 2004 together with his wife and their four-month-old daughter at the Harasta bus station during a joint operation involving four security agencies: the Regional Security Branch, Palestine Branch, the Raids Branch, and Military Intelligence.

He remained imprisoned until December 8, 2024, when the Assad regime fell.

According to Naal, immediately after their arrest, security officers separated his infant daughter from her mother.

To secure his daughter’s release, Saeed Samour—who would later become Syria’s Interior Minister—allegedly demanded that Naal confess to every accusation brought against him.

While being interrogated at the Palestine Branch, Naal was informed that he faced 33 criminal charges.

None, he says, related to the religious opinion he had issued or to incitement against the state.

“I was interrogated by Saeed Samour, who headed the Regional Security Branch at the time, by Assef Shawkat, Assad’s brother-in-law, and by Manhal Al-Suwaid. During one interrogation session, Hassan Khlouf, head of the Palestine Branch, was also present.”

Instead, investigators accused him of plotting to assassinate senior officials including Bashar al-Assad himself and planning to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Damascus.

Naal says Assef Shawkat later offered to release his wife if he agreed to confess to an additional accusation.

A list containing several names was placed before him, and he was instructed to admit that he had planned to assassinate every person on it, including Shawkat himself.

Fearing for his infant daughter, Naal says he agreed.

In 2005, he was brought before the Military Field Court, where Major General Mohammad Kanj sentenced him to what prisoners referred to as “Field Court life imprisonment,” which means incarceration until death.

Later, Syria’s State Security Court imposed two additional life sentences and two death sentences.

Prisoners were transported to the court under brutal conditions. Chained together, they were loaded into what Naal described as a refrigerated meat truck.

When they arrived, the rear doors were opened and guards violently pulled them from the vehicle, causing prisoners to fall on top of one another before being dragged into the courtroom, still bearing visible signs of torture inflicted during interrogation.

Within roughly 30 minutes, at the end of the court’s Sunday session, every defendant had been sentenced.

Naal says no evidence was presented, no witnesses testified, and no meaningful charges were examined.

Judge Mohammad Kanj sat alongside a military officer holding the rank of major general and another man wearing a leather jacket and dark sunglasses. Naal later learned that the latter was an officer from the National Security Bureau.

The judge asked only two questions:

“What is your name?”

“Do you confirm the confession you gave?”

After Naal answered yes, the judge motioned with his right hand, signaling that he should leave.

By then, Naal had learned the meaning of the judges’ gestures.

A motion with the left hand meant immediate execution by firing squad.

A simple gesture was enough to determine whether a prisoner would live or die.

“The Field Courts executed thousands of people in the name of justice,” Naal said. “In reality, they functioned as instruments of systematic sectarian and political extermination.”

Documents reviewed by SIRAJ show that thousands of detainees were referred to the Military Field Courts during 1982 and 1983. Most were accused either of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood or in the so-called ‘Suspicious Right-Wing Organization’—a movement led by former Syrian military officers opposing Hafez al-Assad’s purge of senior commanders and reportedly backed by Iraq. Many of those referred came from Suwayda Province. Another significant category consisted of individuals accused of belonging to the Lebanese Kataeb Party.

The documents do not indicate what ultimately happened to these detainees. However, available evidence suggests that many were executed over subsequent years. The exact number of people put to death by Military Field Courts under either Hafez or Bashar al-Assad remains unknown.

Against that backdrop, Mustafa Tlass’s signature on execution orders for civilians appears less an exception than a routine element of the machinery of death.

Tlass and Hafez al-Assad shared one of the closest political relationships within Syria’s ruling establishment. The two met while studying at the Military Academy in Homs during the 1950s, later working together inside the Baath Party. Tlass played a significant role in Assad’s rise to power and was rewarded with the post of Minister of Defense in 1972, a position he retained until 2004, remaining in office for four years after Bashar al-Assad inherited the presidency.

In a 2005 interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel, Tlass admitted that he could no longer remember how many death warrants he had personally signed.

He said that during parts of the 1980s, as many as 150 public hangings were carried out each week in Damascus alone.

Smiling, he concluded: “We used weapons to seize power, and we wanted to keep it. Anyone who wants power will have to take it from us by force.”

A version of this investigation was also published by Daraj Media

Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awad

The post Exclusive: Assad’s Military Field Courts Executed Two Civilians Over Alleged “Opposition to Socialism” appeared first on SIRAJ.

The minutes of the meeting on May 29, 2024, show how much pressure Assad’s regime was under during its dying days from one of its closest allies. 

At one point in the talks, Russia’s deputy defense minister, General Yunus-bek Yevkurov, even threatened to cut off financing for oil operations if Syria didn’t pay up.

Russia had built up extensive interests in Syria’s oil sector under the Assad regime. In 2015, Russia intervened militarily in Syria, helping regain territory taken by the rebels. In return, Assad’s government had offered contracts to Russian companies to rebuild the energy sector.

“We do not want oil extraction and production to stop, because this will be a strong blow to the Syrian economy,” said Yevkurov, according to the meeting minutes obtained by OCCRP’s Syrian media partner SIRAJ.

Yevkurov did not respond to a request for comment on the meeting. 

Negotiations about the much larger debt owed to Russia have continued under Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander who now serves as Syrian president. The Kremlin has reportedly sought to maintain military bases it established under Assad, while Damascus has asked for debt relief and other concessions.

That puts Syria in a delicate position as the new government attempts to rebuild the country, along with its relationships to the international community — including countries at odds with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. 

But Syria needs help from whoever can offer it. The country is devastated after 13 years of war, and the government has few options to pay for reconstruction, which will cost an estimated $216 billion, according to the World Bank. 

To make matters worse, Syria faces a total debt of about $27 billion, according to its central bank. As much as $22.3 billion of that debt is external, with at least $1.2 billion owed to Russia, according to a World Bank assessment of the country’s economy in 2025, referencing official data.

Military Chokehold

Russia also has a chokehold on Syria’s military, which gives the Kremlin even more leverage in negotiations. The Assad family, which ruled for half a century, built up a military primarily on Russian weaponry. This leaves the new government dependent on Russian arms to maintain the strength it needs to enforce security.

