In 2018, a young Syrian named Youssef Juma was repairing a laptop belonging to a local security commander when he discovered footage of a mass execution. The videos showed blindfolded civilians being led to a pit in Tadamon, a residential district of Damascus, and shot dead. Forty-one people were killed in the filmed massacre, their bodies covered with car tyres and burned. In a folder labelled “revenge for a martyr”, Juma found another 28 videos documenting the deaths of 288 victims, almost all civilians.
The discovery would eventually help expose one of the most disturbing episodes of violence committed during Syria’s civil war and lead investigators to Amjad Youssef, the intelligence officer filmed carrying out the executions. But uncovering his identity required years of covert research by Annsar Shahhoud, a Syrian academic who created a fictional online persona to gain the confidence of military and intelligence officers serving President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Syria’s war began in 2011, when the government started arresting and shooting demonstrators. The protests eventually developed into an armed conflict, during which large numbers of people disappeared into the country’s security apparatus. Later estimates suggested that as many as 300,000 people may have vanished. Reports of detention, torture and killings circulated widely, but evidence identifying individual perpetrators was difficult to obtain.
Juma’s footage offered unusually clear images of the men involved. Unlike other recordings of bodies being transported from intelligence facilities to burial pits that investigators had encountered, the camcorder footage showed the executioner’s face. The man wore green fatigues and fired a Kalashnikov while occasionally looking directly into the camera. Other officers appeared in the recordings, including men Juma knew as neighbours. Aware of the danger of being discovered with the videos, he arranged for the material to leave Syria.
In 2019, the footage reached Professor Ugur Ümit Üngör of the University of Amsterdam’s Holocaust and Genocide Center. Üngör had spent years trying to understand the men who arrested, tortured and killed people suspected of supporting the opposition. Their public identities often seemed inconsistent with the violence they inflicted. Many maintained Facebook profiles showing family photographs and ordinary aspects of their lives, even as evidence accumulated of abuses committed by the security services.
Üngör had found it difficult to persuade serving officers to speak openly. Few accepted his friend requests, and none wanted to discuss their actions. He concluded that a different approach was necessary. “I realised if I was going to get them to talk I needed to invent someone who would be seen as harmless,” he recalled. The persona would be a woman, he decided, because women were not generally perceived as political threats in Syria.
Shahhoud, who had left Syria in 2015 to study in Europe, had already been researching medical violence during the conflict. Her master’s thesis examined doctors who had participated in the torture of detainees, including in interrogation centres located inside hospitals. Her interest in the psychology of perpetrators deepened after Üngör introduced her to Robert Jay Lifton’s book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Lifton’s concept of “doubling” examined how individuals could maintain separate identities, enabling someone to participate in atrocities while continuing to function as a caring parent or professional.
To reach the Syrian officers, Shahhoud and Üngör transformed her Facebook profile into that of “Anna”, a young Alawite woman studying in Europe who supported the regime. The identity was designed to appear sympathetic to the officers’ worldview while placing her outside the immediate reach of Syrian intelligence. Anna presented herself as an academic researching the military’s role in defending the country against terrorists.
The strategy worked. Officers who had spent years exercising power over others began talking about their experiences as the war wound down. Many were themselves being questioned by intelligence services, which feared that commanders who had accumulated wealth and influence might threaten the president. According to Shahhoud, every officer she interviewed had been summoned for questioning at least two or three times. Isolated and anxious, they appeared to need someone with whom they could explain or justify their conduct.
Most initially denied wrongdoing or blamed others. Some, however, acknowledged harming people whom they believed threatened their families and the Alawite community. They described their actions as a duty to the state and connected their participation in violence to their roles as husbands and fathers.
After receiving the Tadamon footage, Shahhoud began searching Facebook for the executioner. She eventually found a photograph of two men in Damascus. One had a distinctive scar above his eyebrow matching the mark on the man in the video. The officer was identified as Amjad Youssef. “In many ways, he was a typical career intelligence officer,” Shahhoud said. Üngör added: “The only thing about Amjad that stood out was that we had seen him killing.”
Youssef’s online presence included photographs with his children and mother, images of himself on a motorbike and at the gym, and poetry about his brother, who had died early in the war. His brother was the “martyr” referred to in the folder containing the execution videos. Yet Shahhoud discovered that Youssef’s career in repression predated the civil war: he had already been an intelligence commander interrogating and torturing people in 2004.
Anna eventually persuaded Youssef to speak over video calls. During one conversation, he discussed his brother’s death, his anger and his desire for revenge. Then he admitted: “I killed a lot of people.” Shahhoud subsequently sent him the Tadamon footage and asked a direct question: “Is this you?” He initially denied it but later acknowledged that he was the man shown carrying out the killings.
The recording and admission provided investigators with evidence linking Youssef to the massacre. While Assad remained in power, however, the prospect of justice appeared remote. The government fell in December 2024, prompting hopes that those responsible for mass graves and systematic torture might finally face accountability.
Youssef was arrested in April this year, but his detention has not resolved Shahhoud’s concerns about other figures implicated in the massacre. Fadi Saqr, a military commander widely said to have controlled Tadamon when the killings occurred, has received a form of amnesty from Syria’s new government. Saqr denies having controlled the area at the time and now lives in an affluent coastal area, protected by armed guards.
Shahhoud says she still does not feel safe returning to Syria. Since the covert operation became public, she has received threats from people angered by the deception, including former opponents of Assad. Some accuse her and Üngör of withholding evidence from the new authorities. The researchers gave the footage to Dutch authorities, expecting the Syrian government to request it through official channels.
She has also faced criticism over errors in identifying children in the videos. Shahhoud acknowledges that she lacked the qualifications to make such identifications, but says families desperate for information about missing relatives placed her under pressure. In one case, she told a man that six missing children in his family were not among Youssef’s victims, when they were.
For Shahhoud, the consequences extend beyond the identification of a single perpetrator. She says the experience of living through Assad’s Syria left her with trauma of her own, and that inhabiting Anna became a way of separating herself from it. Now that the character has served her purpose, she and Üngör have burned printed copies of the fictional profile.
The threats and disputes continue, while other figures linked to the violence remain free. Shahhoud says confronting Syria’s past will require years of dialogue about the ways people exercised control over one another, both militarily and socially.
