10 SEPTEMBER 2024
It was a warm evening in July, and we were in Amnesty UK’s London headquarters where we found many familiar faces, and some relief from the heat. We were gathered for a conversation on achieving justice in Syria, and on challenges and opportunities for the UK’s new government.
The event was arranged by the Syrian British Consortium, which advocates for bringing about a democratic and inclusive Syria, and the discussion focused on a report they published recently, Militia on Campus: Crimes of the National Union of Syrian Students at Damascus University. (Some members of Syria Notes’ staff have also worked for the SBC on this report.) Taking part were Dr Yasmine Nahlawi, head of the SBC’s investigations team, Dr Yaman Alqadri, a clinical psychologist and survivor of human rights violations by the National Union of Syrian Students, Mazen Darwish of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, and Fadel Abdul Ghani of the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
The chair was Emma Beals, an independent consultant on peace and foreign policy with a lot of experience on Syria. She set the scene, talking of how in early 2011, Syrians took to the street to demand freedom, and were met with violence and war. A reduction in killing in recent years doesn’t equate to peace. “The war is still ongoing,” she said, with forced disappearances and torture, as well as bombing and killing. “And so we’re going to hear about the pursuit of criminal justice for those that are doing it.”
Yasmine Nahlawi then explained why her team had been investigating a student union. The National Union of Syrian Students is controlled by the Assad regime. It has branches on individual campuses across the country, and even sub-branches within specific faculties within universities. Before the 2011 revolution, the NUSS played a surveillance role against students across the country, and it also had a part in cultivating leaders for the ruling Ba’ath Party, identifying youth fit to rise up the ranks of government. During the revolution, the union took on a new role as the regime’s enforcer, clamping down on political activity on campus, and detaining and torturing students.
At Damascus University, the NUSS surrounded non-violent protests and attacked students with sticks and batons. One witness in the SBC report described being dragged to the basement of the School of Dentistry and being beaten by NUSS members until he required hospitalisation. Students weren’t only at risk at demonstrations — the NUSS also detained students at the university gate, in libraries and canteens, and even from student residences.
The witness testimony gathered by the SBC investigations team allowed them to map NUSS detention sites across Damascus University. As well as the School of Dentistry, these were in offices in the School of Medicine, in the Economics and Arts and Humanities departments, the Higher Languages Institute, and in the basement of one of the student residence buildings, as well as several security guard rooms across campus. At most of these locations, NUSS members inflicted torture on their prisoners, punching, kicking, hitting with sticks, with batons, with pipes. They were also subjected to psychological torture by threats of murder, of detaining family members, threats of raping family members, or killing them.
And then, after students had been detained and tortured on campus, many of them were handed to the state security services. NUSS members would escort a student to a security services car for transfer to the political security branch, to the General Intelligence Branch 251, also known as the Hotline Branch, or to Air Force Intelligence. “The NUSS actions were not random,” Yasmine told the audience. “This was directly tied to the national clampdown against protests across Syria.”
Yaman Alqadri speaking at Amnesty International UK, London, on the 30th of July 2024. Photo: SBC.
Testimony and Healing
Yaman Alqadri is a clinical psychologist working with torture survivors at the Helen Bamber Foundation. She is also herself a survivor of torture. “On November 30th, 2011, while on the university campus, I was captured, beaten up and detained by Syrian regime agents,” she told the audience. Earlier that autumn, she had distributed flyers on campus, with slogans about freedom, dignity and democracy. That day, inside the medical school, she was stopped by a group of National Union of Syrian Students members, amongst them a medical school colleague called Ashraf Saleh. He confiscated her student ID card and she was dragged into a small security booth. There she was beaten and verbally abused, bleeding, crying, and trying to scream for help.
