The Tadamon Massacre: Archiving Violence through the Perpetrators’ Gaze

Abstract

On 16 April 2013, the Assad regime’s Military Intelligence Branch 227 committed a massacre of over 300 civilians (including women and children) in Damascus, by driving them to a secluded part of Tadamon neighborhood, taking them to a pre-dug pit, and executing them one by one. The perpetrators videotaped the entire massacre, footage that was never intended to be circulated, but a source close to the perpetrators leaked the video to us. Having analyzed the video content, managed to find the main shooter on Facebook and then interview him, and having found contextual information and evidence for this massacre, one of the questions that still need to be addressed was: How can we unravel, examine, and systemize these types of violent video produced by the Assad regime? Much like the Caesar photos, the prison CCTV system, and the Mukhabarat archives, the phenomenon of perpetrators producing and archiving very violent images like the Tadamon massacre demonstrates how and why the Assad regime has become the chief archivist of its own violence.

Notes

1 In this article, I distinguish first person singular in describing the research and writing that were conducted exclusively by myself, as distinct from first person plural to describe the research done by myself and Annsar Shahhoud. See “Massacre in Tadamon: How Two Academics Hunted down a Syrian War Criminal”, The Guardian, 27 April 2022; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/27/massacre-in-tadamon-how-two-academics-hunted-down-a-syrian-war-criminal; also Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör, “How a Massacre of Nearly 300 in Syria Was Revealed”, Newlines Magazine, 27 April 2022; https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/how-a-massacre-of-nearly-300-in-syria-was-revealed/

2 See the contributions in Mortensen and McCrow-Young (2022).

3 See the special issue “Double Exposures” of the Journal of Perpetrator Research, vol. 2, no. 2 (2019).

4 This website is available at https://syrianarchive.org/.

5 One of the most powerful Military Intelligence branches in all of Syria, the District Branch, is in charge of Damascus province and its countryside. It was headed in the 1980s by Nizar al-Helou (1942–2016), but after the escape from the branch of several Islamist inmates, al-Helou was sacked and his deputy, Hisham Ikhtiyar (1941–2012), became head of the branch until 2001. From 2005 to 2012, the branch was run by Rustom Ghazaleh (1953–2015), after which Imad Issa and (at the time of writing) Kemal al-Hussein took over.

6 In this article I do not anonymize him or protect his identity in any other way; for he has been widely identified in the Arabic and international media, and is so firmly in power that no academic publication could threaten him.

7 The interviews were done by the researcher Annsar Shahhoud.

8 Through an interview on 22 March 2021 on Facebook.

9 In an interview with SJAC director Mohammad al-Abdallah, 19 Feb. 2016, and 26 Aug. 2016. Site visit CIJA, 1 Oct. 2015.

10 All photos are available for viewing at: https://safmcd.org/

11 Found within “The Project of Documenting the War on Syria” (28 June 2018) at: http://en.wathiqat-wattan.org/452/the-project-of-documenting-the-war-on-syria and http://en.wathiqat-wattan.org/category/oral-history

12 See for example the closed Facebook group “Air Force Intelligence of the Syrian Arabic Republic”, with 9800 members; https://www.facebook.com/groups/524882774239186, which I accessed on 20 Nov. 2021.

13 There is a rich scholarship on the Assad regime, both as a case study and in comparative perspective. For a thorough bibliography on modern and contemporary Syria, as well as the conflict, see that compiled by Judith Tinnes at: www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/431/html

14 A less credible theory that has circulated is that the videos are shot as instructional material to show new recruits at the Mukhabarat’s intelligence academy in Damascus “how it’s done.” The digging of the pits, the scene-setting of the execution, and keeping the footage on Branch 227’s official laptop indeed all suggest some premeditation and intention, but it seems a bit far-fetched to suggest that the Mukhabarat would be so callous as to expose young recruits to the level of criminality evidenced in the videos.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Uğur Ümit Üngör

UĞUR ÜMIT ÜNGÖR is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute. His main areas of interest are mass violence, with a focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East. He is the author of Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford, 2020), and Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad's Prison System (I.B. Tauris, 2023). E-mail: [email protected]