His work, described as “close to suicide,” was nevertheless in high demand. Exchanging foreign currency through official channels rarely reflected its real value on the parallel market. Most people holding foreign currencies, particularly dollars and euros, who wished to sell or even buy them turned to the parallel market to avoid suspicion, especially after several laws criminalized first the trading of dollars and later even their possession.

Despite the heavy security pressure and the regime’s attempts to criminalize dealings in foreign currency, the driver did not know that the passenger who had entered his car was an informant working with Military Intelligence Branch 251 (the Al-Khatib branch).

During the exchange, the informant took a photo of the agent inside the car and sent it to his superior in the branch via WhatsApp. A screenshot of that message later appeared in an official document signed by the head of Branch 251 and addressed to Department 40 on 29 November 2023, ordering the immediate arrest of the transfer agent, his handover to a police department, and the confiscation of the phones in his possession “with utmost urgency for the purpose of investigation.”

This currency exchange agent was not the only one arrested. The former Syrian regime deployed all available tools to track down and detain anyone dealing in foreign currencies, whether exchanging them or, later on, merely possessing them after issuing a series of laws aimed at centralizing control over hard currency in Assad’s hands.

Economic researcher Khaled al-Turkawi says that all the measures taken by the Assad regime were designed to extort anyone holding dollars or other foreign currencies, forcing them into two choices: either exchange their money through the regime at the rate it dictated, or face legal prosecution. He notes that these laws had little to do with economic policy and were instead intended to extract funds to sustain military operations and pursue victory.

As part of the “Damascus Dossier” project, the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism – SIRAJ reviewed digital copies of numerous documents showing how the Assad regime used its intelligence agencies to track and arrest anyone dealing in U.S. dollars or other foreign currencies following Decree No. 3 of 2020, issued by the deposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, which criminalized transactions in any currency other than the Syrian pound.

The “Damascus Dossier” is a collaborative investigative project led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in partnership with the German public broadcaster NDR. It brings together journalists from around the world to uncover disturbing new details about one of the most brutal state-run killing systems of the 21st century: the regime of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

ICIJ, NDR, and 126 journalists from 24 media organizations across 20 countries spent more than eight months organizing and analyzing these documents, consulting experts, and interviewing Syrian families still searching for loved ones who disappeared under Assad’s rule.

The Damascus Dossier investigations reveal the inner workings of Assad’s security apparatus and its links to foreign governments and international organizations. The leak consists of more than 134,000 files, mostly written in Arabic, amounting to approximately 243 gigabytes of data.

The documents span more than three decades, from 1994 to December 2024, and originate from Syria’s Air Force Intelligence and General Intelligence Directorates.

Both agencies have been subject to extensive U.S. and European sanctions due to their brutal practices, including torture and sexual violence.

The documents include internal memoranda, reports, and correspondence revealing the day-to-day operations of Assad’s surveillance and arrest network, as well as its coordination with foreign allies such as Russia and Iran, and communications with United Nations agencies operating inside Syria.

The highly sensitive database also contains the names of numerous former Syrian intelligence officers.

Recruiting Informants to Seize the “Dollar”

In a document dated 16 December 2023, the head of the Military Intelligence Branch 251 ordered Department 40 (Al-Khatib Branch) to arrest three money transfer agents operating in different areas of Damascus on charges of dealing in foreign currencies.

The document includes detailed information about the locations where the agents worked and businesses they used as cover to provide money transfers, as well as photographs secretly taken by intelligence officers during currency exchange operations. It also contains personal details such as phone numbers and other identifying information.

As in the previous document, the branch chief attached screenshots that appear to have been sent directly by the officers responsible for surveillance and reporting during the operation.

These operations were not only aimed at enforcing decrees and laws issued by the regime’s authorities. According to economic researcher Khaled al-Turkawi, they also served a much broader economic objective: monopolizing foreign currencies in the country and redirecting them to sources close to the regime and individuals within Assad’s inner circle.

After Assad banned trading in U.S. dollars and other foreign currencies, Syrians began using coded language to refer to the dollar in personal conversations and over the phone. They used nicknames such as “the forbidden one,” “parsley,” “the green,” or “number one.”

However, this strategy did not escape the Syrian intelligence services under Assad. One intelligence document summarizing surveillance of specific phone numbers indicates that Syrian intelligence identified a man in Sweida province as dealing in U.S. dollars after he asked about the price of “number one,” a coded reference to the dollar during what appeared to be a wiretapped phone conversation.

Criminalizing the Trade and Possession of Foreign Currency

Possessing foreign currency, especially U.S. dollars, had long been considered taboo in Syria. Even carrying $100 in one’s pocket could expose a Syrian to questioning, as holding such currency was considered illegal.

As a result, working in currency exchange outside the control of the Syrian regime was widely viewed as a “suicidal profession” because of the extreme risks involved, particularly in recent years, when the regime’s need to extract additional funds intensified.

Trading in the U.S. dollar and foreign currencies was first officially banned in Syrian markets in 1986, through Law No. 24 of 1986, issued under Hafez al-Assad. The law criminalized buying or selling foreign currencies outside licensed banks and exchange companies, as well as possessing large amounts of dollars without authorization. Violators faced prison sentences and financial penalties. This law laid the foundation for the criminalization of foreign currency trading in the local market.

Law No. 24 remained in effect until 2013, when Bashar al-Assad, two years after the outbreak of the Syrian uprising, issued Law No. 29 of 2013, titled “Combating Illegal Dealings in Foreign Currencies.” The law criminalized trading foreign currencies outside official channels, including licensed banks and exchange companies.

It also criminalized buying or selling dollars or other foreign currencies on the parallel market, as well as transferring money or speculating on exchange rates. Notably, the law imposed harsher penalties, including prison sentences ranging from three to ten years, depending on the severity of the offense, in addition to substantial fines.

In 2020, the Syrian pound experienced a sharp collapse. For the first time in its history, the exchange rate reached 1,000 Syrian pounds per U.S. dollar in January 2020, and by the end of that year, the dollar had risen to approximately 3,000 Syrian pounds.

This collapse prompted Assad, on 4 October 2020, to claim that the fundamental reason for the pound’s decline was the freezing of billions of dollars in deposits belonging to Syrians in Lebanese banks following Lebanon’s banking crisis in 2019.

During a visit to the “Producers 2020” exhibition, Assad stated that between $20 billion and $42 billion of these deposits may have been lost in the Lebanese banking sector, describing the figure as “terrifying” for Syria’s economy. He added: “They took the money and placed it in Lebanon, and we paid the price.”

Yet this statement was not Assad’s only response. Earlier that same year, he had already tightened restrictions on Syrians holding foreign currencies through Decree No. 3 of 2020. For the first time, the decree explicitly used the phrase “prohibition of possessing foreign currencies.”

Article 1 of the decree states that “it is prohibited to deal in any currency other than the Syrian pound as a means of payment or for any type of commercial transaction.” The decree significantly increased penalties and introduced legal provisions allowing authorities to confiscate foreign currencies involved in such transactions.

Dominating Hard Currency

It appears that the Syrian regime’s aim behind these laws was not to regulate the flow of currency in the market, nor even to protect the Syrian pound, but rather to secure Assad’s share of every dollar entering Syria, according to economic researcher al-Turkawi.

“The purpose of all these laws was to centralize the sale of dollars through the Central Bank. The regime wanted all foreign currency transactions to take place through the Central Bank for three main objectives.”

The first objective, according to al-Turkawi, was the collapse of the Syrian pound, which had effectively become unacceptable for international trade, as foreign suppliers increasingly demanded payment exclusively in U.S. dollars. This made it difficult for the regime to finance the army or settle payments to Russia or Iran without dollars, as well as to pay for essential imports such as food supplies.

• Creative coordination and visual solutions: Radwan Awad

The post “‘The Green’ in Assad’s Hand”.. How the Syrian Regime Recruited Informants to Trap Those Dealing in U.S. Dollars appeared first on SIRAJ.

Credit: SIRAJ Chemicals used to make Captagon found inside an abandoned drug production facility in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.

Fighters from the new Syrian government forces uncover Captagon pills hidden inside an electrical power adapter in a facility used to produce Captagon under the previous regime of Bashar al-Assad in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.

Credit: Screenshot of a Facebook post by Syria’s Ministry of the Interior Syria’s Ministry of the Interior announced a Captagon seizure in Al Nabak, Syria, on June 27, 2025.

Credit: Ali Al Ibrahim/SIRAJ, Fighters from the new Syrian government forces inside a Captagon production facility in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.

Credit: Lebanese Army, Lebanese authorities dismantled a clandestine Captagon lab in Hermel, near the Syrian border, after seizing a truck in May 2025 loaded with drug-making equipment.

The post Captagon Drug Networks Adapt and Survive in Middle East After Assad’s Fall appeared first on SIRAJ.

The 6 February earthquake caused widespread destruction over a large area of southern Turkey and northwestern Syria.

Within Syria, the worst-hit region was the opposition-held enclave, including Idlib and parts of Aleppo province, where at least 4,191 people were killed, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR).

In government-controlled areas, the death toll was at least 394 people, with most of those deaths reported in the town of Jableh in Latakia province, according to SNHR.

Other sources put the death toll in Syria even higher. A UN spokesperson told Siraj that at least 6,000 people had died in the country. The International Medical Corps said in April that 7,259 people were confirmed killed in Syria.

After more than a decade of war, the opposition-held region was already in a state of humanitarian crisis, with a population of 4.6 million swollen by those displaced from other areas by the conflict and aid deliveries into the enclave long restricted to a single border crossing from Turkey.

Search and rescue efforts after the earthquake largely relied on volunteers from the Syria Civil Defence, the so-called White Helmets who for years have operated as a de facto emergency service in opposition-held areas pummelled by air strikes and shelling.

Footage showed White Helmets volunteers and others desperately searching for survivors by digging through rubble with their hands and basic tools, highlighting the lack of specialist equipment and the improvised nature of the rescue effort.

“After the earthquake, I evacuated my three daughters from the house to the car and didn’t see them for five days,” said Ahmad Yaziji, a member of the Idlib branch of the Syria Civil Defence.

“Several other volunteers left the evacuation areas in order to bury their loved ones before rapidly returning to the rescue. There were so many locations where people were still alive and trapped under the rubble.”

According to the Syria Civil Defence, its volunteers rescued 2,950 people from the rubble and retrieved the bodies of 2,172 people from 182 sites.

The lack of an immediate UN-coordinated response prompted angry criticism from Raed al-Saleh, the head of the Syria Civil Defence.

Saleh told Siraj his organisation had sent distress calls to the UN on the day of the earthquake requesting the deployment of specialist rescue teams.

Opposition authorities including the Salvation Government, the civil administration in Idlib backed by the dominant Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militant group, and the Turkish-backed Syrian Interim Government in Azaz also requested international assistance.

“Let me be clear: The White Helmets received no support from the United Nations during the most critical moments of the rescue operations,” Saleh wrote in an opinion piece for CNN one week after the earthquake.

“The UN’s failure to respond quickly to this catastrophe is shameful. When I asked the UN why help had failed to arrive in time, the answer I received was bureaucracy. In the face of one of the deadliest catastrophes to strike the world in years, it seems the UN’s hands were tied by red tape.”

The critical importance of a quick response after an earthquake is embedded in search and rescue best practice.

In Turkey there were more than 7,800 live rescues within 24 hours of the earthquake. Despite a massive international effort, only 260 people were rescued alive over the next eight days.

In opposition-held Syria, the situation was very different. Families of some of the victims interviewed by Siraj have described hearing voices trapped under collapsed buildings for several days.

They believe their loved ones and many more lives could have been saved if rescue teams with appropriate equipment had been quickly deployed.

Muhammad al-Mustafa, 32, from the town of Jindires near the Turkish border, said he had to listen helplessly to the cries of his two-year-old son Wafeek and other members of his family trapped under the ruins of their home.

“It was like doomsday,” said Mustafa. “I remember how the voices started to fade on the second day. We couldn’t get them out on our own. There was so much rubble we needed specialist equipment.”

A search team eventually retrieved the bodies of Mustafa’s wife, son, parents and three siblings.

“The fact I could hear my child pleading for me to save him while I was unable to do so devastated me the most,” said Mustafa.

Similarly tragic scenes were playing out in towns and villages across the northwest.

In Bseenah, near Salqin in northwest Idlib province, 39-year-old Rami al-Abdullah said he could hear the screams of his wife and eldest daughter trapped under the rubble for two days after the quake. Only his one-and-a-half-year-old son was eventually pulled out alive.

“The whole village was demolished, and the Civil Defence could not reach everyone and save them,” said Abdullah. “Residents were trying to help, but they were afraid of aftershocks and new collapses.”

‘Coordination mechanisms’

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) operates an international emergency response system with the capacity to send rescue teams anywhere in the world within hours of a disaster.

The two main organisations, described by Ocha as “coordination mechanisms”, within this system are United Nations Disaster and Coordination (Undac) and the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (Insarag).

Undac’s responsibilities include assessing and coordinating emergency response missions, while Insarag is a network of search and rescue teams from 90 UN member states and international organisations.

Undac and Insarag typically send teams into disaster zones at the request of a government. But UN guidelines also allow for rescue efforts to be initiated by a UN resident coordinator in the affected country.

According to several sources who spoke to Siraj, including el-Mostafa Benlemlih, the UN’s resident coordinator in Syria until earlier this month, the Syrian government did file a request to the UN for help, but this was limited to government-controlled areas.

Benlemlih, who spoke to Siraj while he was still in the role, described Undac’s work as a “complement to national efforts”.

“The Undac team was deployed as soon as they received a request from the usual channels [the Syrian government]. The team was deployed to assess the situation in Aleppo, Latakia, Tartous, Homs and Hama,” said Benlemlih.

Asked why Undac had not deployed to opposition-held areas, Benlemlih said the UN had been “fully prepared to support those affected in Idlib and [opposition-held areas of] Aleppo”.

But he added: “However, the activation of the response system is linked to the approval of the concerned authorities, and is also linked to the provision of mechanisms to support logistical work and protection. These conditions were not available even for the humanitarian support we tried to deliver in the first hours of the disaster.”

Earlier this month, the UN named Adam Abdelmoula as its new residential coordinator in Syria.

Documents obtained by Siraj also show UN and Syrian officials discussed sending aid convoys – but not search and rescue teams – into opposition-held areas in the days after the earthquake.

But no convoys were sent across the front line. According to Reuters, the delivery of aid from government-held areas was opposed by HTS.

Details about Insarag’s response within Syria, and issues which hindered the UN rescue effort in the country, were discussed at a meeting of Insarag team leaders in Singapore on 28 February.