“For the past 50 years, all of Syria’s military capabilities have been of Russian origin,” said Osama al-Qadi, a senior economic policy advisor for Syria’s Ministry of Economy and Industry. “Therefore, it needs spare parts, new weapons to modernize its older Russian arsenal.” 

Under Assad, Syria also allowed the Russian military to establish bases directly on its territory.

Al-Qadi has not participated in the talks with Russia, but he said that, in addition to arms purchases, he believes the two sides have discussed Russia’s continued use of its naval base near the city of Tartus. Russia may also be allowed to maintain its Hmeimim Air Base near the coastal city of Latakia “on the condition that it remains under Syrian administration to prevent it from becoming a haven for remnants of the old regime.”

“In return, any debts or contracts signed by the regime with the Russians could be overlooked,” al-Qadi told SIRAJ.

He said he believed negotiations around such an agreement constituted “a significant part of the joint Syrian-Russian talks during President al-Sharaa’s visit to Russia” in January 2026.

When al-Sharaa took over the presidency a year earlier, one of the first things he did was ask for Russian loans taken out by the Assad regime to be cancelled, Reuters reported. By October, he said his government would honor deals the Assad regime had made with Russia.

The Syrian Foreign Affairs and Finance Ministries did not respond to questions about debt negotiations, while the Ministry of Energy said the matter was not with them.

A recent report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, noted that 

“Russia retains influence through debt leverage, military basing and security mediation.”

Tough Talk

The leaked minutes, obtained by SIRAJ and its Syrian partner Zaman Al Wasl, show Russian officials using similar leverage in talks with Assad-regime officials.

The May 2024 meeting at the presidential palace in Damascus was attended by a delegation led by Yevkurov, the Russian deputy defense minister, who met with Mansour Azzam, then Syria’s Minister for Presidency Affairs. 

“We have been paying the costs of the Russian soldiers and the Syrian workers,” Yevkurov said, at a monthly tally of $4.5 million. He also demanded that Syria pay an additional $1.16 million monthly for “re-equipping Russian support points that will protect the sites”. 

Yevkurov then said Russia would stop paying those costs from June 2024, and he demanded that Syria pick up the bill. 

Alluding that Syria was withholding payments, Yevkurov warned: “I do not like anyone cheating me… The dialogue with the minister of oil will be in another style.”

Yevkurov said the total debt for the specific services under discussion — which was only part of the much larger bill owed to Russia — amounted to $37.16 million. 

Yevkurov said Russian President Vladimir Putin did not know about that $37 million owed, which put him in a “predicament.” 

“The new Russian Minister of Defense will raise the topic of this debt… or he will inform President Putin about it,” he said. “Surely then the president will ask, how did this happen… I cannot say to the president that I fell short and I do not know how to justify this debt.” 

Azzam was conciliatory as he tried to alleviate Russian concerns, saying: “I believe that we will be able in a very short span to solve all these problems.”

OCCRP could not contact Azzam directly. The Syrian consulate in Moscow, where Azzam is reportedly located, did not respond to a request for comment.

Oil for Protection

Nine years before Azzam and Yevkurov spoke in Damascus, Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war, giving the Assad regime a much-needed advantage.

By that time, the regime was financially depleted and incapable of securing its own energy infrastructure. In return for military support, Damascus reportedly began offering “all possible incentives” to Russian companies to rebuild the energy sector. 

According to the European Union sanctions list, the Russian company Evro Polis LLC “signed a number of contracts with the Syrian regime, through the state-owned General Petroleum Corp.” The company received 25 percent “from the production of oil and gas in fields captured by the Wagner Group,” a Russian paramilitary force fighting for Assad.

The EU called Evro Polis “a front for the Wagner Group,” which was run by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

Prigozhin turned against Putin in 2023, leading a group of Wagner fighters from the Ukrainian front towards Moscow in a short-lived rebellion. He called off the uprising, but died in a mysterious air crash two months later, in August 2023.

By the time of the meeting in Damascus, the minutes show that Russia was intending to transfer the oil contracts away from Evro Polis. Yevkurov asked why the company was still receiving fees for the Ebla and Hayan gas and oil facilities in central Syria.

“According to our information, Ebla and Hayan still pay amounts to the Evro Polis company and we request that you investigate this,” said Yevkurov, asking: “Why do they pay Evro Polis?”

He demanded the Syrian Ministry of Oil sign a contract with a different company, ERPOST-M, which reportedly opened an official branch in Damascus in 2024 to provide security services for facilities, including oil fields. 

By the end of that year, the Assad regime had fallen and Syrian-Russian relations had taken a dramatic turn. 

Syria’s negotiations with Russia have since been complicated by a host of other geopolitical considerations, according to analysts. Al-Sharaa’s government is concerned with preventing both internal rebellion, and Israeli incursions over the border. The new government also needs to balance its relationship with Russia vis-a-vis its diplomatic rapprochement with ِEurope and the U.S.

“The Syrians certainly take into account the fact that the Russians are — among the big countries — the only ones possibly willing to send troops to southern Syria to protect them from Israel,” said Jihad Yazigi, a Syria expert and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 

Russia could also choose to prop up the new government’s adversaries, explained Soqrat al-Alou, a Syrian political economy researcher at the Arab Reform Initiative, a Paris-based think tank.

The Kremlin could “stir or contain unrest along the coast through networks linked to Alawite constituencies and remnants of former regime military,” he said.

But accommodating Russia’s desire to maintain a military presence in Syria could alienate countries Damascus wants to have good relations with.

Al-Alou noted that the U.S. appears to accept “a limited Russian presence” in Syria, as “its concerns lie elsewhere.”

“European actors, by contrast, appear more sensitive to the entrenchment of Russian influence,” he said.

Fact-checking was provided by the OCCRP Fact-Checking Desk.

Fact-checking was provided by the OCCRP Fact-Checking Desk.

The post Russia Threatened to Halt Syrian Oil Operations if Assad Regime Didn’t Pay Debt appeared first on SIRAJ.

But when the jeweler tested the coins, the results unveiled a different story. Although the coins appeared to hold evidence of meeting official standards, laboratory testing revealed that their gold content fell below the declared 21-karat purity.

Maher’s experience was far from unique.

Over the course of this investigation, similar accounts emerged from jewelers, gold traders and ordinary citizens, all pointing to a hidden flaw in one of Syria’s most trusted stores of wealth: gold.