After a couple of hours, she was taken by the NUSS members to an unmarked car. In the car, she was sandwiched between two armed individuals, her head pushed down to prevent her seeing where they were driving to. She was led into a building and to an underground cell, blindfolded, and taken for interrogation by “the boss” — a senior officer. She was already in handcuffs, but he ordered that her hands be secured behind her instead of in front. He began questioning her about the flyers, and then he used a taser-like instrument to deliver electric shocks to her body.
This was the start of more than three weeks of detention, interrogation, and abuse for Yaman. “The physical pain was quite incomparable to the psychological agony one has to go through, hearing the voices, screams and cries of men being tortured,” she told us. She tried covering her ears, babbling loudly to not hear them, but the cries continued. She chose to pray for the other prisoners every time she heard a new interrogation session begin.
After her release, Yaman said she was received with immense warmth and compassion by thousands of Syrians, and this was key to her recovery. “Every time I gave testimony, my painful recounting was met with acknowledgment, validation, and affirmation,” she recalled. “All of this was precisely what protected me from post-traumatic stress.”
PTSD is often defined by the nature of the trauma memories, often loaded with the original emotions of fear, terror, disgust, or shame, Yaman explained, and for some survivors these memories are not simply recalled, but rather re-experienced on a very physical and visceral level. But equally relevant are survivors’ post-traumatic appraisals, meaning the ways people make sense of their suffering — the ways they see it, understand it, and interpret it.
“These are often at the core of what prolongs psychological suffering,” Yaman said. “When I sit in the clinic across from survivors, I help them do two things. The first is to narrate their trauma so I can bear witness and contextualise their trauma and suffering in the broader social, political, and at times, global reality. The absence of a sense of justice, or even the hope of it, has been one of the most prominent themes within the therapeutic space.”
Syrians need to tell their stories, and for the world to bear witness and offer them a sense of justice and moral closure, for the sake of psychological survival of communities and societies, Yaman argued. “Our psychological pain is a political one, and I can’t avoid this reality,” she said.
Regime Control
A student union is supposed to be a civil society organisation, and to represent students’ interests, Yaman pointed out, but the National Union of Syrian Students was essentially a death squad during the revolution, and in other times, it functioned as a surveillance and indoctrination machine.
Fadel Abdul Ghani of the Syrian Network for Human Rights placed the actions of the NUSS in the wider context of oppression by the Assad dictatorship. “Because this union is attached to the regime, the union has committed against students the same practices as the regime has committed against the Syrian people, such as extrajudicial killing, detention, torture, suppression of freedom of opinion and expression, prevention of demonstrations, and attacks on university facilities and equipment,” he said.
These kinds of violations are ongoing within areas controlled by the Assad regime, Fadel explained, detailing recent cases of arbitrary arrests, disappearances, and death by torture. Millions of people have fled their homes to escape, and the regime then seizes their property and other assets. And all the while the regime and its allies continue to bomb and shell areas outside regime control.
Mazen Darwish of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression then told of how he first came to Syria as a child. “I was born in Palestine and spent six years there,” he explained. “My father is Syrian, so I came to Syria, and to school, and suddenly I find there is something called the Ba’ath Vanguards.” This is a Ba’ath Party organisation for primary school children, integrated into the education system, where all pupils are compelled to be members. For secondary school pupils there is another organisation, the Revolutionary Youth Union, and for third-level the National Union of Syrian Students completes the system. “This is how the regime creates its own civil society just to control everything,” Mazen told the audience.
Hopes for Change
On the new Labour government in the UK, Mazen Darwish welcomed what he saw as “very good signals” with the ending of the Rwanda scheme for removing asylum seekers, and the dropping of UK objections to the International Criminal Court case on the Gaza conflict. “And we are talking about a Prime Minister who started as a human rights defender, so there is a lot of expectation and there is a lot of opportunity,” he said.
“Finally, last year, the UK’s War Crimes Unit decided to open an investigation, a structured investigation about Syria,” Mazen said. Other countries began this work in 2012. Mazen and his colleagues have worked with war crimes units in many other countries, but bringing a case in the UK has been exceptionally difficult. “Between opening the investigation and sending the charge, it doesn’t take years, usually — and yet this is our experience here with the Metropolitan Police and SO15 in the UK.”