Search and rescue teams from Russia, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates were deployed to Latakia, and teams from Tunisia, Armenia, Algeria and China were deployed to Aleppo, according to a presentation delivered at the meeting.

But challenges faced by Undac and Insarag included a “lack of awareness of the Government of Syria of the international response mechanisms” and the “lack of a basic structure to receive and coordinate international assistance including USAR [urban search and rescue]”.

Team leaders complained that coordination had been complicated by the involvement of multiple entities, including civil defence, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and national security, and by an “inconsistent approach of LEMA [local emergency management agency] in assigning USAR teams to geographic sectors”.

The Syrian government had not responded at the time of publication to questions from Siraj and MEE about why it had not asked for international rescue teams to be deployed to opposition-controlled areas.

In response to questions about why Undac and Insarag teams were not deployed into opposition-held Syria, Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for Ocha, said the deployment of search and rescue teams through Insarag was a matter for national governments rather than the UN.

Laerke said: “To be clear, the United Nations does not have search-and-rescue capabilities, including heavy machinery, nor does it decide which teams deploy to which countries for how long.”

Ocha’s role through Undac, he said, was limited to coordinating the work of search and rescue teams and sharing updates about casualties, damage and requests for assistance.

“While the UN can decide where to deploy its own staff, the decision to deploy national search-and-rescue teams rests solely with the national governments of those teams,” said Laerke.

‘Speed is critical’

Yet the failure of the UN to coordinate the deployment of search and rescue teams into opposition-controlled areas appears to fall short of Undac’s own guidelines on responding to “complex emergencies”, such as in countries in a state of civil war.

These guidelines are contained in the Undac Handbook, a reference guide for Undac team members involved in emergency missions.

The handbook acknowledges that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states must be fully respected, and that humanitarian assistance should be provided with the consent of the affected country.

But it makes an exception in circumstances in which “the legitimacy and territory of the State is under, often violent, dispute”.

The guidance reads: “This situation makes the adherence to the above principles problematic in complex emergencies. In these cases the commitment to the victims may supersede the commitment to the State.”

The handbook advises that “coordination efforts will need to acknowledge the legitimacy of competing authorities [and]… maintain effective relationships not only with the State but also with the antagonists and political opposition”.

It stresses, too, the urgency of deploying emergency teams as quickly as possible, particularly in the aftermath of an earthquake.

“In a natural disaster speed of response is critical and is measured in hours and days. This is especially so in an earthquake situation where trapped people are unlikely to survive more than 3-4 days unless rescued.”

According to one legal expert, the Syrian government’s failure to request or facilitate the deployment of rescue teams to opposition-held territory may be in breach of principles of international humanitarian law established through the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing access to conflict zones for humanitarian actors.

“If the Syrian authorities refused these teams entry into areas beyond their control, this is an arbitrary rejection prohibited by international law,” said Sama Kiki, executive director of the Syrian Legal Development Programme, a UK-based legal advocacy organisation.

Kiki added that a periodically renewed UN Security Council resolution permitting humanitarian aid to be sent into northwest Syria from Turkey through the Bab al-Hawa crossing offered a further legal avenue, and an established route, for Undac and Insarag teams to be deployed into opposition territory.

Bodies instead of aid

The situation in northwest Syria was in stark contrast to the UN response in southern Turkey, where Insarag deployed 221 search and rescue teams from 82 countries in support of the rescue effort by Turkey’s own disaster agency (Afad), according to documents reviewed by Siraj.

In Idlib, the only international response in the days after the earthquake was a visit by a three-person Spanish team who crossed into Syria through Bab al-Hawa on 9 February independently of the UN aid effort.

Mazen Aloush, the media officer for the crossing, said the visit had been coordinated by a Salvation Government charitable support coordination office. It lasted only a few hours and was limited in its scope to assessing the damage, Aloush said.

Muhammad al-Sadiq, a Salvation Government spokesperson, said the Spanish team had trained local volunteers to use a sensor device to detect people still alive under the rubble.

No other equipment was provided, and hopes of finding any further survivors had by then mostly faded.

The Syria Civil Defence head Saleh told Siraj that assessment teams from a number of UN agencies finally entered opposition-held Syria six days after the earthquake.

“These were needs assessment teams, and not search and rescue,” Saleh said.

“After six days people had already died. No one was left from those who were alive.”

Those critical of the UN’s failure to send search and rescue teams and heavy-duty rescue equipment into Idlib through Bab al-Hawa question remarks, made by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on 9 February, in which he said damage to roads leading to the crossing had hindered the aid effort.

According to Aloush, the spokesperson for Bab al-Hawa, within hours of the earthquake the bodies of Syrians killed in Turkey were being delivered to the border post.

“On the evening of the same day, we received cars carrying bodies from all the stricken Turkish provinces without any problem on the roads,” he said.

Border crossing authorities reported 85 bodies delivered to Bab al-Hawa one day after the earthquake, with the number rising over the next few days to more than 1,200. Photos and videos posted on social media showed some of these bodies being delivered on flatbed trucks.

Laerke, the Ocha spokesperson, told Siraj that cross-border aid into northwest Syria had been briefly suspended due to road damage and because of casualties and injuries among staff at a UN aid hub in Reyhanli.

The failings of the UN response were frankly acknowledged by Martin Griffiths, the UN humanitarian relief chief, during a visit to Bab al-Hawa on 12 February.

“We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived,” Griffiths wrote in a tweet.

“My duty and our obligation is to correct this failure as fast as we can. That’s my focus now.”

The following day, Griffiths was in Damascus for talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Soon afterwards, two more border crossings from Turkey into opposition-held northwest Syria had opened for the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Fadel Abdul Ghany, the chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said that serious questions remained unanswered about the failure of the UN to deploy search and rescue teams into opposition-held territory.

“There was negligence on the part of the United Nations,” he said. “This is incomprehensible, unjustified, immoral and illegal.”

Ghany believes that at least dozens of lives could have been saved if the UN had taken prompt and decisive action. He said he had called on the UN to conduct an internal investigation but had not received a response.

UN officials, he said, had talked at length about the mechanisms and details of the earthquake response, but without providing adequate answers as to what had gone wrong.

“In the end, all of these mechanisms failed,” said Ghany.

The post Syrian government blocked UN earthquake response in opposition areas appeared first on SIRAJ.

Among the companies that received U.N. procurement money in Syria was one owned by a sanctioned militia leader linked to a massacre outside Damascus and another owned by the family members of a businessman who allegedly profited from trading the rubble of buildings shelled by government forces, the study said.

“When humanitarian assistance is systematically abused and distorted, under the pretext of protecting the neutrality of humanitarian operations, it may become a dangerous weapon in the hands of the government against its people,” the report’s authors wrote.

The U.N. has long been known to contract companies linked to the Assad regime, which has overseen a decade-long civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and forced around seven million to flee their homes.

Click here to read the full report.

U.N. staff have spent tens of millions of dollars staying at the Damascus Four Seasons hotel, which is partly owned by regime-allied businessman Samer Foz, for instance. The United States sanctioned Foz in 2019, saying he had “leveraged the atrocities of the Syrian conflict into a profit-generating enterprise” and was “directly supporting the murderous Assad regime.”

But the new study — published on Tuesday by the London-based Syrian Legal Development Program (SLDP) and the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks (OPEN) — was the first major attempt to analyze just how much U.N. procurement money is going to human rights abusers or figures who are sanctioned or connected to the Assad regime and the conflict.

In total, the United Nations paid out around $406 million in procurement spending in Syria in 2019 and 2020, covering a wide variety of goods and services such as food, accommodation, medical equipment, security, training, IT services, chemicals, and office materials. About $75 million went to companies which were not identified for “privacy reasons” or “security reasons.”

Of the remaining amount, the report analyzed the money that went to the U.N.’s top 100 known suppliers in Syria — and found that about $137 million went to what the report called “high” or “very high” risk companies, including those owned by war profiteers, sanctioned people, and prominent regime allies.

Reporters from OCCRP and its media partner, Syrian Investigative Reporting For Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ), assisted with research, were granted advance access to the report, and carried out their own analysis of the U.N. procurement database, which corroborated many of the report’s key findings. They also found examples of problematic disbursements before 2019.

In one of the more striking cases, about $1.4 million in UN funding was also provided to the Syria Trust for Development, a foundation established and run by Syria’s First Lady Asma Al-Assad, in 2015 and 2017, ostensibly for emergency shelter and “non-food items,” according to the U.N. Financial Tracker Service.

Carsten Wieland, a German policy adviser and author of a book about humanitarian aid in the Syrian conflict, expressed alarm at the findings.

“It is very appalling that there has not been sufficient due diligence inside the U.N. where these organizations came from, or are a hidden arm of someone else,” he told OCCRP.

Francesco Galtieri, a senior U.N. official based in Damascus, said that the United Nations provided assistance “with strict adherence to humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, independence, and impartiality.”

He said that internal due diligence procedures had been strengthened over the past two years and that donor states could ask for details of contracts through a formal audit process. The U.N. also continuously reviews allegations and “disengages” if evidence suggests “the involvement of vendors and suppliers in proscribed practices,” he said.

“All U.N. agencies apply diligent effort to ensuring an in-depth understanding of the breadth of factors relevant to conflict sensitivity and due diligence practices in Syria, to ensure that programming and related operational procedures are risk aware and do no harm,” Galtieri told OCCRP.

The Rise of War Profiteers

Syria’s government has maintained a tight grip over the economy for decades, with allies and relatives of the ruling Assad family dominating key sectors such as telecommunications, infrastructure, and real estate.

Since the 2011 uprising and the ensuing civil war, the Syrian regime has become even more reliant on a new class of war profiteers and proxies to help it skirt sanctions and maintain control over its last few remaining sources of foreign currency.

At the same time, Syria has become one of the world’s largest recipients of humanitarian assistance. Since 2011, over $40 billion of aid money has flowed into the country, more than half of that through the U.N., according to researchers.

The SLDP and OPEN study shows that many in the regime’s inner circle have benefited from this influx of cash.

For instance, a company called Desert Falcon LLC, run by pro-regime commander Fadi Ahmad, received over $1 million in 2019 and 2020 from the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and its refugee agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, under a variety of categories including “apparel,” “office equipment,” “electronics,” and “manufacturing components.”

In 2012, Ahmad, also known as Fadi Saqr, took command of the pro-government National Defense Forces militia in Damascus. The following year, the militia took part in a massacre of dozens of people in the Syrian capital’s Tadamon district.

Desert Falcon’s co-owner is Bilal Al-Naal, who has been a member of Syrian parliament since 2020. Another company owned by Naal, Al-Naal LLC, received over $1.2 million in funds, also from UNICEF and UNRWA, listed under categories including “apparel,” “paper materials,” and “medical equipment,” the study found.

Another company, Jupiter for Investments SA, which received over half a million dollars from UNICEF for “management and admin services,” is owned by relatives of regime ally Mohammad Hamsho, including four who are under sanctions. Hamsho, who is also sanctioned by the United States and the European Union, has been accused of trading in the rubble from destroyed homes and acting as a front for Assad’s brother, Maher, who heads the army’s elite Fourth Armored Division.

Cham Wings, a Syrian airline sanctioned by the United States, received over half a million dollars from the World Food Program, the study said. The airline was also sanctioned along with its owner and chairman by the European Union for exacerbating the refugee crisis on the borders of Belarus in 2021 and 2022, but the sanctions were lifted earlier this year.

A variety of other companies receiving U.N. funds were linked to the Assad family, including multiple relatives and partners of Assad’s cousin, the sanctioned business tycoon Rami Makhlouf. Many of Makhlouf’s assets were stripped and he was put under house arrest in a conflict with Syrian authorities over the past two years.

Earlier this month, the Associated Press separately reported that staff members at the U.N.’s World Health Organization in Syria had accused their boss of mismanaging millions of dollars and using the agency’s funds to buy gifts for Syrian government officials.

The Report

The influx of foreign currency brought by humanitarian aid spending is a boon for the Syrian government, which has struggled to procure cash amid international sanctions, the collapse of its most productive economic sectors, and a financial crisis in neighboring Lebanon.

U.N. agencies that spend money in Syria are required by the government to exchange currency at the official exchange rate, which is far below the black market rates. Karam Shaar, the co-author of the report, said that in his research he found the U.N. exchanged some $340 million at the official rate in 2020, which was on average 50 percent lower than the black market rate that year.

The differential resulted in $170 million of “diverted” donor money, although it is not exactly clear how or where the government diverted these amounts, he said.

The SLDP and OPEN study analyzed about $294 million in procurement funding, representing the amount that went to the U.N.’s top 100 suppliers in Syria in 2019 and 2020, and including companies that are fully private or those with both public and private shareholders.

Drawing on business directories which rely on the official Syrian gazette, as well as news websites and social media, they divided the suppliers into four levels of risk, based on a guide written by SLDP and Human Rights Watch.

“Very high risk” companies included companies with links to human rights abuses, paramilitary groups, the private security industry, the destruction of civilian property, the development of land where people were forcibly displaced, and support for the Syrian armed forces and government since 2011.

“High risk” included companies which have received Syrian state contracts or held monopolies over certain sectors, were owned by members of parliament or other local officials, had donated to Syrian entities, or taken part in economic blockades of opposition-held areas.

The study found that about 36 percent of the funds it analyzed went to “very high risk” companies, while another 10 percent went to “high risk” companies, 30 percent to “medium,” and 23 percent to “low risk” companies.

Wieland, the policy adviser, said that thorough reform would be needed to get out of the “neutrality trap” and make sure that U.N. money was not going to suppliers like those listed in the report.

“It is something so tricky, and so politically relevant, that it has to come from somebody so far up,” he told OCCRP. “This has not been done. I have not seen any real will to tackle such issues.”

The post Millions in UN Funding Flow to War Profiteers and Human Rights Abusers in Syria, Study Shows appeared first on SIRAJ.

Although tracking data offers no sign of the Kubrosli-y’s whereabouts during that week, photos posted on Facebook by a Syrian government agency two days before its reappearance provide clues to why its crew might have been keen to disguise their location.

One of the images shows Syrian oil and minerals minister Bassam Toumeh at the Mediterranean port of Tartus. Another shows the Kubrosli-y docked at one of two berths at the port that were custom-built to load phosphate, a prized mineral that has been a major economic lifeline for the sanctioned regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Syria has some of the largest known reserves of the increasingly sought-after fertilizer ingredient. The phosphate industry collapsed when Islamic State militants seized the country’s largest mines in 2015, but production has revived since government forces recaptured them the following year, attracting buyers even from countries opposed to Assad’s regime.