This investigation seeks to answer two fundamental questions:

How could gold bearing the official hallmark of the Damascus Association of Goldsmiths and Jewelry Making contain less gold than its certified purity? And why do the findings suggest that these were not isolated incidents, but part of a broader pattern within Syria’s gold market?

The investigation draws on multiple sources, including 13 interviews with jewelers, workshop owners, former employees of the Syria Association of Goldsmiths and Jewelry Making, and gold traders who have since left Syria. Together, they describe how large quantities of under-karat gold entered the market despite carrying official certification.

Syria’s Law No. 34 of 2023 regulates the temporary entry of raw gold into the country, setting out applicable exemptions and fees. The law allows both Syrian and foreign residents—as well as non-residents—to bring raw gold into Syria without an import license, including as accompanied baggage, while prohibiting the import of processed gold jewelry.

Per this law, such entries are considered temporary admissions rather than permanent imports. Thus, Importers are required to export an equivalent weight of manufactured gold products, ensuring that the raw gold is processed domestically rather than treated as a commercial import.

Mahmoud Al-Nimer, head of the Association of Goldsmiths and Jewelry Making, told the investigation team that, following the fall of the Assad regime, the Association discovered gold items containing 760 shares of pure gold instead of the 875 shares required for 21-karat gold—a discrepancy he described as evidence of the scale of the problem.

In Syria’s jewelry industry, a “share” (sahm) is a precision unit used to express gold purity by dividing the karat into finer measurements. A purity of 760 shares is closer to 18-karat gold. The difference represents a significant loss of value in a market where even the smallest deviation in purity carries serious financial consequences.

Syria is not a major gold producer. The domestic market relies primarily on recycling existing gold stocks, supplemented by imported raw gold, temporary admissions for manufacturing, and smuggled supplies that circulate between workshops, jewelers and consumers.

According to Trading Economics, Syria’s official gold reserves—held by the Central Bank of Syria—were estimated at 25.8 metric tonnes as of 2024, with an estimated value of approximately 42 trillion Syrian pounds.

How It Began

Following the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, cases of gold fraud began to emerge in Damascus. Goldsmiths secretly sold bullion, coins and jewelry whose actual purity was lower than the karat stamped on them.

According to the head of the Association of Goldsmiths and Jewelry Making, today’s market inherited large quantities of under-karat gold from that period. Gold traders and consumers who monitored the market and spoke to SIRAJ estimate that tens of kilograms of counterfeit or under-karat gold entered circulation.

Former Association chairman George Sarji said demand for gold surged after 2011 as the Syrian pound rapidly lost value.

“We were hallmarking around 500 kilograms of gold every month,” he recalled.

The accounts gathered from victims, jewelers and traders suggest that the problem went beyond isolated fraud, pointing instead to both regulatory and technical failures. They also raise a more troubling possibility: the existence of a system that allowed what goldsmiths refer to as “counterfeit” or “tampered” gold to enter the market by exploiting weaknesses in the inspection and hallmarking process.

This occurred within an economic environment largely controlled by the Fourth Division of the former Syrian regime’s army and the country’s security services, particularly Branch 251, commonly known as Al-Khatib Branch, one of the regime’s intelligence directorates.

Unlike many international markets dominated by large manufacturing companies, Syria’s gold industry is built around independent workshops that produce jewelry for local sale.

Traditionally, the Syrian market relied on a two-tier verification system to guarantee the authenticity of gold before it reached consumers.

The first hallmark identifies the workshop where a piece was manufactured. The second, issued by the Association of Goldsmiths and Jewelry Making, certifies that the item complied with officially approved purity standards.

In theory, this dual-hallmark system provides both traceability and regulatory oversight. In practice, however, investigators found that it did not always function as intended.

According to the General Authority for Precious Metals, Damascus currently has 250 gold manufacturing workshops, Aleppo has 225, and Idlib has 30.

Between the middle of last year and the beginning of this year, Damascus produced approximately two metric tonnes of gold jewelry, Aleppo produced four tonnes, and Idlib produced one tonne.

Gold prices in Syria are officially determined according to the official U.S. dollar exchange rate and pricing issued by the Central Bank of Syria.

However, the sharp depreciation of the Syrian pound and the existence of a parallel (black) foreign-currency market created persistent instability, causing gold prices to fluctuate dramatically.

What Is “Counterfeit Gold”?

In a market built almost entirely on trust, an official hallmark is supposed to be sufficient proof of authenticity.

Hallmarking is the official stamp engraved on gold jewelry to certify its purity, legal status and compliance with national standards. It functions as a government-backed guarantee of quality.

Yet the cases uncovered by this investigation revealed something very different: jewelry bearing an official hallmark indicating one purity level while actually containing significantly less gold.

A gold item’s karat—the proportion of pure gold it contains cannot be determined by visual inspection alone. It must be measured using specialized equipment such as precious-metal analyzers or chemical and spectrometric testing methods capable of accurately determining gold content.

As a result, a piece may appear flawless in terms of color, weight and official hallmark while still containing less gold than its stamp indicates.

In many cases, the discrepancy was relatively small, only 10 to 15 shares (parts per thousand) below the legal standard. For jewelry stamped as 21-karat gold, even such seemingly minor deviations represent a significant loss in value.

Within the trade, goldsmiths refer to this practice simply as “counterfeit gold.”

One workshop owner who operated during that period explained the financial incentive behind the practice: “The difference may seem small. But when you’re producing hundreds of kilograms, it becomes a fortune.”

According to five jewelers interviewed by SIRAJ in the Al-Hariqa Gold Souq and the Barzeh district of Damascus, the greatest challenge was that this type of fraud was extremely difficult to detect within the market itself.

In everyday business, most jewelers relied primarily on the official hallmark—alongside the workshop’s own maker’s mark as proof of authenticity, without subjecting every item to laboratory testing or re-smelting.

Even when suspicions arose, advanced analytical equipment such as X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometers was rarely available, particularly during the years of conflict, owing to high costs and import restrictions.

Musab Al-Aswad, Director of the General Authority for Precious Metals—a newly established government body tasked with restructuring the sector after years of overlapping authority between the Ministries of Finance, Economy and Industry, the Central Bank and other institutions—argues that the “counterfeit gold scandal” reflected the broader corruption that permeated the institutions of the former regime.

