The Higher Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany is examining accusations against a member of the Syrian regime’s National Defense for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
According to a statement from the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office, on March 26, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office brought the charges before the State Security Council of the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg.
The statement identified the accused as “Ahmad H.”, who is charged with committing crimes against humanity, persons, and property, and some of the alleged behaviors constitute crimes under German criminal law.
The indictment stated that since April 2011, the Syrian regime has increasingly used brutal violence against its critics in the country, with the Syrian intelligence playing a key role in this, aiming to stop the protest movement with the help of security forces as soon as possible and to intimidate the population.
To achieve this goal, real and alleged opposition figures were arbitrarily arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and often killed across the country, without any legal basis.
Tensions in Syria escalated into a “civil war” by early 2012, with “Syrian state” forces and opposition groups fighting each other, and from 2012 to 2015, “Ahmad H.” worked in a “Shabiha” militia that was integrated into the “National Defense” in the al-Tadamon area, south of the Syrian capital, Damascus. The Syrian regime tasked this militia with violently suppressing the opposition efforts in al-Tadamon, in collaboration with “Branch 227” of the “Syrian Military Intelligence”.
At the headquarters of “Branch 227,” elements carried out killings that included at least 47 civilians who were executed in mass executions between April 16 and October 16, 2013.
During that period, “Ahmad H.” and his comrades established checkpoints in the al-Tadamon area and other locations, and these forces were active in arbitrarily arresting people to extort money from them directly or through their relatives, forcing them to toil, or torturing them.
The accused also personally participated in the mistreatment of civilians, and in one incident in 2013, he beat a man detained by the militia and ordered others of his comrades to brutally beat the prisoner using plastic pipes for hours.
In the autumn of 2014, “Ahmad H.” repeatedly beat and kicked a civilian at a checkpoint, grabbed the victim by the hair, banged his head against the pavement, and restrained him before the militia took him away. He also detained numerous civilians between December 2012 and the summer of 2014 at various times at different points in al-Tadamon, forcing them to transport sandbags to the nearby front for several hours each time.
In that area, hundreds of detainees worked under repeated bombardment without food or water, and some were mistreated by the accused or other militia members. In some cases, “Ahmad H.” took money and mobile phones from them and kept them for himself, and on different occasions until November 2015, the accused or his family members and other militia members, upon his request, took goods from the shops in the area without paying for them.
“Ahmad H.” was arrested in August 2023 and remains in custody following an arrest warrant issued by an investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice in July 2023, which was revised by an order dated January 2024.