Amjad Youssef, key perpetrator of Tadamon massacre, arrested in Syria

Amjad Youssef, one of the main perpetrators of the 2013 Tadamon massacre in Damascus during the Syrian civil war, has been arrested. 

His detainment followed “a successful security operation”, Interior Minister Anas Khattab announced on Friday on X. 

A security source told Sana news agency that Youssef, an intelligence officer under Bashar al-Assad’s regime, was detained in the al-Ghab area of Hama, in Syria’s western countryside.

The massacre took place on 16 April 2013 in the Tadamon neighbourhood of Damascus. 

Syrian soldiers and militiamen walked 288 people into a pit and mocked them before shooting them dead. 

Footage of the massacre, filmed by the perpetrators, was leaked in 2022. It showed detainees blindfolded and with their hands tied, being led to the pit to be shot. 

Seven women and 15 children were among those seen murdered. 

The videos were some of the most detailed evidence of war crimes committed by Assad’s authorities.

Assad’s regime was overthrown in December 2024 by rebels led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is now Syria’s president. 

The footage helped to identify key suspects, including Youssef, and formed part of evidence used by the new government to hold perpetrators of mass crimes accountable. 

Such killings took place in Tadamon frequently – right up until the regime fell, residents have previously told Middle East Eye. 

Abdul-Rahman Saud, who witnessed the massacres, said he saw blindfolded men being led out of minibuses year upon year. 

“I cannot count how many they killed. Everyone here in Tadamon lived in terror,” he said in December 2024. 

Syrians live among bones after years of Tadamon killings

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Tadamon’s residents had grown accustomed to finding bodies and bones dotted around the neighbourhood. 

The area – named after the word solidarity in Arabic – was created to house Syrians displaced from the Golan Heights after Israel seized and occupied the territory in 1967. 

Since then its population has diversified, with Druze, Sunnis, Alawis, Turkmen and Palestinians among many communities living there before the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011. 

“Everyone loved each other but the regime made us hate each other,” Saud told MEE. 

There was support for the revolution in Tadamon after peaceful protests broke out in 2011 – a fact that the Assad government’s soldiers never forgot. 

Saud remembered entire families, like the Aloush family – which included four young boys – being killed. 

“If they saw on your ID that you were originally from a Sunni area like Idlib or Deir Ezzor, that was enough to kill you,” he said.

Tadamon’s kill zone, about a square kilometre in size, was overseen by the Military Intelligence and the paramilitary National Defence Forces (NDF).

Witnesses told MEE that authorities were headquartered in a building with chequered tiles known locally as the “chess house”. Women snatched from the mosque would be brought there to be raped, neighbours said.

“They [Assad’s forces] walked around like they were kings,” said Saud. “If anyone looked them in the eye they would kill them.”