“It is only natural that corruption in the gold sector would be greater than elsewhere,” he said. “The financial returns are exceptionally attractive, and uncovering this type of fraud requires highly specialized expertise. The real problem was that the very institutions responsible for detecting violations were also managing the sector—and were themselves implicated. Once corruption reaches the oversight bodies, exposing it becomes vastly more difficult.”

A Market Under Pressure

As the Syrian pound rapidly lost value against foreign currencies, Syrians’ saving habits changed dramatically. Citizens increasingly sought safer ways to preserve their wealth, and gold—long regarded as the country’s most trusted store of value—became the preferred refuge. Within a short period, demand for gold coins and bullion ounces surged, placing unprecedented pressure on the market.

A Damascus jeweler who worked in the market during that period described the situation as “a state of madness.”

“Everyone wanted to convert their money into gold,” he said. “The quantities arriving at the Goldsmiths Association became enormous.”

According to former Association Chairman George Sarji, minting gold coins and bullion had originally been prohibited in Syria until he obtained approval from the Governor of the Central Bank of Syria, allowing locally produced coins to receive official hallmarks.

At the same time, however, Sarji acknowledged that some workshops had forged both the Association’s hallmark and the proprietary stamps of legitimate workshops by manufacturing counterfeit dies. As a result, part of the counterfeit gold entered the market entirely outside official channels, without ever passing through the Association’s inspection process.

An Association employee who served before, during and after the uprising—and remained in office following the fall of the Assad regime—described the immense pressure placed on the organization, which was the sole official body responsible for verifying gold purity and issuing hallmarks.

“On some days, we received more than 100 kilograms of gold,” he said. “Sometimes as much as 200 kilograms in a single day.”

Under normal circumstances, not every piece of jewelry undergoes an individual laboratory analysis before being hallmarked and released to the market. Instead, inspectors test random samples from each production batch before applying the Association’s official hallmark to the entire batch, certifying that it complies with legal purity standards.

As production volumes increased and pressure on the Association mounted, this quality-control system became increasingly vulnerable. Yet random sampling remained the primary verification method.

“That’s when the fraud started slipping through,” said an employee at a Damascus jewelry shop, referring to the declining ability of the regulatory system to detect every irregularity.

The First Signs of Suspicion

The issue of under-karat gold first surfaced as isolated rumors—cases that many jewelers hesitated to report to the security services for fear of retaliation or arrest.

Gradually, however, the issue became common knowledge throughout Damascus’s gold market.

The controversy reached a turning point in February 2013, when George Sarji was dismissed after serving 13 years as head of the Association of Goldsmiths and Jewelry Making (2000–February 2013), and Ghassan Jazmati replaced him.

Speaking to SIRAJ, Abu Maher, a veteran jeweler in Damascus’s Gold Souq, recalled what many in the industry consider the first public warning.

Between 2013 and 2014, he said, a well-known Syrian company distributed gold coins as prizes in commercial promotions, a common marketing practice at the time.

The problem emerged only when some of the winners attempted to sell their prizes.

“When people came to sell the coins,” Abu Maher said, “we discovered the purity wasn’t accurate. They contained around 800 parts per thousand instead of 875.”

According to Abu Maher, the matter quickly extended beyond isolated suspicions.

As similar cases multiplied, complaints spread throughout the market. Eventually, the coins were withdrawn, and the company responsible for minting them was required to compensate buyers for the difference in value.

But although that action appeared to resolve the immediate problem, it failed to restore confidence.

“At first we thought it was just a mistake,” Abu Maher said. “Later we realized the problem was much bigger.”

Former Association Chairman Ghassan Jazmati, however, rejected allegations that the market had been affected.

In an interview with SIRAJ, he insisted that all gold circulating during his tenure was legally compliant as long as it bore the Association’s official hallmark, implicitly denying any systemic failure in inspection or hallmarking procedures.

When asked about allegations of corruption, Jazmati dismissed them as “defamation” and subsequently ceased responding to journalists’ questions.

His account, however, is contradicted by judicial records and testimony from numerous goldsmiths describing what they characterized as a broad corruption network operating within Syria’s gold sector during that period.

An appeal filed by eight Damascus jewelers directly accused Jazmati of systemic corruption, of manipulating gold purity standards and of extorting jewelers in cooperation with officers from Branch 251 (Al-Khatib Branch) and other security agencies under the former regime.

According to the appeal, submitted before the First Referral Judge in Damascus on 29 December 2025, the plaintiffs accused Jazmati of abusing his authority within the Association and allowing counterfeit gold bearing the Association’s official hallmark to circulate in the market.

The filing also alleged the disappearance of financial records, assay registers and quantities of gold, while describing systematic manipulation methods, including altering tested samples and resealing production batches. The plaintiffs argued that an earlier decision shielding Jazmati from prosecution had ignored what they described as “conclusive evidence and compelling indications.”

The appeal was ultimately rejected after the court upheld the previous decision not to prosecute Jazmati, citing insufficient evidence, according to documents reviewed by the investigation team.

Multiple witnesses also alleged that Jazmati maintained direct relationships with senior officers at the Al-Khatib Branch, including Major General Ahmad Dib and Yasar Ibrahim, a senior economic adviser to Bashar al-Assad.

According to these testimonies, the names of wealthy Damascus jewelers were routinely passed to the security services. This was allegedly followed by summonses, arrests on pre-prepared charges, and pressure on some detainees to pay hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars in exchange for their release.

Payment receipts showing financial transfers made by gold traders to Branch 251 through the Central Bank of Syria – SIRAJ

Where the Fraud Began

Following the fall of the Syrian regime, journalists from SIRAJ began tracing reports of under-karat gold by following the metal’s journey through Syria’s gold market.

As they gathered testimonies from jewelers and industry insiders, nearly every account pointed to the same starting point: the workshops.

These workshops represented the first stage of production, where a gold item’s purity could be deliberately altered before it reached the Association of Goldsmiths and Jewelry Making for official hallmarking.

Throughout the investigation, one name repeatedly surfaced: a prominent businessman and gold trader, J. Z.