The journey of the Kubrosli-y, and the techniques it deployed, offer a glimpse into the murky supply chain of Syrian phosphates as they make their way from regions torn apart by civil war to farmers across Europe. Every step of the way, the trade enriches the Syrian state, war profiteers, and people with deep ties to Russia’s elite.

Despite the risks of sanctions violations, Serbia, Ukraine, and four European Union states have imported over $80 million worth of Syrian phosphates since 2019, according to a new investigation by OCCRP member centers in seven countries, in partnership with Lighthouse Reports and Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ).

The United States has imposed sanctions on both the Syrian government and the Russian company that appears to control much of Syria’s phosphate exports, Stroytransgaz. The EU has also sanctioned two key players: Syria’s Toumeh and Stroytransgaz’s owner, Gennady Timchenko, a billionaire tycoon and close ally of the Kremlin. But neither the U.S. nor the EU specifically prohibit the purchase of Syrian phosphates.

Experts say companies still run the risk of violating sanctions even if the phosphates trade is technically legal. A 2018 report by Politico that Greece was buying Syrian phosphates raised hackles in the European Parliament, and imports stopped soon after.

Even Stroytransgaz has tried to distance itself from the industry, insisting that it has no connection to two similarly named companies that dominate the trade today. But OCCRP and its partners found evidence of several links between Stroytransgaz and these firms.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February has also led to increased pressure for European companies to cut ties to sanctioned Russian figures, such as Timchenko.

“Syrian phosphates are very bloody, not only because of the conflict in Syria but also what is happening in Ukraine,” said Glen Kurokawa, a phosphate analyst at commodity research group CRU. “Syria has to sell at a political discount because its goods are so toxic to handle.”

Asked about the imports, the EU Commission said it was up to individual countries to decide whether Syrian phosphate imports break sanctions. Authorities in Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Serbia confirmed they regard the trade as legal. Italian authorities did not reply to requests for comment.

Karam Shaar, a Syrian economist, said the trade shows how easily sanctions can be circumvented by opaque supply chains or by channeling funds and goods through the unknown subsidiaries of targeted companies.

“Of course exporting phosphates to Europe is a violation of sanctions,” he said. “But most of the countries don’t understand the structure of the organizations they have sanctioned.”

In the case of the Kubrosli-y, in the space of just three weeks it had set out from Istanbul, slipped in and out of Syria and sailed back through the Bosphorus to Nika Tera port in Ukraine, owned by a sanctioned oligarch.

“The ship owner doesn’t want anyone to know that his ship is coming from an economically sanctioned country like Syria,” said a Syrian ship captain from Tartous, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Sierra Leone-flagged Daytona Prime disappeared from AIS systems south of Cyprus while headed in Syria’s direction on Jan. 20, 2019. Satellite images show the ship docked in Tartous two weeks later, where port documents reveal it visited the phosphates berths the following day.

The ship appeared again on AIS south of Cyprus before reaching Romania’s Constanta port on the Black Sea on February 16, the same day that Romanian customs records show a cargo of Syrian phosphates were imported.

Tartous port took most of its recent records offline in June 2020, but more recent phosphate shipments could be identified using open-source and satellite images.

A Honduran-flagged cargo ship called the Sea Navigator disappeared from AIS off the coast of Cyprus on January 4, 2022, and then reappeared heading north before reaching Romania’s Constanta port on January 21. During this time, it appeared in the background of a selfie taken by a worker in the Tartous phosphates berth which was posted to social media.

The International Maritime Organization, the U.N. agency that regulates global shipping, requires ships to broadcast AIS positions at all times, so ships with blackouts like these are problematic. That, in combination with the threat of sanctions and bad publicity, leaves European importers of Syrian phosphates working with ship owners on the legal fringes of the industry.

One of these is Aminos Maritime Ltd, which owns the Kubrosli-y, the ship that reporters noticed turning off its tracker in May last year before delivering phosphates to Ukraine. The ship has also made deliveries of Syrian phosphates to Romania and Greece. Aminos did not reply to a request for comment.

Another ship, the Prince Mouhammad, is owned by a Lebanon-based company whose largest shareholder is owned by relatives of Jihad al-Arab, a contractor close to former Prime Minister Saad Hariri. Last year, Arab was sanctioned by the U.S. for corruption. He did not respond to a request for comment either.

Ibrahim Olabi, a Syrian legal expert who monitors sanctions evasion, said the methods used to dodge sanctions in Syria would likely help Russian companies avoid new sanctions imposed by the European Union and United States over the Ukraine war.

“The Syrian phosphates trade shows why the EU sanctions system is not fit for purpose,” he said. “Sanctions evasion works and it’s not even that difficult.”

The industry’s dubious legality has also given rise to a complex network of proxies and middlemen.

‘Blood Money’

On a busy shopping street in London’s upmarket Kensington neighborhood, a small office above a secondhand clothing store is listed as the address of a British company called Resalper Trading Ltd.

The company sold $450,000 worth of Syrian phosphates to Ukrainian company Prime Organics in August 2020 — the country’s top importer of Syrian phosphates over the past two years — according to Ukrainian customs records. But Resalper Trading reported no financial activities in the year ending in May 2020, and only around $530 in assets that month, according to its most recent filings.

The office in Kensington belongs to formation agents Company Wizard and Quick File. When OCCRP contacted the 29-year-old Ukrainian who founded Resalper Trading in 2019, Ruslan Turkovskyi, he declined to comment.

Ukraine’s imports of Syrian phosphates ballooned from $3 million worth in 2018 to $15 million last year, despite Ukrainian sanctions imposed on Stroytransgaz and Timchenko. Most of those that arrive by sea enter through the Nika Tera port, owned by the sanctioned pro-Moscow oligarch Dmitry Firtash.

Sanctions expert Irene Kenyon, director of risk intelligence at the consultancy FiveBy Solutions, said using shell companies is a common strategy to disguise the fact that sanctioned entities or individuals were benefiting from a trade.

“Even though you might be legally in the right, you’re also giving blood money to a sanctioned human-rights violating regime and a sanctioned Russian oligarch,” she said.

Europe Quietly Resumed Syrian Phosphate Imports

Serbia and Ukraine are Europe’s top buyers of Syrian phosphates, while several EU states have also resumed imports.

Ukraine’s imports halted after the Russian invasion in February, but the country is far from the only buyer of Syrian phosphates.

In Serbia — Europe’s top buyer of Syrian phosphates in recent years — one importer was a former beauty company called Yufofarm. A Serbian business registry shows the company imported $26.9 million worth of products from Syria in 2021, though it did not specify what they were. Yufofarm declined to comment.

Yufofarm is owned by the business partner of Stanko Popovic, whose agriculture and fertilizer company, Elixir Group bought the Syrian phosphates Yufofarm imported. Elixir Group is the exclusive supplier of phosphoric acid — used to make fertilizers and animal feed — for the local operations of a major French conglomerate called Groupe Roullier.

“If the person you’re buying cargo from isn’t under sanctions then you’re further removed and aren’t necessarily busting sanctions yourself,” a maritime lawyer told OCCRP, speaking anonymously as they were not authorized to talk to the press. “This is the trade version of international money laundering.”

A spokesperson for the French company said it did “not use Syrian phosphate” and strictly complied with all sanctions.

Popovic acknowledged buying Syrian phosphates, which he had done since the 1970s, but told reporters that all his business transactions were legal. “We do not cooperate with any company in Syria on the basis of phosphate imports, or on any other basis,” he said.

Although Greece appeared to have stopped importing Syrian phosphates after the 2018 Politico report, at least four other EU member states — Italy, Bulgaria, Spain, and Poland — quietly resumed imports, OCCRP and its partners found. EU and UN trade data show that Italy started importing in 2020, Bulgaria in 2021, and Spain and Poland earlier this year.

Many of the EU’s imports of Syrian phosphates entered the bloc through Romania. Most of them were handled by two Middle Eastern companies, UAE-registered Blue Gulf Trading and Lebanon-registered Medsea Trading, both of which are owned by Lebanese businessman Afif Nazih Auf. He did not respond to requests for comment.

In Italy, Syrian phosphates are imported by Puccioni Spa, an established Italian fertilizer company. The company confirmed the purchases, but said it dealt with Syrian authorities through a broker, and that it did not work with Stroytransgaz.

In Bulgaria, Syrian phosphates are imported by a small Bulgarian company called Fertix EOOD, which was founded in 2017. Fertix’s managing director, Radostin Radev, has deep connections in Bulgaria’s agriculture industry, after starting his career at Agropolychim, one of the biggest fertilizer producers in the Balkans.

Radev said he had sold some of the Syrian phosphates to EuroChem Agro Bulgaria, a subsidiary of Eurochem Group AG, which is connected to Russian billionaire Andrey Igorevich Melnichenko. Melnichenko, who was sanctioned by the EU and the U.K. for supporting Russia’s war on Ukraine, recently withdrew from the company’s board.

For now, the trade in Syrian phosphates appears to be growing in spite of the many political complexities. Sergiy Moskalenko, director of Dnipro Mineral Fertilizer Plant, a Ukrainian firm that uses Syrian phosphates, told OCCRP that for them the purchases were a practical matter.

“Look, we need to eat,” he said. “In order to eat properly we need to supply the soil with fertilizers and to do this we must purchase the raw materials. To buy them, we unfortunately turn to…” He paused. “We take whatever phosphates are offered to us.”

Eva Constantaras (Lighthouse Reports), Hala Naserddine, (Daraj), Adam Chamseddine (Al Jadeed TV), Hervé Chambonniere (Le Telegramme), Ahmad Haj Hamdo, Ayman Makieh and Ahmad Obaid (SIRAJ) contributed reporting.

The post A ‘Bloody’ Trade: Inside the Murky Supply Chain Bringing Syrian Phosphates Into Europe appeared first on SIRAJ.

The young man was killed during the clashes the city had seen before she left with the family in late 2017, and was hurriedly buried while the Global Coalition’s planes roamed the sky and gunfire from all sides filled the air.

In her daily search for the apple of her eyes, Mrs. Nawfa has repeatedly visited organizations concerned with missing persons, affiliated with the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria which controls the city, as well as the concerned individuals in the Raqqa’s Civil Council’s first Responders Team, but always came back empty-handed.

On a ‘sad’ Raqqa night, as she described, and with the help of her neighbors, Nawfa buried her son with her own hands while tears ran down her face. She never imagined burying him at this place, next to Al Taj Wedding Hall, the place where she wished to have his wedding party, surrounded by family and relatives.

The hall is located in south Raqqa, next to the old bridge. Before the war, it was a place to spread joy, a destination for the neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods to have wedding parties, but it soon became a gloomy place shrouded in darkness, remembered sadly and sorrowfully by Raqqa’s people and all Syrians, because they buried their children and loved ones in a mass grave next to the hall and named after it, “Al Taj Mass Grave.”

Al Taj grave, or “the grave between bridges” as the residents call it because it’s located between the old and the new Raqqa bridges, was founded hurriedly by the residents at an open piece of land with red soil over an area of 4 dunams (around 4000 m2) at a crossroads next to a bypass road, in order to cover dead bodies during the fierce battles between ISIS and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which took control over the city on 17 October 2017, backed by the US-led global coalition.

“After the burial, I left the city as the battles got fiercer at the last days of defeating ISIS. After a few months, I was able to go back to the war-wrecked city, full of hope of visiting the grave that entombed his body so I could bury it at a proper place and be able to visit him, like others who lost their loved ones,” said Nawfa.

But Mrs. Nawfa did not foresee what actually happened. When she visited Al Taj mass grave, she did not find her son’s grave, as the place had transformed after moving the graves to another place. The once-famous hall was also completely removed by the end of 2017.

“The bodies were hurriedly exhumed from Al Taj grave, as I was told by a volunteer in the team working on exhuming the bodies, and the bodies were then moved to Tal Al-Bay’a Cemetery (east Raqqa) and were buried there. And when I asked him about my son’s body, he said we don’t know.. it might have been buried with the piles of bodies,” Nawfa added.

Like Mrs. Nawfa’s son, two successive global coalition airstrikes on Raqqa in the early hours of 12 October 2017 ended the lives of the 80-something Mohammad Fayyad Abu Seif and 16 other family members (Mohammad al-Fayyad and his three daughters, Ammar al-Fares, Yusri Abdul Aziz, Rezqeya (child), and Salem Hamad) and their neighbors, after the air raids destroyed his house and his brother-in-law’s (Hussein Hamad al-Fares) house in a narrow street at the middle of Raqqa, according to a detailed survey by Amnesty International.

According to the testimony of a source close to the family and the testimony of the surviving neighbors, the man had lived in his house for 50 years and refused to leave his house when the military campaign on the city began, but the series of airstrikes led to his death and burial in a mass grave close to the ruins of his house. The remains were later moved to a cemetery outside the city without identifying bodies and recognizing victims.

The international law deals with mass graves as “crime scenes” and considers exhuming bodies from mass graves in primitive ways to be one of the reasons leading to concealing the traces of the crime or why and how the victims were killed. Bodies, where they are, and how they look are evidence that should not be tampered with before forensic and legal examination as a part of investigations, as explained by legal experts.

Which now makes finding and identifying the remains of a victim that was buried in a mass grave and moved somewhere else, like the remains of Nawfa’s son, nearly impossible.

Dr. Mahmoud Kahil, forensic expert, argues that “the main problem with the process of moving mass graves is that it will cause the identities of the dead people to be lost and take away their families’ right to identify them.”

“In mass graves, there are no identification documents with the remains, not one piece of evidence, thus, the identified bodies are only the bodies that were buried in homes or were under fallen ceilings. The rest of the bodies have no papers.”

– Yasser al-Khamis, head of the Syrian Missing Persons and Forensic Team in Raqqa Civil Council (First Responders Team)

In the year when al-Fayyad’s family and Mrs. Nawfa’s son were killed, another 1600 civilians were killed in air and artillery bombardment by the coalition according to documentations by Amnesty International and Airwars, after an analysis of 200 airstrike sites, while others were killed as a result of battles, bombardment, and blockade targeting the city.

Moving the Remains Again!

In April 2013, ISIS announced its control over Raqqa, and in July 2014, a US-led coalition to defeat ISIS was formed.In 2016, US-backed “SDF” waged a campaign to take control over Raqqa, and was able to take control over it in October 2017.

As a result of these battles, Raqqa became the most destroyed city of the modern age, according to OCHAA, and around 80% of the city was left uninhabitable.

Amnesty International says that over 2500 bodies were exhumed from Raqqa, most of which are of civilians who had nothing to do with the conflict other than living on the battlefield. The organization believes that around 3 thousand bodies remain under the rubble or in mass graves, most of which are also civilians.

