Damascus court reads war-crimes charges against Atef Najib, Assad's cousin and former Daraa political security chief

On Sunday, May 10, 2026, a Damascus court read out detailed war-crimes charges against Atef Najib, a former Brigadier General in the Syrian Arab Army, the man who headed Political Security in Daraa province when the country's 2011 uprising began, and a cousin of former president Bashar al-Assad. Judge Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan described the charges in open court while state television aired part of the session, before the bench halted broadcast coverage and proceeded to hear statements from Najib and witnesses. Najib, who was arrested by the new government in January 2025, is the most senior former regime figure standing trial in person; Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher, and several other senior officials are being tried in absentia, believed to be in Russia.

What the judge read out

Aryan grounded the indictment in early 2011 events in Daraa. "The accusations against you relate to events in Daraa province in early 2011, when the peaceful protest movement was met with an excessive use of force," the judge said. He told Najib that as head of the political security branch at the time, he held direct and joint leadership responsibility for systematic acts targeting civilians—killing, torture and arbitrary detention.

Among specific allegations, the bench cited the arrest and torture of children, the opening of fire on a sit-in at a mosque in Daraa, and fatal torture in detention facilities run by the security forces under his command. Aryan summed up the chain of command: "You were the ultimate authority in Daraa province and hold direct responsibility for issuing orders to kill, arrest and torture... and for participating with political, security and military leaders in an organised hierarchical structure in committing these grave violations." That formulation tracks the legal logic of superior responsibility that international criminal courts have used to convict commanders without requiring proof they personally carried out each act.

Who is Atef Najib

Atef Najib held a politically sensitive role inside Syria's intelligence architecture. The Political Security Directorate is one of four major intelligence services that operated under the Assad family's rule, alongside Air Force Intelligence, General Intelligence (Mukhabarat) and Military Intelligence. The directorate's regional branches—Daraa being one—reported up through Damascus and held wide latitude over arrests, interrogations and informant networks within their geographic remit.

His family link mattered. Najib is a cousin of Bashar and Maher al-Assad on the Makhlouf-Assad side of the family network that supplied senior security and economic posts under the previous regime. That kinship is partly why the Daraa command pose was politically explosive in March 2011: complaints about his branch's behaviour—particularly the treatment of detained students—fed directly into the protests that spiralled into a civil war.

Why Daraa is the spine of this case

The uprising is widely traced back to March 15, 2011, when 15 students—most accounts call them schoolboys—were arrested in Daraa for writing anti-government slogans on the walls of their school. Local accounts of how the boys were treated in custody fuelled large protests, which were met with live fire, escalating crowd sizes and a national crackdown that became the Syrian civil war. The first known killings of protesters by security forces took place in Daraa, which is why the city is sometimes called the cradle of the uprising.

Choosing Najib as the lead in-person defendant therefore carries a doctrinal message inside the new transitional-justice process: the prosecution is starting at the geographic source of the war and at the command level that held line authority over the original crackdown, rather than with mid-level operatives swept up later. It is also an answer to political pressure from inside Syria—including from families of the disappeared and from civil-society groups—that the new authorities not allow the trail back to 2011 to grow cold while focusing on later atrocities such as the prison archives.

The wider docket: Assad, Maher and the 4th Division

Beyond Najib, the Damascus court is running parallel in absentia proceedings against Bashar al-Assad himself and his brother Maher al-Assad, the former commander of the Syrian military's 4th Armoured Division. Opposition activists and rights groups have for years accused the 4th Division of killings, torture, extortion, drug trafficking—including the regional captagon stimulant trade—and the operation of its own detention centres. Both brothers are believed to have fled Syria during the December 2024 collapse of the regime and to be living in Russia.

An unnamed judicial source cited by AFP indicated that other officials expected to face in-person trials include Wassim al-Assad, another relative of the former president, and Ahmed Badreddin Hassoun, the former Grand Mufti of Syria, alongside additional military and security officials arrested by the new authorities. Many members of the Assad inner circle, however, are thought to have escaped Syria, complicating any ambition to deliver a fully in-person reckoning.

Syria's transitional-justice framework under al-Sharaa

The trial is the first concrete output of the transitional justice track promised by interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former leader of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) whose lightning offensive in late 2024 brought down the Assad government. Al-Sharaa has spent the past 18 months trying to normalise his international standing—the UN Security Council has lifted sanctions on him personally, Germany has hosted him despite human-rights concerns, and Washington has engaged him on regional questions including the Iran war—while domestic critics have accused his government of dragging on legal proceedings against former regime members.