According to three well-informed sources within the jewelry sector, J. Z. owned his own workshop but did not always manufacture gold under his own name.

One market insider explained how the arrangement worked:

“He used another workshop’s hallmark, one whose owner had already died. That way, responsibility disappeared.”

The investigation was unable to obtain a response from the trader. Multiple sources later told SIRAJ that he had moved to an Arab country before the fall of the Assad regime and subsequently died there.

Neither the Syrian Ministry of Interior nor the Central Bank of Syria responded to requests for comment.

Using the names and hallmarks of inactive or abandoned workshops created an additional layer of obscurity around the true origin of the gold.

When a counterfeit item surfaced, tracing it back to its producer became significantly more difficult because the stamped hallmark no longer identified the workshop that had actually manufactured it. In the case of J. Z., the hallmark belonged to a workshop whose owner had already passed away.

Former Association Chairman George Sarji previously stated that he had reported cases of forged hallmarks to the relevant authorities and had attempted to trace their source within the market.

Taken together, these competing accounts illustrate the complexity of the scheme, in which direct responsibility, abuse of influence and regulatory failure often became intertwined.

Yet nearly everyone interviewed agreed on one point:

The workshops were no longer merely production sites—they had become the starting point for a chain of manipulation that eventually spread throughout the entire market.

Sarji told the investigation team that, during his tenure, the market was considerably more disciplined. The Association conducted regular inspection campaigns and destroyed any non-compliant gold it discovered.

He explained that the hallmarking process was never based on testing every individual item. Instead, inspectors randomly selected one or two samples from each production batch before applying the official hallmark.

“From every box we would take one or two samples,” he said. “Those boxes could contain rings, bracelets or other jewelry.”

From Guarantee to Loophole

If workshops marked the beginning of gold production, the official hallmarking tools—known within the trade as hallmark punches—served as the passport allowing jewelry to enter the market.

According to George Klass (a pseudonym), a former employee in the sector, the hallmarking system before 2011 relied largely on professional trust between workshops and the Association.

Workshop owners first had their gold assayed by specialized testing facilities before submitting it to the Association, where inspectors randomly tested samples to verify purity before applying the official hallmark.

Although the system was never entirely immune from abuse, Klass said that before 2011 cases of fraud remained relatively limited and never developed into a widespread phenomenon.

That changed dramatically in the years that followed.

According to Klass, regulatory oversight weakened while informal financial settlements increasingly replaced formal enforcement whenever purity violations were discovered.

Although SIRAJn could not independently verify every allegation, interviews consistently pointed to serious shortcomings in the control of the official hallmark punches after the Syrian uprising began.

Several witnesses stated that both workshop punches and Association hallmarking tools were not always kept under strict supervision.

A workshop owner identified only as Nihad said some Association employees routinely kept official hallmark punches in their personal possession outside working hours.

“Some people carried the punch with them all the time,” he said. “That meant they could stamp anything.”

Even more concerning, counterfeit hallmark punches themselves became increasingly common.

According to Nihad, forged punches circulated among certain workshops, allowing jewelry to receive what appeared to be legitimate official hallmarks despite failing to meet legal purity standards.

An Organized Operation

Gold and diamond trader Ahmad Al-Khayyat provided one of the clearest accounts of how the hallmarking system was exploited.

In a recorded interview for this investigation, he described 2013 as the turning point.

“Around 50 kilograms of under-karat gold entered the Syrian market that year,” he said. “They included gold coins and bullion ounces that looked completely legitimate, carried official hallmarks, but contained less gold than declared.”

He added that during the same period the Association replaced its official hallmark punch, officially claiming that the original had been stolen.

“That wasn’t simply a technical procedure,” Al-Khayyat said. “It opened the door to systematic manipulation of gold purity and jewelry quality.”

Musab Al-Aswad, Director of the General Authority for Precious Metals, believes forging an official hallmark punch was technically straightforward.

“Counterfeiting a hallmark punch was not particularly difficult,” he said. “In some cases it may even have happened with the knowledge of those responsible for overseeing the sector, in exchange for payments to facilitate the process.”

‘Just Fifteen Minutes’ at Al-Khatib Branch

Initially, cases of fraudulent gold were treated as commercial disputes.

A customer would discover a discrepancy, return to the jeweler, who would attempt to compensate the buyer or return the item to its supplier.

As complaints multiplied, however, the matter attracted the attention of the Assad regime’s intelligence services.

One Damascus jeweler described the shift as sudden.

“At first, we only heard about counterfeit pieces,” he said. “Then people started receiving security summons.”

Multiple witnesses told SIRAJ that intelligence officers transformed the issue into an opportunity for extortion.

Jewelers who had unknowingly traded under-karat gold were pressured either to recover the jewelry or compensate buyers while simultaneously becoming targets of security investigations.

Several Damascus jewelers said that some cases ended in arrests by Branch 251, better known as Al-Khatib Branch.

Possessing counterfeit gold or even violating official pricing regulations became pretexts for pressuring jewelers into paying substantial sums in U.S. dollars into intelligence-controlled accounts held at the Central Bank of Syria.

One jeweler from the Barzeh district recalled his arrest: “They told me, ‘Come with us for fifteen minutes.’ Those fifteen minutes turned into four months.”

He said he was transferred between several security branches before arriving at Al-Khatib Branch, where he underwent harsh interrogation and was later sent to Adra Prison.

Despite surrendering 1.3 kilograms of gold, he remained imprisoned for several months. The official accusation was manipulating gold prices.

“The charges were fabricated,” he said.

Jeweler Hanna Boutros described a remarkably similar experience.

In 2020, security officers raided his home before taking him to Al-Khatib Branch, which handled many of the gold market investigations during that period.

He too was accused of violating official pricing regulations.

According to Boutros, the charge was routinely used against jewelers.

After 15 days in detention, he secured his release only after paying the equivalent of five kilograms of gold.

His ordeal did not end there.

Approximately one year later, in 2021, he was arrested again and detained for several months.

This time, he says, his release was conditioned on paying 120 million Syrian pounds, a payment that consumed most of his capital and ultimately forced him to leave Syria.

During the investigation, several traders also showed SIRAJ payment receipts issued by Al-Khatib Branch bearing the names of jewelers and gold merchants.

For security reasons, they requested that the documents not be published.