Its report, “Syria: War of Annihilation: Devastating Toll on Civilians, Raqqa ─ Syria” published in June 2018, describes the civilian’s situation as they are “killed by the coalition forces’ missiles, buried under the rubble, and killed by random artillery shells of the SDF, in addition to those killed by ISIS’ snipers and mines scattered on escape routes, in a strange joint mission to murder.”

A night before ISIS’ exit, besieged civilians had to bury their dead under fire, and since burial in public cemeteries became impossible, residents turned to burying their families and neighbors in public spaces, playgrounds, parks, and even inside and next to their homes or in random mass graves.After the SDF took control over Raqqa, the First Responders Team’s “body exhumation” department began examining mass graves and moving the remains outside the city to cemeteries that were especially made to entomb the remains of those who were in mass graves in Raqqa.

Al Taj mass grave, south of Al Taj hall, from which the process of moving the remains took over a month, from 6 June to 26 July, was only one of 28 graves from which the team has exhumed and moved bodies to other places.

The number of bodies exhumed by the team involving volunteers, diggers, and coroners, was over 6100 bodies, only 700 of which were identified and given to their families since the team started working on 9 January 2018. Thus, leaving the identities of 5400 bodies, among which the remains of Nawfa’s son, al-Fayyad’s family, and hundreds of others, unknown after the main mass graves were moved to bigger cemeteries outside the city (Al-Shohadaa, Tal Al-Bay’a, and Hittin) to be put in the ground there.

In a report obtained by the investigative team, ICMP states that exhuming bodies in primitive ways destroys important evidence and further complicates identifying bodies.

Yasser al-Khamis, who led the search and exhumation team, believes that the role of his team was relief in the first place, and that they worked without training, due to the dire need to move the bodies from the city upon the request and urge of the residents, who started returning after ISIS’ exit.“When we entered Raqqa, we saw bodies in the streets. The city was all piles of bodies, and people lived on top of them. The bodies were, for example, in the streets, between houses and buildings, in halls, on berms, in the Euphrates, and among farmlands. Can you imagine that I’ve found 60 bodies in a wedding hall.. and witnessed constructing a building on top of 10 bodies in Harat Al-Badw?”

Gravedigger

On 21 June 2018, the sun rose on the only sound heard in a number of Raqqa’s neighborhoods, the sound of hand shovels digging the ground, interspersed with the sound of wind passing between the branches of nearby pine trees.

Diggers were then wearing light medical masks, holding blue bags to put body parts and bones in them, and starting to exhume hundreds of bodies from Al Taj mass grave which started to smell like death.

A First Responders Team volunteer, who worked with the team as a digger in this grave at these moments on that day, describes it: “I, and the rest of diggers, were writing down in a chart basic details, like the type of the body, and then put the body in a blue bag and put it in a small van to move the body to rebury them a few kilometers away.

“At Al Taj mass grave, we handed over 31 bodies to their families, after identifying the bodies by personal belongings and documents, or clothes and distinguishing marks. ISIS’ members were also recognized by their clothes.. The rest of the bodies could not be identified, so we numbered each body bag and buried them in Tal Al-Bay’a cemetery.

The digger did not know whether al-Fayyad and his family were among the bodies which remains were moved, due to the difficulty of determining the identity and sex of the victims. What he did know, though, was that only 31 bodies were handed over to their relatives, while 371 bodies of people killed and hurriedly buried here were lost in suspicious circumstances.

The digger’s words intersects with a document obtained by the investigative team on Al Taj mass grave, referring to the exhumation of 402 bodies from the grave, among which 298 male, 36 female, 45 girls, and 17 people whose sex was not determined, according to the document. “We had a choice: either all the evidence (bodies) would be gone or we work on moving them while documenting the reason of death. After two months of work, we had a database, which now contains 6100 bodies. We recorded everything about the bodies, such as any distinguishing marks like a broken tooth or anything of this kind,” Yasser al-Khamis said.

Change of Rules of Engagement

Raqqa city was called the capital of ISIS. At the time, it was overcrowded with civilians, and before the last attack, it was bombarded by the global coalition aircraft as part of rules of engagement specifically targeting ISIS, and limiting civilian casualties.

However, those rules of engagement have changed when the city was subjected to land blockade, and ISIS fighters retreated inside the city, as the land and air forces loosened up some restrictions by US laws, which resulted in a catastrophic destruction of buildings and properties, and the death of civilians, according to rights reports.

The investigative team obtained a copy of the reports recorded by the first Responders Team after exhuming bodies, including details of number of bodies recovered, work days schedule, and the body’s sex, but lack any reference to any additional information or distinguishing marks or even photos of the clothes found next to the body.

This might be explained by the fact that his team has, since ISIS’ exit, started working on exhuming the remains from graves using simple and primitive ways, driven by the requests of the residents who began to gradually return to their neighborhoods, as they lacked experience in this field, and they were mostly regular workers, accompanied by a coroner, and did not use anything but traditional digging methods.

Al-Khamis admits that “there was a hurry to exhume bodies in a nonscientific way, but this was due to the continuous complaints by the residents and their requests to move the bodies in order for everything to be back to normal, so we had to move these bodies.”Um Faisal, a resident of Raqqa, lost her husband in 2012 after he was arrested by the Syrian regime’s intelligence services in Raqqa. Her eldest son, Faisal (18), was her only support, the man of the house despite his young age as she says, but she did not get the chance to rejoice in his youth, as she lost him during the battles Raqqa has witnessed, during the global coalition forces’ bombardment.

In her humble and semi-demolished house, comprising of two bedrooms and a small kitchen, surrounded by the ruins of a city which has not yet recovered from war, she says: “Don’t reopen my wounds again, I’m trying to heal.. Faisal was my home’s pillar after Abu Faisal was arrested, but I lost both the light and the pillar.. We were displaced to Kasrat in al-Birk and stayed there for five months. We crossed the Euphrates with my two young children, after the coalition targeted the bridges, and al-Birk was not safe as the air forces were also targeting boats, it killed many people.”

When the woman returned to the city and when the residents began to move the bodies from Al Taj grave, she went asking for help in moving her son’s body to Hittin cemetery. “I could not find my son’s grave, because the residents began moving their relatives’ bodies before the Responders Team intervened to take them out systematically… So, by the residents recovering their relatives’ bodies and digging the ground, the grave’s features changed and I didn’t know where exactly Faisal’s grave was anymore,” she says.

She adds, “When the First Responders Team started to relocate Al Taj grave, I did not find my son’s body among those they were moving or have allegedly documented. Thus, Faisal died twice, once due to the US-led Coalition aircraft, and the second time when I could not find his grave nor his body”.

Al-Khamis, who still leads the Syrian Missing Persons and Forensic Team, which consists of 43 people (including doctors, data entry clerks, jurists, officers, and engineers), says, “As a team, we did not blur evidence. On the contrary, we documented all undocumented bodies. Legal evidence might be lost, but the body eventually was buried in the cemetery after knowing the cause of death, bombing or execution, or of any other reason. We are proud of our work… our team did not sin but made a mistake… and making a mistake sampling and locating is better than making a mistake and losing the traces of the corpses completely”.

Bodies Hurriedly Buried

The Investigation Team obtained videos documenting the transfer of mass graves, and we also monitored the steps of the relocation, where bodies are placed in bags and then buried in cemeteries like Tal Al-Bay’a, located five kilometres east of Raqqa and considered a public cemetery.

The International Commission on Missing Persons, an international organization working to develop effective procedures for the protection of mass graves, confirmed that the exhumation according to the Commission’s documents requires the analysis of skeletal remains of mass graves and the collection of information on missing persons, the ability to conduct excavations, and the skills used to identify corpses and determine the cause of death.

Thirteen families from Raqqa, who we have contacted and are living in different geographical areas near the city, explained to us that the majority of corpses in mass graves belong to those who were killed by the bombing of the city and the battles the city has witnessed in the last weeks before being taken over and were buried in difficult conditions.“The families of the victims and those missing in mass graves deserve to know the fate of their children and to have access to justice. Preserving evidence from these mass graves is an essential part of this process”.

The Black Stadium

Ammar Gh. (43 years), from the city of Raqqa and works as a microbus driver to transport passengers on the Raqqa-Deir ez-Zor road, recalls how ISIS arrested his cousin in 2016 and put him in Al-Akirshi prison. They then transferred him to the Municipal Stadium in Raqqa (Black Stadium), which the organization used as a headquarter, only to be killed there by the Coalition bombing of the stadium in June 2017.

According to the information that reached the family, the young man was buried in Al-Fakhikha mass grave, south of the Euphrates river (Al-Kasrat area).

The family now thinks that the body of their son is located somewhere in Raqqa, after the transfer of corpses from Al-Fakhikha cemetery to Tal Al-Bay’a cemetery at the beginning of the year 2020. Ammar says, “The family has tried to find where the body of my cousin is through the Responders Team but there were no distinctive traces…In Tal Al-Bay’a cemetery (to where the bodies were transferred from the mass grave of Al-Fakhikha), many corpses were not recognized by the people… They are very large numbers .. thousands of bodies which were not identified because there is no DNA testing device”, as he said.

The young man holds the international community and international organizations accountable for that, as they did not probably and quickly help to identify the dead and the fate of the bodies, as the capabilities of the forensic doctors are limited, the Responders Team work is slow, and there are no DNA testing devices.

“People are waiting impatiently”, he says. He pointed out that getting DNA test devices and identifying the bodies is the only way to determine the identity of more than 5 thousand unidentified bodies.

The Forensic and Missing Persons team has always complained about the lack of support and experts in archaeology and anthropology. Yasser Al-Khamis, who leads the team, agrees with what Ammar and the rest are saying and calls for the need to provide such devices that make the work of the Forensic team much easier. He says, “We need DNA test devices, as well as intensive training courses to deal with the situation”.

For his part, Fadel Abdul Ghany, Head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, calls the Central Tracing Agency, run by the International Committee of the Red Cross, to start aiding in the search for thousands of missing persons in Syria, and trying to reveal their fate, which is a way to help determine the fate of the bodies and the missing, according to him.

Where is My Brother’s Body?

Fayez (41 years), from Raqqa – Ben Al-Jisreen, has lost his brother Salah (43 years) during the battles and fighting between SDF and ISIS near Al-Karajat area, at the end of 2017.

We got a number to contact him via WhatsApp to find out the fate of his brother’s body, and we found out that he is currently out of Raqqa and living in Turkey as a refugee. He agreed to speak on the condition that his full name not be disclosed because his family is still in Raqqa.

Fayez narrates the details of the story, recalling when his brother Salah left home one afternoon “to search for a place from which he could secure bread or anything to eat from the shops near Al-Karaj {the garage}, but he was late until after the Maghrib call and did not come back, while we were home waiting for him to come back, not knowing it was the last time we would see Salah”.

The tall buildings in the area and near Salah’s home were stationed by ISIS snipers, and these buildings were largely targeted by the Coalition forces and the SDF. Used by the snipers, these building were thus destructed, while Ben Al-Jisreen area was targeted by SDF.

Every moving thing is a target, according to Fayez. He says, “Salah did not come back that day and there was no way to communicate with him. A resident of the neighborhood found his body with a sniper’s bullet in his chest, near Al-Karajat area, and was able to pull his body with some neighbors. They buried him in the nearby cemetery, where the people and ISIS buried the dead”.

While the former director of the forensic medicine authority in the Free Aleppo Governorate, Dr. Mohammad Kahil, considers that moving bodies from mass graves to other cemeteries without documentation is considered a crime on its own, in addition to the crime of murder.To this day, the family does not know who targeted Salah and put an end to his life, and Fayez does not know exactly what happened to his brother’s body after moving the graves outside the city after they left Raqqa and had the chance to go to Turkey through the city of A’zaz.

Praying on the Grave

In July of 2018, a Human Rights Watch report confirmed that, if workers continue to exhume the graves without appropriate technical training, equipment, and support, families may lose the chance to accurately identify the remains of their beloved ones.

According to the same report, “evidence related to the crimes in the area might be lost, including ISIS crimes and others”.

“We will not move any new bodies until we have received training, as well as devices to take samples from the bodies and reveal the reason of death”, Yasser Al- Khamis confirms the endeavour of his team in the coming days. Meanwhile, Um Faisal still hopes to find the grave of her son one day… Every day she goes to the place where he was first buried (Al Taj grave) and reads Al-Fatihah for his soul, then goes to where he was buried the second time (where his remains were transferred to the Hittin cemetery) and reads Al-Fatihah for his soul again, hoping her prayers will reach his soul and absent body.

As for Fayez, despite not knowing where his brother’s body is, who moved it, and how they did move it until now, he hopes to be able one day to stand at his brother’s grave, who left three kids behind, the oldest of whom is 8 years old and the youngest is 2 years old, to tell him what happened to their city, which was destroyed by the war.

*The investigation was done under the supervision of the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism – SIRAJ, published on DARAJ.

The post Syrians Lose Their Relatives’ Remains After They Were Removed From Mass Graves appeared first on SIRAJ.

Military service is mandatory for Syrian men between the ages of 18 and 42, and the stakes rose significantly in February when an army official announced on Facebook that a new regulation would allow authorities to confiscate the property of “service evaders” and their families. Pressure was mounting on Yousef to decide.

And so, in June, he made his way to the Syrian Embassy in Stockholm with $8,000 in cash, ready to pay the fee to have his name taken off the conscription rolls. A shiver ran down his spine as he collected his receipt.

“This money will be used by the Syrian regime to buy weapons and kill more people,” Yousef told OCCRP, his voice trembling.

He is far from alone. About a fifth of Syria’s population of 17 million are men of military age, according to data from the World Bank. With some 6.6 million Syrians having fled abroad since the protest movement of early 2011 slipped into civil war, there are likely to be hundreds of thousands in Yousef’s position.

Studies have shown that the threat of being conscripted is a major reason many refugees fear returning to Syria.

The Syrian government has been able to leverage this anxiety into revenue, harvesting foreign currency from the roughly 1 million Syrians who have settled in Europe to help prop up their ailing budget after U.S. sanctions cut them off from the international banking system last year.

Syrian embassies, which used to only process paperwork for the military exemptions, have recently begun collecting cash payments. Two researchers, an airport official, and a former diplomat interviewed by OCCRP and the Syrian Investigative Reporting Unit (SIRAJ), said they suspected the cash makes its way back to Syria via diplomatic pouch.

Although it is difficult to determine exactly how many Syrians have paid the military exemption fees, government documents and official statements show that Bashar Al-Assad’s government projected that the policy would raise substantial income.