The delay wastes time, resources, and also the life of the victims, Mazen says. “In this case, we represent nineteen victims on behalf of thousands.” He hopes the case will now go to the new Attorney General Richard Hermer without further delay. “All the victims, they deserve an answer.”
Mazen then talked about the possibility of referring crimes committed in Syria to the International Criminal Court. Russia and China have used their veto power to block the possibility of the UN Security Council doing this, but there is an alternative that the UK could pursue, Mazen argued.
Under Article 14 of the Rome Statute, the treaty which governs the ICC, “a State Party may refer to the Prosecutor a situation in which one or more crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court appear to have been committed requesting the Prosecutor to investigate the situation for the purpose of determining whether one or more specific persons should be charged with the commission of such crimes.”
The UK as a state party to the Rome Statute can do this, and as Mazen pointed out, most Syrians can think of a specific person in Damascus as a suspect. But there is a catch — in cases not referred by the Security Council, the Court only has jurisdiction if the crime was committed on the territory of a state party, or if the person accused of the crime is a national of a state party. This rules out a case against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, because Syria is not a state party and Assad is not a national of a state party.
However, Asma al-Assad, wife of Bashar al-Assad, is a UK national, so if a case could be brought against her for any of the crimes within the jurisdiction of the court, the UK could refer the case to the ICC. In 2021, it was reported in the Guardian and elsewhere that the Metropolitan Police had opened a preliminary investigation “into claims she has incited, aided and encouraged war crimes by Syrian government forces.”
Whitewashing a Dictatorship
Yasmine Nahlawi brought the conversation back to the NUSS. There are no independent institutions or civil society under the regime in Syria, she said, and the National Union of Syrian Students is no exception in this.
“Organisations like the NUSS are being used now by the regime to whitewash its crimes,” she went on. “Since 2020, we’ve seen the NUSS being invited to international events and conferences, including by the United Nations Development Programme. We’re seeing former members from the NUSS rise in the ranks of the Syrian regime and now representing Syria at senior levels, including recently Omar Aroub’s potential presence at the Paris Olympics.”
Omar Aroub was formerly a senior member of the NUSS, and he ordered the detention and torture of students. He rose up the ranks of the regime, serving a term in the Syrian parliament. “Then in 2020, he became the vice president of Syria’s General Sports Federation,” Yasmine told us. “And in 2023, he was appointed as the head of the Paralympics Committee for Syria. He travelled to Paris in August of last year, and he was supposed to represent the regime in the Paris Olympics this year in July.”
Left: Omar Aroub posing alongside Bashar al-Assad, posted to his Facebook account on the 23rd of November 2019.
Right: A photo of Omar Aroub in Paris, posted on his Facebook account on the 31st of August 2023.
Right: A photo of Omar Aroub in Paris, posted on his Facebook account on the 31st of August 2023.
The Syrian British Consortium, together with the Syria Campaign and Action For Sama, launched a campaign to ban him from the Olympics. Eventually the International Olympics Committee responded that he did not have accreditation to attend. “Whether he decided not to attend, or whether the committee decided not to accredit him was not made clear to us,” Yasmine said.
“Of course we would have been happier if he was arrested and held to account,” she admitted. “There was a very low probability of arrest due to legal constraints, but also due to procedural constraints, so we would count this as a very modest success.”
Links
Syrian British Consortium: https://www.syrianbritish.org/
• Report: A Decade after Daraya: Documenting a Massacre
• Report: Militia on Campus: Crimes of the National Union of Syrian Students at Damascus University
Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression: https://scm.bz/en/• Report: Militia on Campus: Crimes of the National Union of Syrian Students at Damascus University
Syrian Network for Human Rights: https://snhr.org/