The receipts instructed recipients to pay fines denominated in U.S. dollars to the Central Bank of Syria within a specified deadline or face imprisonment.

Alternatively, they could deposit the required amount in cash into an account controlled by the General Intelligence Directorate through Al-Fadel Exchange Company.

“Don’t Buy Second-Hand Gold Without Testing”

According to Mahmoud Al-Nimer, the current head of the Association of Goldsmiths and Jewelry Making, the industry’s approach has fundamentally changed.

“Today, there is zero tolerance,” he said. “Any item that fails to meet the required purity standard is immediately broken up and returned to the workshop.”

Al-Nimer said the Association has introduced modern gold-testing equipment that, he said, had previously been prohibited under the former regime.

He also urged customers to insist on receiving an official, stamped invoice from licensed jewelers.

“A proper invoice is the customer’s guarantee,” he added. “If any problem arises later, it protects their rights.”

Yet the new testing technology remains out of reach for many jewelers.

One market insider explained that the specialized analyzers cost between US$20,000 and US$35,000.

“Not every jeweler can afford one,” he said, highlighting the technological gap that still exists across Syria’s gold sector.

Alongside these measures, the Association has begun inspecting jewelry displays and prohibiting the sale of second-hand gold unless it has been re-tested.

But according to one Association employee, the scale of the problem remains enormous.

“There’s an ocean of counterfeit gold in Syria.”

The total quantity of under-karat gold that entered circulation cannot be accurately determined, nor can it easily be removed.

“Every kilogram may be missing 20 or even 25 grams of gold,” one Association employee said, referring to the cumulative losses embedded in jewelry already circulating among the public.

During an inspection campaign conducted by the General Authority for Precious Metals in the Damascus suburb of Qudsaya, attended by the investigation team, Nikola Al-Zahlawi, a member of the Authority’s Board of Directors, stressed that no second-hand gold should be bought or displayed before undergoing laboratory testing.

He said any item that fails to meet the legally required purity is immediately destroyed, while only jewelry that passes inspection is permitted to return to the market.

As a result, many Damascus jewelers now say they prefer to avoid second-hand gold altogether, choosing instead to sell only jewelry bearing the Association’s newly issued hallmarks.

One jeweler summed up this shift with a sarcastic remark: “Old gold? It’s plastic.”

Regarding consumers who previously suffered financial losses after unknowingly purchasing counterfeit gold, Al-Aswad, Director of the General Authority for Precious Metals, said the authorities have managed to restore compensation in many cases.

“People who have been affected can file a complaint with the Goldsmiths Association by presenting their original purchase invoice,” he explained. “If the invoice is available, the Association recovers the difference in value from the jeweler’s account. If the jeweler is still operating, compensation can be obtained from them. If the jeweler has already compensated the customer, they may in turn recover the loss from the workshop that originally supplied the jewelry. If this chain can be fully established, responsibility ultimately reaches the original producer.”

A version of this investigation was also published by Daraj Media

Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awad

The post “Counterfeit Gold”: The Complete Account of Fake Jewelry in Damascus Markets appeared first on SIRAJ.

One of the most prominent examples is the former frontline south of Idlib Governorate, which separated regime forces from opposition forces led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). This line extends across large parts of the countryside of Aleppo, Hama, and Latakia. It is considered one of the most heavily contaminated areas with landmines, according to Abdul Razzaq al-Qantar, Director of Victim Support Department at the Syrian Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management’s National Mine Action Center.

Between 2020 and 2024, the region witnessed thousands of deaths and injuries caused by landmine explosions, reaching around 15,000 cases, according to statements by Maysara al-Hassan, Operations Commander of the Engineering Regiment in the 80th Division of the Syrian Ministry of Defense.

The absence of maps documenting minefields laid during the years of conflict due to the destruction or removal of documents by regime officers responsible for these operations has been one of the main reasons behind the continued deaths and injuries among civilians and demining personnel after the regime’s fall. According to Fadel Abdul Ghany, Director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the former regime deliberately left these areas without minefield maps or warning signs to maximize casualties after losing control of them.

A previous investigation published by the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism – SIRAJ in March revealed a systematic targeting of agricultural areas along the frontline, estimating the cost of mine clearance in the examined area at approximately $137 million (around 15.2 billion new Syrian pounds).

This report, based on open-source intelligence, reveals, through images of hand-drawn maps, a site containing nine minefields. By translating these maps, along with the local mapping systems used by Assad’s forces, into precise coordinates, journalists were able to locate the site in eastern rural Latakia, south of Kabana village. The area spans approximately three square kilometers, yet its threat extends to the lives of residents in several surrounding villages.

SIRAJ’s team reviewed images of nine minefield maps left behind by regime officers after withdrawing from their positions (frontlines) in rural Latakia during the “Deterrence of Aggression” battle in November 2024. The labels on these maps reference several locations in the Latakia countryside, including Kabana village and Jabal al-Zwayqat.

However, unlike standard mapping systems commonly used in modern applications, which rely on latitude and longitude or conventional metric coordinates, the Assad regime’s forces used a different metric system. While globally recognized systems are based on the intersection of the Greenwich meridian and the equator as a zero point, the system used by Assad’s army was a local one with an unknown reference origin. This makes it difficult for conventional mapping systems to interpret the coordinates found on these maps.

In collaboration with experts using open-source techniques, journalists analyzed these maps and converted their locally based coordinate system into globally recognized coordinates that can be accurately identified using publicly available mapping tools such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Alpine.

We presented the maps to an engineering officer, a colonel in the Syrian Ministry of Defense, who requested anonymity, to understand better why the former regime’s army relied on this type of mapping and its military significance. “The Assad regime used this type of mapping and its own coordinate system,” he explained, “to protect its information, making it more difficult for any group that might obtain these maps to interpret them or dismantle the mines.”

These hand-drawn maps use a scale of 1:25,000, meaning that 1 centimeter on the map represents 25,000 centimeters (250 meters) in reality. For example, if a square marking a minefield on the map measures 4 square centimeters, it corresponds to an area of 250,000 square meters, or 0.25 square kilometers on the ground.

We examined nine maps, each marking one of nine minefields numbered from 1 to 9. By converting the metric coordinates used by former regime officers into global coordinates using specialized techniques, we identified five minefields that form the outer boundary of the contaminated area, in addition to four others located within those boundaries.

