One day before the arrest of Amjad Youssef, perpetrator of the April 2013 Tadamon massacre, Syrian state media broadcast images of transitional president Ahmad al-Sharaa in Douma, standing hand in hand with Samir Kaakeh, the religious authority of Jaysh al-Islam. Kaakeh is accused of abducting, forcibly disappearing, and possibly killing Samira al-Khalil, Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hamada, and Nazem Hammadi, in addition to other crimes. The abductions, like the massacre, took place in 2013.
Information about the crime is publicly available. It has been published time and again by this outlet, which was, incidentally, the first Syrian platform to publish a detailed Arabic-language report on the Tadamon massacre and its perpetrators, written by the two researchers who exposed it, Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör, on the same day The Guardian published a shorter report on the massacre. Today, the killer Amjad Youssef stands on the stage of accountability, while the killer Samir Kaakeh stands on the stage of power.
What prevents the truth from being known and justice from being achieved in the case of the Douma Four is not a lack of information or credible evidence, but rather the current political and institutional context, which reinforces demands for justice for the victims of the Tadamon massacre while neglecting justice for the victims of Jaysh al-Islam’s crimes.
This raises the question of the relationship between justice and politics in Syria today – perhaps the fundamental question of legitimacy in its deepest and most radical sense: To what extent are considerations of justice independent of the ruling camp’s immediate political preferences? And to what extent is legitimacy itself independent of power in Syria today, such that power may be questioned over its legitimacy and justice by all those affected by its actions and conduct?
We knew the answer to this question under Assad rule. Justice (along with everything else) was subordinated to the regime’s priority of monopolizing power indefinitely. Samira al-Khalil, who was imprisoned for more than four years under Hafez al-Assad without charge or trial, knows this all too well. So does Razan Zaitouneh, the lawyer who, under Bashar al-Assad, defended political detainees before the Supreme State Security Court in Damascus, including Salafists. In fact, all Syrians knew it.
Syria was a legal desert just as it was a political desert. The right to justice, like the right to politics, was denied across the board, not selectively. For this reason, it is untenable to defend the right to justice and politics for some but not others: a right is not truly a right unless it is universal. And for this same reason, judicial independence was a central demand of democratic opposition figures throughout the decades of Assad rule, alongside political freedoms and political pluralism.
Today, the question concerns the democratic opposition’s right to justice and politics, and the first test case is that of Samira al-Khalil, Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hamada, and Nazem Hammadi. Why? Certainly not because the freedom and lives of these four are more important than those of any other four among Syria’s roughly 200,000 disappeared, but because their tragic story brings together elements found in no other case.
The four have a well-known history of opposition to the Assad regime that predates both the revolution and the forces that emerged afterward. There is abundant and compelling evidence implicating Jaysh al-Islam, enough to initiate judicial proceedings into the fate of the four. We also know the suspects by name, foremost among them Kaakeh himself.
Finally, and most importantly, the abductors of the Douma Four are Islamists who share the ideology of today’s rulers, making justice in this case the decisive test of whether it can remain independent of ideology and power. The arrest and trial of Atef Najib does not test, nor prove, the independence of justice in Syria today. Initiating judicial proceedings into the crimes of Kaakeh and his followers is what tests and proves that independence. This is the case that will define the fate of justice in Syria today – its touchstone and measure.
People like Razan, Samira, Wael, and Nazem – along with Annsar Shahhoud, Uğur Ümit Üngör, and countless Syrians and their partners around the world – built the moral and human rights case for the Syrian revolution. It was none other than Razan Zaitouneh who prepared the two most authoritative reports on the chemical massacre in the two Ghoutas in August 2013, based on direct personal investigation carried out at great risk to her life only days after the massacre itself. It was none other than her who worked to establish an independent body of justice in Eastern Ghouta so that force would not replace right. And for no other reason were she and her companions abducted by Kaakeh and his associates.
None other than Annsar Shahhoud devoted two years of her young life and risked her health to uncover the truth about the crime now being exploited for political gain, while those profiting from it do not even mention the names of Annsar and her research partner. Young Alawite men – especially Hazem al-Abdallah – risked their lives to smuggle the videos into Europe and place them in the hands of researchers, something sectarians eager to criminalize an entire Syrian community prefer to keep quiet about. Likewise, it is Syrian lawyers and human rights activists – and no one else – who are pursuing Assad’s killers and shabiha across Europe, working to secure a measure of justice for their fellow citizens.
What unites all these people is their commitment to democracy, justice, and citizenship in Syria. Yet today they are politically and publicly erased, just as Razan, Samira, Wael, and Nazem themselves were forcibly disappeared. Meanwhile, Kaakeh, the mufti of murder, is embraced and celebrated, and those claiming exclusive credit for exposing the Tadamon massacre are people who never cared about truth, freedom, or equal rights.
The difference in how the cases of Samir Kaakeh and Amjad Youssef are treated goes beyond a mere double standard on the part of today’s rulers. It is about determining who owns the revolution and the country. These people arrived late to a revolution in whose making they played no role whatsoever, and toward which they remained violently hostile for years. Today, they lay claim to everything millions of Syrians struggled and sacrificed for, thanking no one but themselves and sharing power, decision-making, or even opinion with no one else – as though Syria were their private property, just as it was under Assad rule.
The case of Samira, Razan, Wael, and Nazem is a matter of national, political, and public concern, just like that of the victims of the Tadamon massacre. The latter case did not wait for personal complaints from families before being pursued, ultimately leading to the arrest of the principal perpetrator thanks to information provided by independent researchers and journalists. The same should apply to the crimes of Kaakeh and those like him. This platform, which provided the most extensive reporting on the first crime, is the same platform that provided the most extensive information on the second. In any case, both the case file and the personal complaint already exist. What does not exist is independent justice.
The case of Samira, Razan, Wael, and Nazem will not die, nor will it fade with time. We will not leave it to the forces of hatred and forgetting. It is a story known in Syria and around the world, thoroughly documented and substantiated with names, details, and evidence – a crime committed in public, the perpetrators known. For this reason, exempting them from justice and allowing them to evade accountability is itself a fitting definition of the absence of justice in post-Assad Syria – indeed, the touchstone and measure of that absence.
We address these words to Syrians at large, out of a commitment to the duty of speaking truth to power under all circumstances, but also in the hope that the case will finally move forward after 12 years, four months, and 28 days since the disappearance of Samira, Razan, Wael, and Nazem.
For us, the matter is one of right and truth: the lives and freedom of our loved ones – or at the very least full knowledge of their fate, and the recovery of their bodies if Kaakeh and his associates did indeed kill them. We want marked graves for our loved ones, mourning for ourselves, and a memory for our common cause.
We also address Syrians to say that what protects their lives, freedoms, and rights is neither power nor sect, but independent justice and the equal right of all to justice. The lesson of Bashar al-Assad and his regime is still close at hand.