The findings speak to the lengths the Syrian government is going to in order to raise cash, and raise questions about when exactly sovereign relations between a government and citizens slip into a form of extortion.

Syria’s army, finance ministry, foreign ministry, central bank, and military recruitment service did not respond to requests for comment. U.S. authorities declined to comment.

Sanctions and Crisis

In June last year, the U.S. implemented the Caesar Act, a tough set of sanctions named for a defected Syrian officer who had leaked tens of thousands of photos of torture victims in Syrian prisons six years earlier.

The sanctions worsened an already difficult financial situation for Syria, cutting off its access to the international banking system. Processing payments for vital imports such as wheat and oil products became even harder, and the Syrian pound — now worth barely one percent of its pre-crisis value against the dollar — suffered further losses.

“Shortage in foreign currency has become an acute problem, especially after the Caesar Act came into force,” Armenak Tokmajyan, a researcher at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, told OCCRP. “The regime needs foreign currency. The more it has, the longer it will survive.”

Under pressure, the government has leaned increasingly on its diaspora to fill its coffers since the crisis broke out. A Syrian passport, for instance, is one of the world’s most expensive to obtain abroad, at $300 for a new passport and $800 to get it expedited.

The military exemption fees are even more substantial.

Conscription has long been difficult to escape in Syria, where the constitution enshrines military service as a “sacred duty.”

Two recent amendments to Syria’s conscription law laid the groundwork for the situation now confronting Yousef and many others. The first, passed in August 2014, raised the exemption fee from $4,000 to $8,000. The second, in December 2019, allowed the government to seize assets without prior warning from people who reached the age of 42 and had not yet performed their service or received an exemption.

Early this year, the head of the military’s Allowance and Exemption Branch, Brigadier General Elias Al-Bitar, stoked the fears of many potential recruits when he announced on Facebook that the new amendment was going into effect.

Fear of Confiscation

It’s unclear to what extent the new conscription law amendment has been used to seize assets in Syria. But there was already precedent in the infamous “Law No. 10” of 2018, which effectively allowed authorities to seize property without due process, and the earlier “Decree 66,” which has been used to expel residents of previously opposition-held areas.

Sara Kayyali, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, told OCCRP that the organization had received “fairly credible reports” from people whose assets had been placed on lists to be frozen by the finance ministry.

Although the lists did not say exactly why the assets would be frozen, “it did happen after Caesar was implemented, so we estimate that these cases are a result of assets freezing for people evading military conscription,” Kayyali said.

There are also signs the government expected the conscription amendment to bring in new revenues.

A parliamentary study from 2015 — the year after Syria raised the fee — predicted that payments to avoid service could bring in over $1.2 billion a year, even if only 10 to 15 percent of Syrians wanted for conscription actually paid up, Mujeeb Al-Rahman Al-Dandan, a Syrian member of parliament, told local radio in an interview in November last year.

The study has not been made public. But according to Dandan, it found that annual revenues from the fee could rise to between $2 to $3 billion within five years, meaning it would be a “good contributor to the treasury” and could even “help raise the wages of public servants, including military personnel.”

Syria’s 2021 budget projection predicts revenues from the military exemption fees to reach 240 billion Syrian pounds — about $190 million at the official exchange rate — up from 70 billion pounds in 2020, according to copies published in Syria’s Official Gazette.

The estimated revenue makes up 3.2 percent of this year’s budget revenue, up from 1.75 percent in 2020, Syrian economist Karam Shaar told OCCRP.

The government has also made a point of pursuing draft dodgers. In January 2019, the defense ministry issued lists of more than a quarter of a million people wanted for reserve recruitment and circulated them to recruitment offices around the country.

The Sweden Case

Sweden illustrates how the new amendments have played out among Syria’s diaspora. The Scandinavian country hosts about 114,000 of the roughly 1 million Syrian refugees in Europe and is home to tens of thousands of relatively new arrivals as well as second- and third-generation Syrians.

Between June and August this year, OCCRP reporters made three visits to the Syrian Embassy in Stockholm. They counted an average of 10 applicants a day waiting in the embassy’s queue for military service exemption.

Another hint of how many people were paying the exemption fees came a year earlier, in June 2020, when the embassy website published the names of 43 Syrians cleared to pay the fee. It is unclear exactly when those on the list applied, but for other procedures, such as passport issuance, the embassy usually issues its lists once per month.

The June post was the last such public announcement.

An embassy employee — speaking to an undercover OCCRP reporter who did not identify himself — said he could not say exactly how many had applied for the service exemption, but that there had been a “significant increase” in the first half of 2021, which he attributed to Bitar’s statement.

“On some days, 10 come to us and on other days the figure can go up to 50,” the employee said. If true, this would mean the embassy could be taking in as much as $400,000 in cash on some days.

Cash Is King

Even before the Caesar Act, the European Union and the United States had broadened sanctions to include Syria’s central bank. This made it almost impossible for Syrian embassies in European countries to send funds to Syria electronically, as local commercial banks refused to carry out the transactions.

A sign posted at the entrance of the embassy in Stockholm in June 2020 hinted at the difficulties, saying payments needed to be in cash after the Swedish electronic payment processor Bambora had stopped working with the mission.

Susanne Stöger, a spokesperson for Bambora, told OCCRP that the payment service had terminated its contract with the embassy on instructions from MasterCard — one of the credit card brands whose payments they process — given prohibitions on dealing with the Syrian government. Wordline, the payment services company that owns Bambora, had also flagged Syria as an “unacceptable” risk, she said.

Two researchers, an airport official, and a former diplomat said they suspected that the embassies were using diplomatic pouches to get around these restrictions.

Ayman Abdel Nour, a Washington, D.C.-based researcher and director of an opposition media outlet, told OCCRP that the Caesar Act had forced the Syrian government to adapt, listing diplomatic pouches as one of the possibilities. “The more money the regime gets, the longer it stays in power,” he said.

Bassam Al-Emadi, who served as Syria’s ambassador to Sweden between 2004 and 2008 and then defected in 2011 and now lives in Spain, also said he suspected that the embassies were using diplomatic pouches to send cash back to Syria.

If true, the move would violate the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which regulates the work of diplomatic missions, he said. The convention says that “packages constituting the diplomatic bag must bear visible external marks of their character and may contain only diplomatic documents or articles intended for official use.”

“Diplomatic immunity does not cover sending money inside the diplomatic bag,” Emadi said.

“I Will Not Do It”

OCCRP spoke with ten Syrians — eight in Sweden, one in Germany, and one in Lebanon — who decided to pay the conscription fee. Some, like Yousef, were frightened by the prospect of asset seizures in Syria. Others had more practical reasons.

One 29-year-old named Ali said he paid the fee at the encouragement of his family, who considered the payment to be “a form of direct participation in the Syrian war effort.”

Gian, a Syrian who works at a home for the elderly in Frankfurt, Germany, said he had no issue in paying the money.

“I am getting a monthly salary, the exemption process is easy, and I want to safeguard my family’s property in Syria from being seized,” Gian said. He said three relatives with asylum status in Germany also paid the fee.

But many Syrians are still leery of funding the government they feel was responsible for sending them into exile.

Abdullah Jaafar, a 35-year-old Syrian who has been living in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, for eight years, said he sees the exemption payments as a kind of extortion.

“I have the full amount, and I can pay it, but I will not do it,” Jaafar said. “This government is illegal.”

*Abdullatif Haj Mohammad (SIRAJ), Sana Sbouai (OCCRP), and Lara Dihmis (OCCRP) contributed reporting.

The post How Syria’s Embassies in Europe Help Fund the War Back Home appeared first on SIRAJ.

“The corpses the officers had marked we would later dig up and hand back to them. They would ask the victims’ families for $1,500 to $3,000 per body.”

Syria’s Sinister yet Lucrative Trade in Dead Bodies, Anwar al-Muhammad was wandering around the garbage dump like he had done for years, looking for anything of value that could be traded or sold, when he suddenly smelt a strange smell. It was moldy mixed with the reek of flesh. At first he thought it was a dead dog.

What the 35-year-old garbage collector found instead in the landfill in the village of Hadath east of Aleppo would turn his life upside down, and turn him into a very rich man.

As it turned out, the smell emanated from the partly decomposed body of someone recently liquidated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).“If it were not for the remains of God’s creation, I would not have been able to build my house on the land I inherited from my father,” said Anwar pointing at his home. “Look, it has a courtyard and stone fences. And I have planted olive seedlings.” Having dug a hole next to the dump Anwar buried what was left of the corpse. He feared leaving it out in the open might attract stray dogs. This was in August 2014.

Like most people in the region, Anwar did not know why ISIS killed these people and dumped their bodies the way they did. Yet, on the foreheads of most of the bodies ISIS fighters had written in blue or black “infidel” or “apostate.”

After the first corpse had been dumped, many others followed,” Anwar explained. “Most bodies had ropes around their feet, hands or necks. Initially, the ISIS fighters warned me that if I were to recognize a body and contact the family, my place would be among the dead.”

Like most people in the region, Anwar did not know why ISIS killed these people and dumped their bodies the way they did. Yet, on the foreheads of most of the bodies ISIS fighters had written in blue or black “infidel” or “apostate.”

ISIS used to throw bodies in wells, dry streams or river beds and garbage dumps, according to reports issued by both local and international human rights organizations.

Anwar gradually became aware that the bodies had a value and price, as some point he started selling them to the victims’ relatives. “That’s how I made the money I would never have made just working in a landfill,” he said.

13th Century Fatwa

From 2013 to 2015, more than 20 mass graves were found across Syria, containing thousands of bodies. One of the most famous places where ISIS used to dump its victims is the 50-meter deep Al-Hota pit, located some 85 kilometers from the northern city of Raqqa.

“The Al Hota gorge was once a beautiful natural site,” said Syrian researcher Sarah Kayyali in Into The Abyss, a report issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in May last year. “It became a place for terror and punishment.”

During our 18-month investigation in Syria and neighboring countries, we did many interviews and obtained photographs confirming the trade in dead bodies. We tracked four cases in different geographical areas to ensure there is a pattern to the trade which has made some individuals involved in the conflict very rich indeed.

In the governorates of Deir Ezzor and Raqqa and the countryside of Aleppo, ISIS did not give the bodies to the families, based on a fatwa issued by the 13th century Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, which states it is forbidden to bury an “apostate” in a Muslim cemetery. And so ISIS threw them in wells, dumps and large pits instead.

In 2015, one family was searching the dumps in the countryside north of Allepo for the body of their son, who had been killed by ISIS for “dealing with foreign parties.”The family met Anwar and offered him $7,000 for finding their son, after they had been told his body was thrown onto a village dump. They even told Anwar not to worry “if the corpse were decayed, for they could still recognize it from the teeth.”

Anwar told the ISIS fighters who regularly came to the dump to throw bodies about the family looking for their son. They demanded $10,000 for the body. Anwar would get a commission of 100,000 Syrian pounds.

8,143 People Still Missing

“The Islamic State’s (ISIS) expansion in Iraq and Syria featured horrendous public abuses,” HRW stated in its report Kidnapped By ISIS, which was issued in February 2019. “Largely unseen but equally egregious were the widespread detentions and kidnappings – thousands of people snatched from their homes and cars and at checkpoints, who subsequently went missing.”

While the full scale of the missing is not known, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has reported more than 8,143 cases of individuals detained by ISIS whose fates remain unknown. The majority of those taken were men. But HRW also documented the disappearances of several women.

“ISIS members would ask for money in exchange for informing families about the fate of their son,” Anwar said. “People did not bargain a lot.”

When we were researching other waste dumps in the Aleppo countryside to confirm what Anwar told us, one worker there told us: “They were throwing bodies, once or twice a day. And I also saw them take bodies from the dump.”

Yasser Al-Najjar used to work as an official for the Syrian military authorities negotiating the exchange of prisoners and dead bodies. “ISIS at times had crippling conditions in their requests,” he said in his office in Kilis in southern Turkey. “But that did not stop them from selling bodies for money. In the shadows, far away from media and cameras, anything is possible in Syria.”

SNHR director Fadel Abdul-Ghani told us how one of his teams once witnessed an exchange between the Syrian regime and opposition factions, in which the bodies of Iranian militants were handed over in return for the release of detainees.

In Damascus

A Syrian man currently living in the Swedish capital Stockholm used to work for a public funeral service in Damascus which transported bodies to cemeteries on a daily basis. At first, he refused to speak with us, but after several calls he finally agreed to give us his testimony on the condition of anonymity.

“Our assignment was to transport bodies from the Tishreen Military Hospital and the Mezzeh 601 Military Hospital to two large cemeteries in Qatifah, north of Damascus, and one in Najha, south of the capital,” he said. “The car looked like a decorated box with pictures of Bashar al-Assad on all sides, so we could pass all checkpoints.”

“Some corpses had specific numbers or signs on them, which we would bury next to the mass grave,” he continued. “The others were thrown into the mass grave, one on top of the other, and covered with sand by a bulldozer.”

“The corpses which the officers had marked, we would later take out and hand back to them,” he added, after pausing to drink a cup of water. “For each body, they demanded some $1,500 to $3,000 from the victims’ families.”

He then made us listen to audio recordings and phone messages of conversations between him and the military and security officers. He estimated the total number of bodies he contributed to selling at 125.

According to HRW, the Syrian regime arrested and forcibly disappeared tens of thousands of people. The detention centers under its control are known for the widespread and systematic use of torture, and catastrophic living conditions. According to the SNHN, there are still some 130,000 detainees in the detention centers of the Syrian regime, including 7,913 women and 3,561 children, which represents 88.5% of all detainees in Syria.

The Corpse Market

In August 2020, 30-year-old May learnt that her husband Zaid Jibril had been killed three years after his arrest by the Syrian regime’s security forces for “organizing anti-regime demonstrations.” He was buried in the Qatifah cemetery north of Damascus,May said she was forced to sell her house to be able to pay $7,000 to an officer in the Syrian security services through a local broker, who then brought her husband’s body, so she could bury it.

“I thank God I was able to obtain my husband’s body so our children can visit,” said May by Skype from a refugee camp in the northwestern state of Idlib. “Many families paid money to regime officers and brokers. Many sold everything they owned to obtain news of their loved ones.”

“Trading in corpses, mortgaging them to exchange or sell them is considered a crime against humanity by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” said legal expert Hussein Hamadeh.

According to him, any assault on or mutilation of corpses, leaving them in the open, not allowing them to be buried, using them as tools of political pressure or selling them violates international law. Authorities are furthermore not allowed to intentionally withhold information about those missing, given the level of anxiety and mental stress it produces for friends and families. When the person in question dies, the authorities must provide the family with information regarding the place of burial.