The coordinates show that the total area covered by the nine minefields is approximately three square kilometers, equivalent to more than 400 football fields. These minefields span large areas of hills south of Kabana village and southeast of the villages of Aiko, Bouz al-Kharba, and Basharfa in the Latakia countryside areas that continue to experience injuries and fatalities due to landmines.

At the center of the minefield zone lies Raqraqiyeh Park, placing the lives of many families and children from nearby villages at significant risk due to the high density of mines in the area.

The terrain further compounds the danger: the nine minefields are not located at the same elevation, as the area consists of multiple hills of varying heights. The rugged landscape also makes it more difficult for residents to detect mines, increasing the risk of moving through the area.

The exact types of mines deployed by the former regime forces in this area remain unknown, including whether they are anti-personnel or anti-vehicle mines. However, the positioning of these minefields suggests that the regime intended to use them as a first line of defense for its positions in the Latakia countryside if opposition forces advanced beyond the former frontline.

To accurately determine the geographic extent of these minefields on the ground, we identified six key coordinate points that outline the boundaries of the contaminated area, forming a hexagon encompassing the nine minefields. The coordinates are as follows:

35.6898، 36.24565

35.69881، 36.24585

35.70798، 36.235

35.70814، 36.22395

35.69913، 36.22376

35.68996، 36.23461

The following map also includes all coordinates of the minefields, along with the surrounding area and nearby villages.

The Colonel added, “Decoding this type of maps is critically important for accelerating demining operations, narrowing search efforts within a clearly defined geographic scope, reducing the number of casualties, and enabling the use of mine-clearing equipment that typically does not rely on precise maps. Most importantly, it helps warn residents in affected areas about the presence of landmines.”

The Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented the deaths of 3,485 people, including 872 children, as a result of landmine explosions between March 2011 and the beginning of this year.

SIRAJ has shared all maps, coordinates, and findings from this report with the relevant Syrian authorities responsible for mine action and UXO.

• Creative direction and visual solutions: Radwan Awad.

The post Secret maps left behind by Assad’s army reveal the locations of minefields in the Latakia countryside appeared first on SIRAJ.

The company, Matchworld Group SA, was promoted as possessing the expertise, capabilities, and tools of innovation and artificial intelligence to restore “Syria’s presence on the regional and international stage,” as stated in the announcement. It was expected to “support the marketing of Syrian sports tournaments and activities, and organize international matches and professional training camps.”

However, documents reviewed by the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ) reveal that the company’s regional director, who is also responsible for the Middle East, as stated on his personal social media accounts, had been convicted, on October 4, 2023, of the felony of “abuse of entrusted public funds.” He was sentenced to five years in prison and fined the equivalent of $50,000 for previous sports investments in Syria made under another company.

MoU and the New Syrian Government

Commitment to implementing memoranda of understanding signed with the government has become a topic of public debate among Syrians. Although an MoU is not legally binding, according to lawyer Saeed Manna, the new government began signing MoUs and agreements after the fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024, paving the way for contracts with Arab, regional, and international companies.

Government representation in these agreements varied by sector, with relevant ministries and institutions acting as counterparts. The MoU signed between the Ministry of Sports and Matchworld Group falls within this framework.

This MoU is part of a broader, high-level government effort to attract foreign investment to a country whose economy has been devastated by 14 years of war. Around 50 agreements and MoUs were signed in 2025 to strengthen infrastructure through projects in aviation, ports, bridges, and energy, as well as to improve essential services. These agreements also covered vital sectors such as sports, healthcare, education, agriculture, and humanitarian relief.

However, questions arise regarding the seriousness of these MoUs and their potential to translate into actual projects, particularly given the lack of a clear distinction between a “memorandum of understanding” and a “contract,” especially with respect to rights and obligations, which creates confusion around these initiatives.

Economic expert Dr. Karam Shaar explains that “the difference between an MoU and a contract is often highly ambiguous,” noting that contracts can sometimes be written in vague language similar to MoUs, allowing parties to evade obligations later. Conversely, MoUs may include stricter clauses defining conditions for withdrawal without legal consequences.

Nevertheless, this does not absolve government entities from conducting due diligence on companies entering into agreements, according to economic expert Hayyan Hababeh. This raises a critical question: How was an MoU signed with a company regionally represented by an individual convicted by Syrian courts of abuse of entrusted public funds, especially since such MoUs are expected to lead to formal contracts governed by Law No. 51 of 2004, which stipulates in Article 11/4 that contractors with government entities must not have been convicted of a felony or dishonorable crime unless rehabilitated?

Who is Matchworld Group SA?

On July 3, 2025, the Syrian Ministry of Sports and Youth announced via its official Facebook page that it had signed what it described as a “Memorandum of Understanding” with Matchworld Group during an official visit by Minister Mohammad Al-Hamid to Qatar.

According to the announcement, the company is “one of the leading global entities in sports marketing, providing advanced consultancy in sports management and innovation,” and will support Syrian sports marketing, organize international matches and professional camps, and introduce artificial intelligence tools to enhance performance and decision-making.

The MoU includes provisions for developing sports management, modernizing administrative structures, adopting technological solutions, and integrating AI-based performance analysis tools.

Despite these claims, open-source research conducted by SIRAJ, including sports news platforms and international football association websites, found no evidence of prior partnerships, contracts, or notable activities carried out by Matchworld Group SA.

Mentions of the company were largely limited to its own website, which references a partnership signed in April 2024 with a Saudi sports consultancy firm, along with older images of training camps in Switzerland and ticketing services for select events.

Furthermore, a document from the Swiss commercial registry shows that Matchworld Group SA was established on January 31, 2007, and underwent several administrative changes before reaching its current structure on July 6, 2020.

Records also reveal that another company, Matchworld Football SA, part of the same group and specializing in football, was declared bankrupt in the Swiss canton of Vaud on April 2, 2019, before the bankruptcy was lifted on May 24, 2019.

“Background checks should have been conducted on any entity signing MoUs with the Syrian government, but this did not happen, as the state is newly formed and lacks sufficient databases on such companies,” says economic researcher Hayyan Hababeh.