The opening of the Najib trial on April 26, with charges read out today, is the new government's most visible answer to that criticism. Syria has committed to holding presidential elections within five years of Assad's fall, and the political logic of the transitional-justice docket is to have visible verdicts against named perpetrators well before that vote. Crowds gathered outside the courthouse on the opening day, jostling for entry and waving flags, and state-run SANA has carried the framing that Najib faces charges connected to "crimes against the Syrian people."

What 'war crimes' mean here, legally

War crimes, in international criminal practice, are serious violations of the laws and customs of armed conflict, including wilful killing of civilians, torture or inhuman treatment, attacks on protected sites such as places of worship, and the detention of children under conditions amounting to abuse. Crimes against humanity, a related but distinct category, cover systematic or widespread attacks on a civilian population, such as murder, enslavement, enforced disappearance and persecution on political grounds.

Syrian domestic law historically did not codify these international categories cleanly, which is why the new authorities' choice of charge language matters. Aryan's framing—systematic acts targeting civilians, organised hierarchical structure, direct and joint leadership responsibility—maps onto international legal templates rather than ordinary penal-code violence offences. Whether the verdicts will be written in that international vocabulary, or downgraded to local criminal-code articles for practical reasons, is one of the most-watched aspects of how this trial will unfold.

What the courtroom looked like

Najib appeared in handcuffs and striped prisoner garb—a deliberate choice that reverses Syria's older imagery, in which the inside of detention rooms was hidden and senior officials never appeared in restraints. The April 26 session was procedural, with the bench dedicating it to "preparatory administrative and legal procedures"; today's session was substantive, with the charges spelled out before the cameras were turned off and witness testimony was taken in closed format.

The decision to air part of the session and then halt media coverage balances two pressures the new judiciary is trying to manage. Open broadcast satisfies public demand for visibility after years in which trials of regime opponents were closed and rubber-stamped. Closing coverage during witness testimony is meant to protect witnesses—many of whom risk reprisal—and to avoid contamination of evidence in a case that prosecutors expect to grow as more former officials are caught or extradited.

Risks and limits worth flagging

Several caveats matter. The new authorities themselves have a record under earlier identities—al-Sharaa led an Islamist armed group that fought through much of the war—and rights observers have flagged that any post-Assad transitional-justice mechanism risks selective prosecution if it covers only one side of the conflict. Domestic procedural protections, defence-counsel access, evidentiary chain of custody, and protection from forced confessions are areas where international monitors are likely to scrutinise the proceedings closely.

There is also the question of scale versus speed. Syria's civil war left an estimated half a million dead and millions displaced over 14 years, with state records of regime atrocities documented in archives such as the Caesar photographs of detention deaths. Any single trial—even of a senior Daraa command figure—can do only a fraction of the substantive accountability work; conducting a credible programme that deals with both grand-scale and mid-tier perpetrators will take years and will require legislation, witness-protection infrastructure, and political consensus that the country has not yet fully built.

What to watch in the coming weeks

Three signals will tell readers whether this trial sets a pattern or stays a showcase. First, the schedule and public visibility of the Najib hearings: how often the court convenes, what fraction of testimony is broadcast, and whether the defence is given full ability to cross-examine. Second, the next named in-person defendants—Wassim al-Assad, Ahmed Badreddin Hassoun, and military or security commanders. The order in which the new judiciary brings them to court is itself a political map of priorities.

Third, whether the Russian posture toward the in absentia defendants shifts. Bashar and Maher al-Assad's continued residence in Russia is a hard barrier to physical custody; pressure on Moscow for extradition is unlikely to succeed in the short term, but legal records produced in Damascus can later support third-country prosecutions and universal-jurisdiction cases in Europe under existing precedents.

Bottom line

Atef Najib, Bashar al-Assad's cousin and the Daraa political security chief at the moment Syria's uprising began, has now formally been told in open court that he is accused of war crimes: ordering or enabling systematic killing, torture, arbitrary detention, and the targeting of children and a mosque sit-in. The Damascus bench led by Judge Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan has couched the charges in language that reads from the command-responsibility template international tribunals use, while the in absentia track against Bashar and Maher al-Assad, Wassim al-Assad and Ahmed Badreddin Hassoun keeps the docket politically broad. Whether Syria's transitional-justice process becomes a credible reckoning or a curated showcase will depend on what comes after Najib—on schedule, on transparency, and on whether the new judiciary applies the same legal vocabulary to the war's other crimes.