US charges two former Syrian officials for allegedly torturing Americans and Syrian nationals

By Jack Forrest, CNN

(CNN) — Two former high-ranking Syrian intelligence officials have been charged with war crimes for allegedly torturing Americans and other civilians who were deemed enemies by the Syrian government and held in a military prison, the Department of Justice said Monday.

US prosecutors say the two officials in former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime oversaw operations of the detention facilities at the Mezzeh Military Airport near Damascus, where detainees were beaten, electrocuted, hung by their wrists, burned with acid and had their toenails removed. The alleged crimes occurred during the civil war that wracked the country for over a decade and culminated in the extraordinary fall of the Assad regime over the weekend.

Former Syrian air force intelligence officers Jamil Hassan, 72, and Abdul Salam Mahmoud, 65, “created an atmosphere of terror at Mezzeh Prison,” prosecutors said. They were charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes through cruel and inhuman treatment, according to an unsealed indictment filed in federal court in Chicago. Warrants for their arrests have been issued, and they remain at large, the Justice Department said.

“The perpetrators of the Assad regime’s atrocities against American citizens and other civilians during the Syrian civil war must answer for their heinous crimes,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

“The Justice Department has a long memory, and we will never stop working to find and bring to justice those who tortured Americans,” he said.

The alleged torture occurred between January 2012 and July 2019 against perceived enemies of the Assad regime — which included predominantly Syrian nationals but also foreign nationals and dual nationals, including US citizens, according to the indictment.

Hassan, the Syrian intelligence agency’s director who oversaw a network of detention facilities, and Mahmoud, who directed operations at the Mezzeh prison, along with “their co-conspirators, agreed to identify, intimidate, threaten, deter, punish, immobilize, and kill individuals whom the Syrian Regime suspected of aiding and supporting the Regime’s armed opponents, such as through anti-Regime protest, the provision of medical aid, and public criticism of the Regime, in the armed conflict between the Regime and the Syrian Opposition,” the indictment said.

The Justice Department said that in addition to physical torture, the detainees at the prison were forced “to listen to the screams of tortured prisoners and share cells with the dead bodies of other detainees, while guards threatened to kill and sexually assault their family members. The detainees were also allegedly deprived of adequate food, water, and medical care.”

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement, “For the second time in a year, the Department of Justice has brought charges against those who committed war crimes against U.S. citizens, deploying a previously unused federal law to hold accountable individuals who engaged in cruel and inhuman atrocities during armed conflict.”

Last year, four Russian soldiers were charged with war crimes against an American who was living in Ukraine during Moscow’s invasion, marking the first time the US government used a decades-old law aimed to prosecute those who commit war crimes against American citizens.

“Hassan and Mahmoud allegedly oversaw the systematic use of cruel and inhumane treatment on perceived enemies of the Syrian regime, including American citizens,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. “The FBI is fully committed to working with our law enforcement partners around the world to ensure these alleged war criminals are held accountable for their actions and justice is brought to the victims of these atrocities.”

On Sunday, after 13 years of civil war that fractured the country, the Assad regime came crashing down. Rebel fighters declared Damascus “liberated” in a video statement on state television, sending Assad fleeing to Russia. More than 300,000 civilians have been killed in more than a decade of war, according to the United Nations, and millions of people have been displaced.

For half a century, the Assad family ruled over Syria with an iron fist, with long-documented reports of mass incarceration torture, extra-judicial killings and atrocities against their own people. Assad’s notorious detention facilities were black holes where anyone deemed an opponent of the regime disappeared, with widespread reports of torture and inhumane conditions. But as rebels moved into Damascus, video showed prisoners being freed from the notorious facilities.

CNN’s Rob Picheta, Helen Regan, Holmes Lybrand, Hannah Rabinowitz and Evan Perez contributed to this report.

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