He adds that globally, not all MoUs are expected to materialize into actual projects, but implementing even 30–40% of them could positively impact Syria’s economy.

Economic consultant Osama Al-Qadi notes that an MoU is “closer to a declaration of intent, often non-binding and lacking clear implementation details.” However, cooperation agreements may require investors to submit documentation, clarify project details, and provide company profiles within a specified timeframe; otherwise, the MoU could be considered void.

It remains unclear whether the MoU signed with the Ministry involves any financial commitments or projected expenditures, as the Ministry declined to provide SIRAJ with a copy of the document despite formal requests from the investigation team.

Misuse of Public Funds

In June 2023, Mazen Haj Khalil, a Palestinian-Syrian-Russian businessman since 2016, joined Matchworld Group SA as a partner and regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also appeared in the same capacity at the Sports Investment Forum held in Riyadh in April of the previous year, during the signing of a partnership with a Saudi sports consultancy firm.

However, Haj Khalil is not new to sports investments in Syria. His name appears in documents issued by the General Sports Federation.

According to a document dated June 2, 2012, Major General Mowaffaq Jomaa, then-head of the Federation, requested that Haj Khalil, then-head of the “Smart Sport” company, appoint an arbitrator to resolve a dispute arising from his company’s failure to fulfill financial obligations amounting to $50,000, plus late payment interest.

The contract had granted his company rights to sponsorship, marketing, advertising, and television broadcasting for the 2011 Asian Cup qualifiers in Doha.

A lawsuit filed on July 23, 2012, states that Haj Khalil collected substantial revenues from the investment contract but left the country without fulfilling his obligations.

Subsequently, on June 24, 2013, the Federation’s lawyer was instructed to file a lawsuit demanding repayment of $50,000 plus 9% legal interest.

Under Judicial Decision No. 353 (Case No. 476), issued on June 4, 2014, Haj Khalil was charged with the felony of embezzlement of public funds under Article 8 of Economic Crimes Law No. 3 of 2013, which stipulates a minimum prison sentence of 5 years for such offenses.

On June 30, 2015, the Third Criminal Court sentenced him to five years in prison, fined him $50,000 (or equivalent in Syrian pounds), stripped him of civil rights, and imposed legal guardianship, while waiving residency restrictions.

A Decade in the Courtrooms

After the initial ruling was issued against him, Mazen Haj Khalil filed an appeal, which was accepted. One document indicates that by the end of 2017, the appeal he had submitted against the 2014 indictment had been formally approved.

Eight years later, on June 22, 2022, Judge Mohammad Jassem Al-Abdullah, the First Referral Judge in Damascus, issued Decision No. 300, charging Haj Khalil with the felony of “abuse of entrusted public funds” under Article 8 of Law No. 3 of 2013. The decision also ordered the issuance of arrest and transfer warrants against him and required him to bear all legal fees and court expenses.

On October 4, 2023, the Damascus Criminal Court issued a final in absentia ruling against Haj Khalil under Decision No. 406, convicting him of the felony of abuse of entrusted public funds and sentencing him to five years in prison, along with a $50,000 fine.

Ties and Cooperation with Firas Mualla

Furthermore, Mazen Haj Khalil maintained a relationship with Syrian swimmer Firas Mualla, son of Major General Hashem Mualla, former commander of the Special Units Battalion, which was responsible for the massacre in the Al-Masharqa neighborhood of Aleppo in the 1980s, according to reports by the Syrian Human Rights Committee.

Firas Mualla later held several prominent positions in Syrian sports, most notably as President of the General Sports Federation and the Syrian Olympic Committee, succeeding Major General Mowaffaq Jomaa in 2020.

According to a Facebook post by Mualla dated September 20, 2018, Haj Khalil was responsible for organizing all administrative and logistical arrangements for Mualla’s participation in the Russian Federation Open Water Swimming Championship (Masters category), held on the Black Sea coast in the city of Anapa in 2018.

The team also included Majd Shehadeh, son of Brigadier Moeen Shehadeh, who headed the unit responsible for the protection and escort of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Photos shared by Mualla show Haj Khalil, Mualla, and Shehadeh together on the winners’ podium.

In one of his posts, Mualla described Haj Khalil as a “brother and friend,” praising his support, encouragement, and role in facilitating “all organizational and administrative procedures in the Russian Federation” for the European-level participation.

On October 6, 2018, the Facebook page “Tartous, the Beating Heart of Syria” published a photo taken by Majd Shehadeh during a ceremony in which Murat Kumpilov, Head of the Republic of Adygea, honored Firas Mualla and his accompanying team during the republic’s annual celebrations in the capital, Maykop.

The team also included Majd Shehadeh, son of Brigadier Moeen Shehadeh, who headed the unit responsible for the protection and escort of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Photos shared by Mualla show Haj Khalil, Mualla, and Shehadeh together on the winners’ podium.

In one of his posts, Mualla described Haj Khalil as a “brother and friend,” praising his support, encouragement, and role in facilitating “all organizational and administrative procedures in the Russian Federation” for the European-level participation.

On October 6, 2018, the Facebook page “Tartous, the Beating Heart of Syria” published a photo taken by Majd Shehadeh during a ceremony in which Murat Kumpilov, Head of the Republic of Adygea, honored Firas Mualla and his accompanying team during the republic’s annual celebrations in the capital, Maykop.

Haj Khalil also shared several photos on his Facebook account on September 8, 2018, showing himself alongside Mualla and Shehadeh on a winners’ podium.

Unanswered Questions

It remains unclear whether the Ministry of Sports and Youth or the Swiss parent company, Matchworld Group SA, was aware of Mazen Haj Khalil’s criminal record and his ties to figures associated with the Assad regime prior to signing the Memorandum of Understanding.

Neither party responded to journalists’ inquiries regarding this matter or the fate of the MoU months after its signing.

Additionally, no response was received from the company’s regional director, Mazen Haj Khalil, to questions sent via email on December 26, 2025

• Haneen Omran contributed to this investigation.
• An Arabic version was published on Daraj and in the Syrian newspaper Al-Mawqif Al-Riyadi.

The post “Deal in the Shadow”: MoU between Syria’s Ministry of Sports and Youth and a Company Linked to a Person Convicted of “Abuse of entrusted public funds” appeared first on SIRAJ.