Shortly before 11 on Sunday morning, a man in a brown striped prison uniform was led into an iron cage at the Palace of Justice in central Damascus. Atef Najib, brigadier general, cousin of Bashar al-Assad, and former head of political security in Deraa, sat down expressionless as families of victims packed the courtroom around him.
Above the cage, prosecutors had placed a photograph of Hamza al-Khatib, the 13-year-old whose tortured body became one of the earliest and most widely shared symbols of the uprising. Chants from 2011 filled the hall. Syria had opened its first public trial of an Assad-era official.
The choice of defendant matters. Najib was the political security chief in Deraa in 2011, when teenagers who scrawled anti-government graffiti on a school wall were arrested and tortured. Their detention helped set off the first mass protests against Assad’s rule. He was arrested in January 2025, weeks after the regime’s collapse, and has spent more than a year in custody before Sunday’s preparatory session. The next hearing is scheduled for 10 May.
Deraa Returns
For years, Deraa was discussed as the place where the uprising began.
Now it returns as the place where accountability begins, or at least claims to. That gives the trial historical weight beyond one defendant and one set of charges. The civil war that followed the Deraa crackdown lasted fourteen years, killed more than 500,000 people, and displaced millions. Those numbers are so large that they risk becoming abstract. The trial cuts back to a smaller, sharper origin point: the use of humiliation, torture, and security arrogance against a provincial city that refused to stay quiet.
Assad fled to Russia after his ouster in December 2024 and will be tried in absentia alongside his brother Maher and other senior figures. Judge Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan read out a list of ten suspects at the opening session. Najib was the only one present in person. That list alone signals the ambition of the process, even if the most prominent names on it remain beyond Syria’s immediate reach.
Justice Needs More Than Theatre
There is an obvious danger in moments like this.
A man in a cage makes for powerful images, especially after decades in which Syrians were more used to seeing security officials command fear than submit to it. Yet transitional justice fails quickly if it becomes theatre with legal decoration. An observer assessing the trial’s impartiality on site told Middle East Eye: “We must maintain a degree of neutrality and avoid overly political language in order to meet the standards of justice, even if this is difficult in the face of victims.”
The legal framework itself carries complications. Crimes against humanity and war crimes have not yet been incorporated into Syrian national law, meaning charges are currently framed under domestic statutes. The death penalty remains in force. A rushed or selective process would satisfy the appetite for revenge whilst weakening the claim that a different legal order is being built. Syria does not lack rage. It lacks institutions people can trust after years in which courts served power rather than law.
Under interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa, the new state needs to prove that post-Assad justice will not be only rhetoric. A public trial helps build that case, but only if Syrians can see process, evidence, and consistency rather than a single dramatic spectacle. This first case will be judged less by its symbolism than by its credibility.
One Trial Cannot Carry the Whole War
No serious observer should pretend that trying Najib solves Syria’s accountability problem. The war was too long, too decentralised, and too soaked in impunity for that. One former security chief can stand for a system but cannot contain it. That is especially clear given what happened only days earlier.
On 24 April, Syrian authorities announced the capture of Amjad Youssef, the former military intelligence officer filmed personally shooting blindfolded civilians at the edge of a pit during the 2013 Tadamon massacre, in which 288 civilians were killed. He had been hiding in the Ghab Plain area of rural Hama since Assad’s fall. His arrest was widely welcomed, but even those celebrating it warned that many perpetrators remain untouched and that the value of his detention will be measured by what follows in court, not by the arrest itself.
Taken together, the Najib trial and the Youssef arrest suggest Syria is entering a new phase. The state is no longer dealing only in memory, leaked footage, and absent accusations. It is beginning to put names, faces, and chains of command into public legal form. Selective justice, however, can harden cynicism as easily as it relieves it.
A State on Trial Too
This is why the defendant is not the only one being judged. The new Syrian state is also on trial. It must show that justice is neither sectarian score-settling nor a brief public ritual designed to confer legitimacy on the victors. It must also show that law can confront crimes committed by a security machine that once appeared untouchable.
The hardest part of transitional justice is not opening the first case. It is building a pattern that survives the first applause. Syrians have seen enough dramatic scenes. What they need now is repetition, transparency, and a legal process that does not stop at the most photogenic defendant.
Deraa’s return to public view matters because it restores cause and consequence to a war that often became too vast to narrate. The first crackdown helped trigger the disaster. The first public trial asks whether Syria can begin to answer for it with something more durable than vengeance. The courtroom cage is the image everyone will remember. The harder task begins after the cameras move on.
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