A cousin of the former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad who was involved in suppressing the protests that started the 2011 uprising has been detained inside Syria, according to state news agency SANA.
Atef Najib was detained in the Latakia region, an Assad family stronghold where some loyalists of the former regime have taken refuge. Assad and his family fled to Russia when rebels swept across the country last year.
His detention comes after Syria’s newly inducted interim leader Ahmad al-Sharaa warned recently the next government will be “pursuing criminals who have shed Syrian blood and committed massacres and crimes against us, whether they are hiding within the country of have fled abroad.”
Najib had been sanctioned by the US and European Union for his role in violently suppressing pro-democracy protests in 2011 – which raged into years of civil war after Assad’s forces moved to stamp out the peaceful demonstrations.
Protests against the Assad regime spread quickly in the spring of that year after a group of children were arrested and tortured for writing anti-regime graffiti on walls in the city of Deraa. According to local people at the time, the children had their fingernails removed.
They’d been inspired by the Arab Spring that was sweeping through several countries in the region, including Egypt and Tunisia.
Najib was then head of the regime’s Political Security Branch in Deraa.
The parents of the children and prominent local representatives pleaded with Najib to let the children go.
“They were told, ‘Forget your children. If you want children, make more children. If you don’t know how, bring us your women and we will make them for you,’” wrote Alia Malek in her book The Home That Was Our Country.
The children were eventually released but the army subsequently launched an assault in Deraa and protests quickly spread across Syria.
A senior official in the new security directorate in Latakia, Lt. Col. Mustafa Knaifati, said Friday that Najib was “considered one of those involved in committing crimes against the Syrian people.”
The Assad dynasty’s autocratic rule in Syria was marked by decades of fighting, bloodshed and oppressive political crackdown. All parties to the war carried out unlawful attacks, killing civilians and destroyed vital infrastructure, according to Amnesty International.
Transitional leader Al-Sharaa, whose militant group led a stunning charge by coalition forces to seize regime-held territory and depose Assad in December, has said he now hopes to achieve “civil peace.”
Al-Sharaa, a former al Qaeda member, and his new aides will be tasked with restoring a country riven by more than a decade of brutal civil war that killed over 300,000 people, according to the UN. More than 6 million Syrians have fled the country, the UN said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