Five BodiesAhmed Al-Sayed’s family learnt that one of their sons had been arrested by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) during their control of the city of Raqqa in October 2017.

The young man was arrested after an airstrike near the Abu Al-Hays intersection. The 34-year-old was transferred to a nearby medical center. His father told us that the family had asked all the center’s health workers about their son, but at first they could not find him.

A few days later a  military source told the family their son had been killed. Obtaining the body would cost them $10,000. “We paid the full amount to a SDF commander through a local broker and started digging near the archaeological park in Raqqa,” said Ahmed’s brother. “We found five bodies, one of which was my brother. We reburied the others in the same place, while we took my brother’s body to the family cemetery on the outskirts of Raqqa.”

We requested representatives of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, as well as the Syrian Ministry of Interior to comment on our findings, yet did not receive a response.

As soon as the burial begins, the march of Abu Al-Ward begins too. And of all others who work just like him.

The March of Abu Ward

Abu Al-Ward is a local broker in the city of Idlib. After burying some bodies, he and three young men set out to search for a corpse that someone had asked for in exchange for $3,000.

In the center of Idlib, you can see bodies entering the forensic medical center on a daily basis. They were found, or belong to people killed in mysterious circumstances. Some 75 bodies a week arrive, according to the center’s documentation office.

“There are bodies that the courts and hospitals refuse to hand over to their families, especially those known as Shabiha [gangs closely related to the Baath Party],” said Abu Al-Ward by WhatsApp. “What follows is the process of handing over the body and receiving the money.”

“The body remains in the fridge for some 15 days to a month,” said Ali Al-Taqash who works at a medical center. “Samples for DNA testing are stored to facilitate future identification.”

As soon as the burial begins, the march of Abu Al-Ward begins too. And of all others who work just like him.

The Corpse in the Well

On January 6, 2014, the family of Mohamad al-Ali (a pseudonym) managed to obtain his body, which had been thrown in a well near the town of Deir Sunbul in the Idlib countryside.

Mohamad had been kidnapped at a checkpoint of the Syrian Revolutionaries Front (SRF) and was later liquidated by a gunshot to the head

“After negotiations that lasted for days, we paid a local mediator $10,000 and the SRF allowed us to extract the body from the well,” said the young man’s family.

Local activists we met in the north of Syria and Turkey said they witnessed the sale of at least five bodies between January 2012 and March 2014. Their statements were backed by photographs and videos of the negotiations and sale, which are in our possession.

Military Gains

On the road between the Jenderes border crossing and the village of Qatma north of Aleppo, we met Abu Jaafar, who used to be responsible for forensic medicine in the opposition-held areas east of Syria until late 2016.

He had witnessed the exchange of bodies between the armed opposition and the regime and pointed at another dimension of the trade, which reflected military gains in the war.

“The body of one fighter in an Iranian-backed militia was exchanged for five or six detainees alive in the prisons of the Syrian regime,” he said.

The Syrian war has witnessed countless negotiations and exchanges of bodies and prisoners between the regime and the opposition. In August 2012, the Al-Baraa Brigade in Eastern Ghouta concluded a deal with the regime to release over 2,000 detainees from Syrian prisons, in exchange for the release of 48 Iranians, most of them belonging to the military.

“Any assault on a corpse is considered a crime prohibited in international law,” said SNHN director Abdul-Ghani. “Take the The Hague Convention on respecting the laws and customs of war, which clearly stipulates a commander is responsible for all actions of people under his command, and calls for respecting the dead and preventing the remains from being despoiled.”

This investigation was carried out under supervision of the Syrian Investigative Journalism Unit Siraj and edited by Mohammad Bassiki. published on DARAJ. 

The post Syria’s Sinister yet Lucrative Trade in Dead Bodies appeared first on SIRAJ.

Samer is a Christian man who married a Muslim woman in the village of Masyaf, after a love story that lasted around seven years. In 2011, he tried to find legal loopholes in the Civil Law, so that he could register his child Murad. Their marriage was approved by the two families without any serious objections, despite their different religions, with everybody attending the ceremony in the Monastery of St. George’s church, in Awja al-Jabb area in Aleppo.

Samer was fully aware that the registration of his marriage in the Syrian civil courts and official circles, would require him to convert to Islam. “My wife and I decided not to,” said the young man.

The couple resorted to establishing their baby’s lineage according to Christianity in the husband’s civil registry, thus, obtaining a national identification number.

Although Samer managed to solve his son’s lineage establishment problem, he and his wife are still single according to the state’s records and their official papers, which means that his wife is deprived of her rights (dowry, alimony, and a place of residence) in the event of any discord that happens between them. Worse still, is that each of them could marry someone else since their marriage remains unregistered in official circles.

In Syria, whoever wishes to marry a Muslim woman, a Christian man or that of any other religion, will encounter two choices; First, to renounce his religion, in the event of which his family may shun him and deprive him of his inheritance, as was the case of the church which abandoned some of those who apparently proclaimed their conversion to Islam before the court. The other choice would be not to convert to Islam, but his marriage will remain unregistered in official courts, which leaves the children of unknown lineage and deprives women of their rights.

According to Article 28 of the Civil Status Act 26/2007, “The Syrian Law considers the child born in a marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian man, a child born out of wedlock.”

Moreover, Article 28 stipulates that the civil registrar shall not mention the name of the father or the mother, or both, concerning registering an illegitimate child, unless otherwise provided by the concerned person in writing.

Muhammad Samer Moayad (a lawyer specialized in Personal Status) told reporters that according to the Personal Status Act No. 59/1953, the marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian man shall be deemed null and void, and “The ruling of nullity and adultery is the same.”

Activists and legal experts are demanding the enforcement of civil marriage and the strengthening of secularism of the state in the constitution by separating religion from the state, in an endeavor to change this law that they deem unjust. They believe that forcing a Christian who married a Muslim woman to proclaim his conversion to Islam contradicts the constitution that guarantees freedom of belief, while a Muslim woman is not entitled to proclaim her conversion to Christianity in the same way.

“The marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian is not officially registered unless he converts to Islam, which is against the constitution. Where is the equality when a Christian woman is allowed to marry a Muslim, but a Muslim woman is not entitled to marry a Christian?” asks Antoun Musleh, the head of Court Spiritual of Damascus and the southern region.

The matter is getting more complicated socially, as this marriage, in case it does happen, is often rejected by the newlyweds’ families and close friends, even if the Christian husband converted to Islam, or his Muslim wife was baptized in the church. Indeed, it is not the same case as it differs from one city to another, and even within the same family.

According to the statistics of the Sharia court in Damascus that were reviewed by the reporters,  hundreds of Christians converted from their religion to Islam between 2009 and 2018.

The total number of people who changed their religion or sects in Syria, during a period of ten years, is estimated to be 2102 people.

In this investigation, and during the tenure of more than a year and a half, our team has interviewed 15 Syrian nationals of different religions, and they suffered the dire consequences of civil marriage and from the ruling against the marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian.

The cases spread between Damascus, Aleppo, Tartous, and the villages of Reef Hama, such as Masyaf, Homs Governorate, and its countryside, and Tartus Governorate and its countryside such as Safita, in addition to Latakia and its countryside.

We have also documented online marriages of couples who nnow live in Sweden and Brazil, with the same problems.

“Undercover”

After the completion of the marriage socially, the couple encounters a different kind of suffering, which is not receiving the identification paper, namely, the family register, marriage contract, and civil record (to get a record) which proves the family status and the like. Also, the availability of these documents differs between the cases which were documented by the report. Furthermore, the father and the mother shall be deemed single in the official documents unless the Christian father converted to Islam.

Consequently, some of them convert to Islam without any true belief in the religion just to claim their rights and their children’s.

What’s made the matter worse, is the long-term impact, from which the children of a Christian father and Muslim mother suffer, as the child is treated as an illegitimate son or “a child of sin.”

“An invalid marriage does not have any effect in terms of the marriage money and the rights of the wife,” according to the lawyer, Muhammad Samer Moayad.

One of the reporters visited the civil registry office in Damascus and claimed that he was a Christian, married to a Muslim woman, and wanted to register his daughter but did not want to convert to Islam.

He knew that he could register his child on the father’s record, lineage, and surname, without registering the marriage. the newborn will get the mother’s religion (Islam) and the name and surname will be mentioned after the parents submit an Affidavit in writing. The child will also get her identification papers, such as issuing the registry (family record) and later the personal ID without any indication of the fact that she was born out of wedlock.

Loss of Lineage!

For her part, Rahadah Abdush (a lawyer specialized in women and child cases) from Damascus confirms that a child born from the marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian loses his lineage because he is registered on the lineage of his mother.

The law considers this child illegitimate and is treated as a child of unknown descent, so the paternity of the child goes to his mother and he inherits from her.

On the other hand, the child (unlike his brothers who may be born from another normally registered marriage) shall be deprived of his right of inheritance and lineage, due to his violation of the Personal Status Law, as the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim is considered invalid, and therefore is not governed by the laws of marriage and their consequences.

Abdush believes that the law is incompatible with the basic human rights and co-existence, which are enshrined in the everyday life of the Syrian society, and the Syrian constitution that stipulates, in Article 33: “All citizens have equal rights and duties. There is no discrimination among them on the basis of gender, origin, language, religion, or creed,” However, Muslim women in Syria cannot get married to Christian men according to Article 48 of the Personal Status Law, while Christian women are allowed to get married to Muslim men.

Mahmoud Maarawi, the Sharia judge from Damascus, denied what has been mentioned above and considers that “There is no applicable law that contradicts the constitution.”

According to Abdush, a Muslim woman is entitled to inherit from her Muslim husband, while a Christian woman is not entitled to inherit from her Muslim husband. That is because non-Muslims are not allowed to inherit from Muslims, according to Article 264 of the Personal Status Law.

Also, Christian men are not entitled to inherit from their Muslim wives, due to difference of religions, according to Article 50 of the same law, which stipulates that “Invalid marriage does not result in any of the legal consequences of the valid marriage even if the first sexual intercourse happened.”

Lost Rights

“Imagine someone living and dying with no papers. How are you supposed to live when you have no identity, like a ghost, no one noticing your existence?” this is how Maha Mamo (a daughter of a Syrian Christian dad and a Syrian Muslim mom who currently lives in Brazil) described some of the lost rights experienced those children who result from the marriage of a Muslim woman and a Christian man.

“Can you imagine that my brother did not own any identity documents when he was alive except for the refugee death certificate which we obtained after he was killed in one of the Brazilian streets.”

Maha’s parents lived in Aleppo without getting married because their families refused their marriage. Thus, they escaped from Syrian to Lebanon in November 1985 and got married in a church. However, Syrian law does not acknowledge this marriage.

Maha was born on 29th February 1988 and was brought up with her brother and sister in Lebanon without any identity documents except for an identification document she obtained from the Mukhtar. Thus, she lost her most basic human rights.

Maha managed to take the high school exam after a phone call conducted between the principal of her school and the Minister of Education who gave her a paper authorizing her to take the exam. She passed it and got her baccalaureate degree with a score that qualifies her to join the Faculty of Medicine. Accordingly, Maha went to the Lebanese university with her certificate, but the registration official threw the papers away and shouted at her: “Get out of here, where is your passport and identity papers?” without even listening to her story.

The Lebanese universities refused to register her as a student except for one private university. Maha got her MBA degree. She corresponded with international embassies all over the world, looking for a country where she would be acknowledged, but all her attempts failed. Then, Brazil agreed to help her by considering her as a refugee daughter of a Syrian father and mother.

Maha said, in a phone call with the reporters from her current residence in Brazil, “My mom and dad are still singles according to the Syrian official papers, although they have passports and ID cards.”

Maha went to Brazil with travel documentation that was presented to her by the Brazilian embassy which authorized her to travel from Lebanon to Brazil. She did not own any personal documents and was not registered. In Brazil, according to Maha, there are no laws related to people with no nationalities and they are not even defined in any certain way.

The only way Maha tried to obtain legal papers there was by applying for asylum provided that her parents are from war-stricken Syria. After a year and a half, the Brazilian government hardly agreed to grant her refugee status, and that’s how she became entitled to work, obtained a number to pay taxes, and a refugee ID card, which enabled her and her siblings to live in Brazil for five years.

Alleged Conversion to Islam

Christians or non-Muslims who want to marry a Muslim woman inside Syria have no choice other than conversion to Islam so that their children’s rights will be guaranteed. This is what F. A (Christian young man from Reef Tartous) realized. F.A has loved his Muslim girlfriend since they were at school, but he had to pretend he converted to Islam in front of the Syariah Court of Latakia. Accordingly, he managed to document their marriage, while he continued to practice his Christian rituals.

Then, they conducted a canonical marriage in Aleppo in the presence of a Christian minister, and the wife was baptized according to the Christian rituals. F.A told the reporters: “The Syariah Court of Latakia and Tartous will not document the marriage without a civil registration extract that proves that I am Muslim. However, in Aleppo, they were flexible and accepted. So, I documented my marriage there, but I do not have a family book yet.”

The couple decided to have their first child two months after they were married, and they were not worried because they knew all the legal details.

The young man said: “Before I got married, I changed my accommodation in the papers from the Reef Tartous to Aleppo, and I was done with transferring the civil registry certificate before anything else. If I were still registered in Reef Tartous, my family would have known when I wanted to document my conversion to Islam, as it’s a tight-knit community. Also, the law prohibits transferring the civil registry certificate from a governorate to another, but greasing some palms helped me to do so.”

“I registered my child 6 months after his birth, and when he become in the ninth grade in school, I will have to document my conversion to Islam at the Personal Status Department,” added the young man.

The identity papers owned by F.A. and his wife are a court decision and a marriage document from the church, while the papers required for registering a child include a civil registration extract and a passport which are what the couple wants to obtain.

Single Mother!

Farah (47-year-old Muslim woman) got married in Aleppo 20 years ago by virtue of a marriage contract in the presence of witnesses with a defined advance and deferred marriage dowry, just the way marriage is conducted with legal contracts, but outside the court. The woman was hoping the canonical contract would contribute to documenting that marriage afterward.

When she got married, Farah refused to get married in one of the Syrian Sharia courts, so that her husband will not have to convert to Islam and change his name.

Farah postponed having her first child for five years, until 2003, fearing that the little girl would be unregistered, and for other personal reasons. “The maternal instinct was so overwhelming and I was ready to have children at all costs,” says Farah.

One year after her baby girl was born in 2004, Farah decided to register her in the Personal Status Department, as the registrar in the Civil Status Department in Aleppo told her that her daughter will be registered under her father’s name and religion, and requested that the daughter’s identity would be acknowledged.

