Published On 4/24/2026
Video footage showed Syrian Interior Minister Anas Khattab confronting the first accused of committing the Tadamon massacre in the capital, Damascus, in 2013, Amjad Youssef, after his arrest.
Khattab appeared in the clip circulated by activists on social media, saying to the accused, “Don’t you have children? Do you have no heart?” Youssef answered, “Yes, I have a girl and a boy.”
The Syrian Minister of the Interior addressed the defendant, Amjad Youssef, saying, “Don’t you have the heart to kill people in this way?!” In reference to the passage related to Joseph committing the massacre.
He added, “What you did was not the action of someone taking revenge, but rather someone who had no humanity.”
Today, Friday, the Syrian Ministry of Interior announced the arrest of Youssef, explaining that monitoring and tracking operations continued for several days before the implementation in the Al-Ghab Plain in the Hama countryside, stressing the continued pursuit of the remaining perpetrators of the massacre, to arrest them and bring them to justice.
Solidarity massacre
On April 16, 2013, the forces of the ousted regime killed 41 civilians in the Tadamon neighborhood massacre in Damascus, and threw them into a large hole, and human bones were later found in the area.
On April 27, 2022, the British newspaper The Guardian published a video clip, which it said was leaked by a pro-regime militia recruit, showing the forces of “Branch 227” of the regime’s military intelligence killing at least 41 people and burning their bodies.
Amjad Youssef, an Assad regime intelligence officer, whose face is clearly visible in the photos, was seen shooting civilians who were arrested, blindfolded and handcuffed.
Last year, Internal Security arrested a number of those involved in the massacre, and they confessed to committing several massacres in the neighborhood, in which more than 500 civilian men and women were killed.
The Syrian News Agency quoted Ahmed Adra, the official in charge of the Tadamon neighborhood coordination, saying that the Tadamon neighborhood massacre is not the only massacre, but rather one of several massacres, exposed by the mass graves found in the neighborhood.