Farah explained the registration process: “We fingerprinted the papers and the registrar wrote (Done with the consent of both parents) on the civil registry book.”

Farah resorted to the provisions of the “Child Rights” agreement signed by Syria in 1993, as she told the reporters. After a long search for a legal solution, she found this agreement to lean on.

Farah succeeded in issuing a family record for her daughter while she was in Syria, before leaving to Sweden for good. Beside the mother’s name registered in the document they wrote: Unmarried, and also beside the father’s name.

Today, Farah and her husband own a few official documents, such as a family record as well as non official documents like ecclesial marriage certificate, a civil marriage contract, and their daughter got an individual civil registration extract.

The family experienced difficulty in issuing a passport for the child, because “issuing a passport requires a national ID number. In that respect, the civil registry department cooperated with us, as they know our condition. After heavy correspondence between official departments in Damascus and Aleppo, we finally obtained our daughter’s national ID number and passport,” said Farah.

“Until now, we haven’t got a family book, while in Sweden we got one as soon as we arrived in the country, givern that we entered Sweden with a work visa,” she added.

Mahmoud Maarawi, the Shari judge from Damascus, insists on denying that there are applicable laws that contradict the constitution, in response to human rights activists who confirm that the Personal Status Law contradicts the constitution, which guarantees the freedom of belief.

He says: “A Christian man is free to marry a Christian woman, but in order to do so, he must embrace Islam. On the other hand, a Muslim woman cannot embrace Christianity to marry a Christian man, because this would be considered apostasy.

The Convention on The Rights of The Child Is Merely Ink on Paper

Syria signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1993, yet it does not abide by all its articles as it has some reservations about some of them.

Article 7 of the convention stipulates that a child should be registered right after his birth, and has the right to have a name, nationality, and, whenever possible, know his parents and receive their care. Article 14 provides for the following: “States Parties shall respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.”But the First Magistrate in Damascus Sharia Court, Mahmoud Maarawi, says that “Syria had reservations about some of the articles of the convention that contradict the Islamic Law, because they may lead to mixing lineages which is against the public order in Syria”.

Lawyer Abdoush thinks that the Syrian laws contradict the Convention on the Rights of the Child, especially Article 14 concerned with the right to choose religion, which stipulates that: “States Parties shall respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.”

It also contradicts the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, especially the second article, concerned with the woman’s right of choice and equality.

Converted Christians

Every year, a number of Christians convert to Islam in order to marry Muslim women, or for the purpose of registering their children.

Our reporters were not able to obtain the correct numbers, because the statistics include all the people who embraced Islam or changed their sects within Muslim or Christian sects.

It can be said that the percentage of Christians who embraced Islam may reach 45%, and the rest are people who have changed their sects, as the First Magistrate in Damascus Sharia Court, Mahmoud Maarawi told our reporters on July 16, 2019.

The total number of people who changed their religion or sect in Syria from 2009 to 2018 is 2,102, according to statistics obtained from the Sharia Court, but it did not determine whether converting to Islam was for the purpose of marriage or other reasons. Thus, the proportion of those who changed their religion with the intent of marriage could not be determined.

But lawyer Miar Amer from Sowaida, who prepared a scientific and legal paper entitled “Highlights on Civil Marriage”, which our reporter got a copy of, indicating that 90% and more of those who change their religion in different Sharia Courts in Syria do so for the purpose of marrying outside their religion or sect.

“There are 50 cases of civil marriages in each governorate per year, including marriages between Muslim and Christians and inter-sect marriages within the same faith,” his research concludes.

The lawyer says that this number includes those who file lawsuits before Civil Courts requesting the registration of their civil marriage, but in vain, because Civil Courts also require changing the doctrine.

Loss of Lineage and Inheritance

This marriage has a retroactive effect on children which deprives them of inheritance and descent. Judge Maarawi says, “the child resulting from a marriage between a Muslim woman and a Christian man (an invalid marriage) is attributed to his mother but not to his father, and thus is entitled to inherit from the mother and she is entitled to inherit from the child. The mother can also sue the husband to support her financially when she gets insolvent, if the husband is rich. The child is not entitled to inherit from his father because this requires lineage and lineage of adultery (marriage of a Muslim woman and a Christian man) is not recognized nor registered.”

“Invalid marriage does not result in inheritance. Inheritance is only valid in case of correct lineage. Lineage of invalid marriages will not be registered so the children will not inherit the same way as his siblings who resulted from a legitimate relationship.”

In this context, Rohada Abdoush, the lawyer, believes that these laws will only change by changing the constitutional articles that distinguish between citizens according to sex and religion. She called for separating religion from the supposedly secular state in order for those endless problems to be solved.

Lawyer Mohamed Samer Muayyad, believes that Articles 136 and 137 of the Civil Code of Legislative Decree No. 84 of 1949 confirm that every contract that contravenes public order is considered null and void.

The Islamic jurisprudence, according to the constitution (Article 3) is a major source of legislation, so the marriage of a Muslim woman and a Christian man is void, and is considered adultery, which does not have the effects of valid marriage, such as confirming lineage and other issues, so the child shall be attributed to his mother, adopts her last name and inherits from her, but is not attributed to the father.

Under these laws, the matter of obtaining full inheritance and lineage rights by children who result from marriage between Muslim women and Christian men remains a distant dream, according to activists specialized in this field.

In return, activists put forward the idea of protecting children’s rights through a marriage model which is documented, registered in the court, and based on the abolition of religious, doctrinal, and ethnic differences between the two parties of the marriage. According to them, the contract should not prohibit Muslims from marrying non-Muslims and vice versa. The contract is to be held according to the will of the two parties, the husband and wife, and in the presence of witnesses.

However, until this model gets discussed on the official level, or steps to move forward with legislation and parliament are taken, Farah, Samer and dozens of other cases, will remain single mothers and fathers, wives will be deprived from their rights, and children will live without documents or inheritance rights.

Sharia Court judge Mahmoud Maarawi says: “Children from illegitimate marriages are recognized, they are registered and have the right to education, adoption, running for office, and voting. They suffer no form of discrimination, just like any Syrian citizen, and they are not considered as second degree citizens. As for inheritance, it must not be in violation of the law, like in all countries in the world. What distinguishes Arab countries from other countries is lineage.”

This investigative report was carried out under the supervision of the Syrian investigative journalism network -SIRAJ, under the supervision of colleague Mohamed Bassiki.

The post “Imagine Living and Dying With No Documents?” Children of Civil Marriage in Syria appeared first on SIRAJ.

Although it is normal to hear the sounds of gunfire and bombings there, these gunshots in particular were targeted to kill the Syrian journalist and activist, Raed Fares (46 years old), and his colleague Hammud Junayd (29 years old). It was then when a twenty-year-old youth shouted at the door of the grand mosque, “They killed Raed .. they killed Raed and Hammud,” while Ali al-Dandoush, the young man in his twenties who was in the car with them survived.

Junayd, who was known as the “Barrel photographer” for daring to rush to the places where the bomb barrels were dropped by the Syrian regime’s planes to take close-up shots of the places and the victims of the bombings, was instantly killed.

Fares was rushed to a nearby hospital where he breathed his last after he got shot by several bullets and the doctors’ attempts to save his life were in vain.

Two hours later, the atmosphere of the whole town changed and grief loomed large over the Syrian community opposing the authorities of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Along with the burying of the two victims, the pages of two of the most influential figures in the course of the continuous Syrian revolution of 2011 were turned.

Although the assassination took only seconds, the planning process took much longer. Even Raed sensed danger one week before he was killed. Back then, he talked to his elder son, Mahmoud Fares (24 years) privately and told him about the “risky threats” he has been receiving, and informed him of the identity of the entity that is threatening his life.

Fares was known, during his Syrian movement path, as “The engineer of Kafr Nabl’s famous and funny banners” (banners with drawings and critical expressions sending messages in multiple languages to the international community on the Syrian case.) He was the founder of the local “Radio Fresh” programs and was the manager of the Union of Revolutionary Bureaus (which is a group of civil society organizations that have taken upon themselves to execute projects related to medical services, medical treatment of children, women empowerment, and media training.

In May 2017, Fares was in Oslo, the Norwegian capital, and told the Norwegian crowd: “Since our revolution does not rely on the international community, we decided to work on our own to set ourselves free from all the continuous murdering committed by al-Assad against us, so we formed a civil society organization and worked on issues like education and child organizations.”

The perpetrators managed to silence his voice which rose early to face the growing radical system in his Idlib community and the whole of Syria. He was fully aware of the risks of what he was doing but he did not stop. He made a deep change in the region, and he was full of vitality to urge the demand for change and ending al-Assad’s authority, according to those who were close to him, Fares represented the hopes of a whole generation of youth who faced the waves of change after the outbreak of the Arab Spring in March 2011.

After the assassination, the crowds in Kafr Nabl continued to demonstrate against al-Assad, Russia, and Iran and to condemn the international inaction. This all happened without Raed Fares and his colleague because they were buried under the ground after they left a legacy and archive that contains projects and ideas to promote public freedoms, democracy, gender equality, and protecting civilians and displaced persons.

In his “resistant” town which faced the conflicting parties, Kafr Nabl, Fares direct his activities in development and education, and was determined to continue broadcasting from Kafr Nabl which was controlled by “Al-Nusra Front” which later changed their name to “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham”.

It has been two years since the assassination, Raed and Hammoud’s blood was wasted without investigations, conducting a trial, or even gathering pieces of evidence to determine the identity of the murderers who are scot-free living their lives among their children and relatives, while Raed’s grieving family, who fled to France, and his children who lost their father have hopes that justice will be served one day.

Although the assassination took place without revealing the identities of the murderers and without holding anyone accountable, we will reveal, in this investigation, the most prominent legal paths that should be taken to hold the perpetrators accountable during the period of transitional justice, in addition to the conditions and basics that should be available for this process to be done according to experts and human rights activists who followed the case closely, among testimonies and pieces of evidence gathered by human rights organizations which indicates that “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham” is behind this assassination, although it denies that.

Activating accountability and serving justice to Raed will act as a support and shield for the rest of the journalists and activists who still work in Idlib, its country, Syria and other dangerous geographical areas after Syria ranked second in the “Committee to Protect Journalists” global index of impunity for the year 2020, Which sheds light on countries where journalists are killed while the killers remain free.

In another global ranking done by Reporters Without Borders in April 2019 on journalism freedom for 2019 entitled “The Fear Machine Is Working at Its Maximum Capacity,” which included 180 countries, Syria ranked 174 after being ranked among the most dangerous areas for journalists where the Syrian regime and radicals are racing to suppress journalism freedom and to murder journalists.

For its part, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent human rights organization, documented the murder of 707 journalists since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, including six women, nine foreign journalists, and 52 were killed under torture, in addition to 1563 injuries of varying degrees at the hands of the conflict parties.

551 journalists, including a woman and 5 foreigners, were killed at the hands of the regime forces, while the Russian raids claimed the lives of 22 journalists.

During the same period, 64 journalists were killed by ISIS, and another 4 were killed by “YPD-PKK”, while 33 journalists were killed at the hands of armed groups opposing the regime. The attacks of the international coalition against “ISIS” resulted in the killing of a journalist, in addition to the killing of 32 others by unknown gunfire.

Whereas, the country witnessed at least 1.169 cases of arrest and kidnapping of journalists, and about 422 persons (Including 3 women and 17 foreign journalists) are still arrested or forcibly disappeared. Moreover, the Syrian regime is still detaining 353 journalists, including 2 women and 4 foreign journalists.

Threats and Attempted Assassinations

As soon as Al-Nusra Front consolidated its grip on Kafr Nabl and all of Idlib and seized it from the Syrian Regime forces in late 2012, the activists and journalists started bearing the brunt of the threats, harassment, and restrictions on media freedom.

On December 30, 2014, elements of Al-Nusra Front struck a military cordon around the headquarters of Radio Fresh, and the military squads and a big bus cordoned the area.

Ali al-Dandoush (23 years old), the witness who survived the assassination attempt, was working in the radio station at the time in the (audio mixing). He was terrified and could not believe what was happening. “A minor fighter (under the legal age of 18 years) from Al-Nusra Front entered the headquarters, with a copy of a newspaper that published a fictional picture of the Prophet Muhammad, thinking that the paper was ours. He exchanged a few words with the other fighters about whether they would kill us in the headquarters or not? But when we provided the evidence that we had nothing to do with the newspaper that published the cartoons, they left and departed.

It did not end here, it even repeated in another incident of the raid on the same broadcast station, but this time the attack was more brutal with the workers and officials there, according to the witness, specifically on January 17, 2015, and ended up with the arrest of Fares himself.

“We were in the office about 5:30 a.m.” he added, “and all of a sudden, the fighters of Al-Nusra Front raided the station’s headquarters and locked me, Raed, and another person in a room. While we were there, we heard the sounds of smashing the broadcast equipment, and then they opened the door and ordered us to leave, but they arrested Raed and after a while they released him,’ explained al-Dandoush.

The third time was on December 10, 2016 when they arrested Fares in Ma’arrat al-Numan district, southern Idlib, for 48 hours, during which he was tortured in a (Shabeh) method for six hours to force him to unlock his mobile phone which he refused until his relatives found out about his detention place and exerted pressure to have him released, according to his son Mahmoud al-Fares.

The reasons behind the detention of al-Fares included the post he published on Facebook addressing “The Nation of Iqraa,” in which he harshly criticized customs and traditions, calling for laying the foundations of science and humanity, which Al-Nusra deemed contrary to Shari’ah as provided in the Agreement that included the terms on which al-Fares would be released and was published later after the Agreement was concluded and signed by Hadi Al-Abdullah (a friend of Raed) and someone called Abu Khalil the Emir of Al-Nusra Front in Kafr Nabl.

“We knew that the arrest and the raid took place because the broadcast aired songs and music and allowed the voices of women broadcasters. Consequently, the demonstrations were staged in the city calling for the release of Raed, and this was after journalist Hadi al-Abdullah pledged not to broadcast music again,” says Mahmoud, Raed’s son.

Indeed, Fares tried to cope with the restrictions that were gradually growing after canceling the broadcast of songs on the radio, and replacing the music of the news bulletin with the chirping of birds. Moreover, the voices of the women broadcasters were amplified through sound mixing programs and techniques.

According to lawyer Yasser Al-Saleem, France-based, who was an old friend of Raed al-Fares since childhood, the threats to Raed came from Al-Nusra Front directly because of the radio and songs broadcasting, and because of the secular orientation he adopted.

In May 2018, the United States announced the enlisting of Tahrir al-Sham among the terrorist organizations, after it changed its name from (Al-Nusra Front) to Tahrir al-Sham in January 2017, to “reinforce its position in the Syrian war and achieve other goals, In the context of its relations with Al-Qaeda”. 

Before the “Tahrir al-Sham” took control of Kafr Nabl, ISIS controlled it for a while in 2014, during which ISIS tried to assassinate Raed. One night when he was returning home at midnight, one of the ISIS elements shot him, and he was injured with three bullets in his shoulder and chest and was transferred to the United States to receive his medical treatment.

Al-Fares worked his way in Kafr Nabl by attracting the youth of the district and other Syrian cities to participate in the launch of the Radio Fresh.

However, with the accelerating pace of events in Syria, the continued momentum of public demonstrations calling for change, and the emergence of Islamic factions, al-Fares found himself fighting on both fronts in this town, he was overwhelmed and confined between the military raids of the Al-Assad Regime Forces, which he first revolted against, and the restrictions of hardliner Islamic militant groups that is growing, such as ISIS and Al-Nusra Front ( Tahrir al-Sham), (the face of al-Qaeda in Syria)

From the very beginning, al-Fares challenged the version of Bashar Al-Assad Regime, in his paintings and his ability to influence others. He mocked the International Community’s inaction to put an end to the massacre of the Syrians, which he made his first priority to face the authoritarian regime represented by Al-Assad and the hardliners) in defense of the people.

“He has a different character and a different opinion, and he has characters and governments who support his cause in freedoms, so Raed was not an easy number in the region.”

Meanwhile, al-Fares consolidated his efforts by taking them to the streets and squares even more. He was back to voice his call from his mountain city that the Syrians are living between the two faces of terrorism (the Syrian Regime and the extremists,) which he signified in a famous sign that read: “In fact, the Syrians are the victims of two forms of terrorism, one from Al-Assad’s terror, and the other from the terror of ISIS and other extremists.”

Among the famous signs he wrote in red and held in his hands, was one that read, “There are two opposing parties: The people who are trying to survive, and the regime that is trying to quash them.”

Raed’s peaceful movement was also associated with Radio Fresh, and it was one of the reasons for which he was the target of death threats as he adopted a liberal ideology and a different approach from the prevailing approach and the extremist religious ideology.

Bassam Alahmad, the Director of the Syrians for Truth and Justice Organization confirmed that al-Fares was not like other media professionals who would buy the account of the dominant parties, and perhaps take their side, but he rather introduced a different project and different opinions from the account told in the areas of the Salvation Government (A service arm of Tahrir al-Sham In Idlib), and was challenging her official account.

“He had a different personality and a different opinion, and had prominent personalities and governments that supported his case in freedoms that is why he was a very significant figure in the region,” he added.

What Happened on the Black Day?

Ali al-Dandoush started working in Radio Fresh in 2014, and he soon built a deep relationship with Raed Fares and the rest of the radio staff, so much that they were practically living in the radio headquarters.

Fortunately, al-Dandoush miraculously survived the assassination on November 22, 2018. Al-Dandoush gave us an account of what happened, “A day before the assassination, Raed was spending the evening with his cousins and friends, and each of them later went home… At the time, Raed used to go home for a few hours to spend time with his family and then head to the radio headquarters to spend the night. That night, he asked me to give him a ride home on the motorcycle, around 1 a.m., which I did.”

“Three hours later, Raed called me asking me to give him another ride to the office,” al-Dandoush added.

At dawn, they both decided to sleep over at the office. They carefully locked the doors and went to sleep.

The next day, November 23, both men woke up at noon. Hammoud Junaid joined them, and they decided to go on a retreat to Kafr Nabl mountains to dine with other friends.

The three of them (Hammoud, Ali, and Raed) drove in the direction of a side road leading to Raed’s cousin’s house, as he was supposed to join them on the trip.

At that time, most townspeople were praying al-Juma’a (Friday) Prayer, and it was a weekend, thus there was barely any traffic.

“Raed was driving, Hammoud was sitting next to him, while I was in the back seat. We passed the grand mosque on a road leading to Raed’s cousin’s house. A closed gray Hyundai Starex passed near us. Upon reaching the house of Raed’s cousin, the closed car suddenly advanced and stopped right beside us,” said al-Dandoush.

“The closed car stopped to our left, and that’s the last thing I saw. Windows were opened, and a 5.5 rifle appeared. The shooters were not masked, however, I could not observe their faces,” he added.

“I lowered my head and hid for a few seconds while we were under fire. The shooting finally stopped and the car left. I raised my head to find Raed lying on his seat, while Hammoud was not in his place, I thought he managed to escape, but later found out that he opened the door and tried to escape but was shot. Raed took two bullets in his thighs and a bullet in his waist, and another in his underarm area, close to his heart. As for me, a bullet penetrated my coat near the head,” he continued. They were taken to the hospital.

I raised my head and found Raed lying on his seat, and I didn’t find Hammoud in his seat, so I thought that he managed to escape, but I discovered later that he had opened the door and tried to but was injured in the process.Raed was hit by two bullets in the thigh.

After the ‘accident,’ members of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) arrived at the scene and talked to Raed Fares’ son, told him they would open an investigation, and left without taking any action.

The nearest HTS checkpoint was only one kilometer away from the scene of assassination, there were also other HTS checkpoint situated on Kafr Nabl’s northern and western exits, while there were no such checkpoints on neither the eastern nor the southern exits, which suggests that the perpetrators drove through them, especially the eastern exit, towards downtown.

In a report that included showing and exposing initial leads and investigations into the assassination, published on November 28, 2018, Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) pointed out that “the gunmen retreated immediately after the operation which was planned to coincide with the Friday prayers, knowing that most residents would be at the mosques performing the weekly prayer, which facilitated the assassins’ movements, and helped them to pull off their terrorist act without being identified or recognized by people.”

After the assassination, Radio Fresh’s future is now in jeopardy, especially since the keystaff’s financial support has stopped for six whole months. Broadcasting resumed later, after the team changed headquarters and moved to another city.

“Work is still going on after Raed’s murder, but organizations stopped funding us for six months. Despite the difficulties we faced due to losing Raed, we managed to overcome this adversity and move on, believing in Raed’s saying: “Radio Fresh is an idea, and ideas never die,” said Mahmoud Raslan, radio’s current CEO.

Imminent Danger

Both Ali al-Dandoush (the surviving witness) and Mahmoud Fares (Raed’s son) agree that the three months preceding the assassination were the “most dangerous,” as during these months, Raed sensed a real danger to his life, due to obtaining leaks of people from HTS; indicating that they wanted him killed. This led him to tell his son, Mahmoud, about these threats and how serious they were, and emphasized that if something were to happen to him, it would be HTS’ doing.

In September 2018, large weekly demonstrations were resumed in Kafr Nabl, coordinated by a number of people in town, led by Raed. During one of these demonstrations, HTS members ran through the crowd with two military vehicles and raised HTS black flags, leading to altercations between both parties, and resulting in arresting the lawyer Yasser al-Saleem.

At that time, Raed started to sense danger, and stopped spending the nights at home or even at the radio’s headquarters, instead, he stayed at a friend’s house in a nearby village.

Evidence That the Assassination Was Planned

The investigation team met with four witnesses and heard their testimonies, including those of the only survivor (Ali) and Raed Fares’ son (Mahmoud). The team also examined informed human rights reports suspecting HTS’ direct involvement in the assassination.

Mahmoud Fares lays a number of incidents as foundation to his narrative of HTS’ responsibility for his father’s assassination, saying that “a week before my father was assassinated, I was working at the radio, my father called me and told me to go to the headquarters. He told me that during the past week, he had received direct threats, and that it was now worse than ever. He asked me to be careful because the threats were strong, dangerous, and serious.”

“My father told me that if something happened to him, no one but HTS would be responsible,” he continued.

His father told him that he confided in two other close acquaintances who still reside in Kafr Nabl to this day, and told them that HTS would be responsible for anything bad that happens to him, and told them that “HTS wants my head, if something bad happened to me, do not say ‘he was killed by anonymous people,’ and do not say ‘we’re not sure who killed him.’ I don’t have any other enemies within or outside of Syria.”

Mahmoud Fares quotes a relative who told him about a meeting with an HTS leader in Kafr Nabl the morning after the assassination, saying “right after the assassination, one of our acquaintances met with an HTS leader in Kafr Nabl. They were talking about Hammoud Junaid’s murder, and the leader said that Junaid deserved to ‘die’ because he was with Raed Fares.”

Among the facts on which the son based to prove his story is that the area was completely under the control of Tahrir al-Sham organization and that no evidence was found by the surveillance cameras installed in the streets, showing the passage of the closed gray car that assassinated his father and his colleague, so the assassins know the roads of Kafr Nabl well, as well as the places where the cameras are installed, so they were able to hide the evidence.

“The decision to assassinate my father has not been taken by an individual as no one in the organization can take such a decision and bear its consequences. Rather it requires the approval of al-Joulani himself, and needs to be planned and other consequences that may not be taken into consideration,” he said.The son’s account is identical to that of the assassination survivor Ali al-Dandosh, because the entire region is under the control of the ‘Tahrir Al-Sham’ faction, so that wherever the car carrying the perpetrators went after the operation it would pass through HTS military checkpoints. “So I am sure they assassinated him,” he says.

He supports his narrative by saying: “They did not ask me what happened, they did not take the car information from me, and they did not open an investigation even though all evidence was available at that time”.

Bassam al-Ahmad, the Director of the Syrians for Truth and Justice organization, which issued a detailed report about the incident, commented by saying: “During documenting the assassination, we noticed that whoever executed the assassination was very comfortable in controling the area. He was not at all scared of being held accountable, he also studied the city very well, so he probably is one of its residents, and not a stranger or a visitor, as he seems to be well acquainted with its streets.”

Evading Accountability!

Days after the accident, all the clues pointed towards Tahrir Al-Sham Organization, which issued a statement through its official agency “Ibaa”, saying that there were “parties supporting the counter-revolutions trying to get them involved in the assassination”.

The statement entitled “A Crime in a Region Aiming to Involve the Authority” claimed that “the murder of Fares and al-Junaid coincided with “a systematic campaign led by some networks of suspicous purpose and funding, as they spread a huge amount of lies to undermine the stability of the liberated north and try to cause a rift between the Mujahideen and their supporters”.

In an endeavour to understand why an official investigation has not been conducted, the investigation team communicated with the Minister of Justice of the Syrian interim government, Abdullah Abdul-Salam, who confirmed that the interim government does not control the area and cannot enter it in the first place.

“We have no control over the area where the assassination took place, and we cannot even reach that area because this will cause problems with the Salvation Government,” said Abdul-Salam.

He added: “There is no contact between us and the Salvation Government (a service arm, and a government supporting Tahrir Al-Sham Organization), and the assassination took place in areas controlled by “Salvation” and we do not have access to the area or know anything about the incident”.

The “Salvation Government” was formed on November 2, 2017, in the areas under the control of “Tahrir al-Sham” in Idlib and Reef Halab, and a week after its formation, the organization handed overall service facilities to it, which confirms the link between the two sides, but the “Salvation” denies that it is a civil arm for “Tahrir al-Sham” despite all evidence of this relationship.

Our team also contacted the media office of the Salvation Government to understand why they have not started an investigation in this incident. In the beginning, they were responsive, but when they knew our report was about the assassination of Raed Al-Faris they stopped responding to our messages.

Al-Ahmad considers that the absence of an investigation into the case is due to the fact that the salvation government does not want to carry out this investigation, or has orders from its military wing, which may be involved, not to start an investigation into the case. If there were any intentions to start investigating, whether from the salvation government or the interim government, that would have happened.

The Judicial Path and Accountability. Where Is The Case Now?

Searching for the possibility of promoting the prevention of impunity for crimes against journalists through fair trials, or the formation of a court similar to the one that prosecutes war criminals even after a while, Fadl Abdel Ghani, director of the Syrian Human Rights Network, said, in an interview with the report team, that “Achieving justice through the judicial system in the death of Fares is essential, although it may take a long time, up to ten years, but there are other tracks to achieve what it calls “Urgent accountability” for the perpetrators, which is achieved through the societal rejection of the one accused of the assassination, as well as those dealing with them boycotting them, i.e.the Syrian military factions and fighters and their supporters.

“All of them have to boycott the organization, as a result of the criminal act it has committed, as well as impose a blockade on it economically and politically, and expose this crime,” he says.

He referred to the role of the press in talking about the crime and revealing its circumstances, which is also part of the accountability.

As for international justice, it is available according to the international jurisdiction, but it needs an effort and action to gather evidence and present it to the public prosecution, after which the prosecution accepts it, and a number of extremist factions are held accountable using universal jurisdiction. According to Abdul-Ghani, “this is a long path and can result in holding one or two people accountable”.

The Syrian Human Rights Network suggested that Tahrir Al-Sham was behind the assassination of media activists based on analysis of evidence and information, and on testimonies from the region. In turn, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of expression, which is directly involved in the litigation of crimes against journalists, Yara Badr, the Center’s media freedom director, says that no criminal responsibility has been established at the legal level, allowing for procedural judicial steps to be taken, because no independent investigation was conducted into the death of the al-Faris.

The Center, which is currently active in the areas of preventing impunity for crimes against journalists, focuses on Syria and on the most dangerous countries for journalists such as Mexico, Iraq and Colombia. They filed a lawsuit in the case of the murder of American journalist Mary Colvin in targeting the Baba Amr Media Center in Homs in February 2012, and the murder of the French military photographer, Remy Oschlick.

Badr adds, “In partnership with international organizations at the level of UN mechanisms, they work to improve the legislation to guarantee freedom of expression, and they press for the approval of the international badge of journalists”.

According to lawyer Yasser Al-Salim, who was once imprisoned in the notorious Iqab prison (in the western part of Idlib and is used today as a prison and a security investigation branch for Tahrir al-Sham): “The killers did not leave behind any concrete evidence, and the party controlling the region is still the same. Who will investigate?” asked the man who left Syria fearing for his life due his critical opinions.

“None of the perpetrators can be prosecuted until the situation stabilizes and the organization’s control over the region ends,” he says.

Bassam al-Ahmad agrees that “in these circumstances, it is impossible to bring justice to the case, and even if there is a trial, it will be unfair or incomplete, because there is no independent and impartial judiciary, within the Salvation government and the Tahrir al-Sham organization.”

But “the inquiry committees and the neutral international mechanism can collect information about the case in order to prepare for a future judicial track,” he added.

Al-Ahmad concludes by inviting the victims’ families, and witnesses as well, to keep documents, facts and evidence in their possession, waiting for the disclosure of specific information or the ability to conduct a trial.

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