The Justice Department has charged two top Syrian military officials with war crimes committed against Americans and others at a notorious prison in Damascus during the Syrian civil war, according to an indictment unsealed on Monday.
The indictment represents the first time the United States has criminally charged top Syrian officials with a litany of human rights abuses used to silence dissent and spread fear through the country. The whereabouts of the officials, Jamil Hassan and Abdul Salam Mahmoud, are not known, but the indictment clearly signals that the United States aims to hold the former Syrian government officials responsible.
Mr. Hassan and Mr. Mahmoud “sought to terrify, intimidate and repress any opposition, or perceived opposition, to the regime,” according to the indictment, which was filed under seal last month in federal court in Chicago.
The indictment was made public the day after Syrian rebels overthrew Bashar al-Assad, the longtime Syrian leader. Mr. Hassan and Mr. Mahmoud would need to be flown to federal court in Chicago to stand trial, but the charges provide the legal mechanism for American law enforcement to take custody of the men, if they can be found.
Mr. al-Assad has already fled to Moscow.
Along with unnamed co-conspirators, Mr. Hassan and Mr. Mahmoud “committed the war crime of knowingly and intentionally conspiring to commit cruel and inhuman treatment,” according to the indictment. The men intended to inflict “serious physical abuse upon victims within their custody or control, namely U.S. citizens and other detainees” held at Mezzeh military air base in the Mezzeh neighborhood of Damascus. Investigators described the location as the Mezzeh prison and said both men had offices at the facility.
Mr. Hassan and Mr. Mahmoud were top leaders under Mr. al-Assad. Mr. Hassan was the head of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, which oversaw the crackdown on Syrian citizens, and Mr. Mahmoud was a brigadier general in the Air Force Intelligence unit who was in charge of the Mezzeh prison and operations at the military base.
The indictment describes the torture that Syrian military officials doled out, such as electrocuting and pulling out the toenails of prisoners, as well as burning them with acid and regular beatings. Federal investigators said the cruelty in the indictment took place from 2012 to 2019.
The men were instrumental in helping Mr. Assad conduct a ruthless system of detention and torture that he used to maintain his government for 13 years. His rule came to an end days ago, when rebels seized the country’s largest city, Aleppo, and the capital, Damascus, and toppled Mr. Assad’s government. The rebels freed prisoners in the country, many of them thought to be innocent civilians.
Both men are well known to human rights advocates and the American government. In 2012, the United States imposed sanctions on Mr. al-Assad and his inner circle, including Mr. Hassan, for committing acts of violence against civilians.
Three days before a grand jury returned the indictment against Mr. Mahmoud, the State Department said that it had restricted his ability to travel “due to his involvement in gross violations of human rights, namely torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”
A spokesman for the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment about why prosecutors waited more than 20 days to unseal the indictment.
Prosecutors in Chicago have been investigating Mr. Hassan and others since 2018, when it opened a case related to the detention and killing of an American aid worker named Layla Shweikani. F.B.I. agents traveled to Europe and the Middle East to interview witnesses, including the man who may have buried Ms. Shweikani.
The indictment does not name Ms. Shweikani, who was held imprisoned on the outskirts of Damascus for nearly year at three detention facilities known for their use of torture: a facility at the Mezzeh airport, the Adra civilian prison and the Saydnaya military prison.
Dina Kash, an F.B.I. witness who was detained at Mezzeh prison, said that investigators wanted names of fellow detainees and information about how they were treated, one of the locations where Ms. Shweikani was held. Syrian guards beat Ms. Kash and knocked out her teeth. She was forced to listen to the screams of fellow prisoners being tortured. Guards killed her husband.
“The investigators focused on the people that interrogated me and the Assad regime intelligence operatives and officials that were involved in my family’s arrest, including Hassan.” Ms. Kash said.
“I have hope that the United States government can get justice for American citizens, but also for the countless women and children that were arrested, detained, tortured and killed by this regime,” she said.
“Now it is our time to catch these criminals and bring them to the United States for trial,” said Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force. Mr. Moustafa said that he was traveling to Syria to help law enforcement agencies gather human remains and documents from the nation’s prisons.
The indictment does not mention anything about Austin Tice, an American abducted in Syria in 2012. Syria never acknowledged holding Mr. Tice, but American officials are hopeful that he survived what would have amounted to a grueling stretch inside the Syrian prison system.
American officials are confident that Mr. Tice was held by the Syrians early in his abduction. Investigators learned that he had initially been taken to a prison in Damascus and was seen by a doctor, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Tice managed to escape for about a week but was recaptured, the people said.
In May, U.S. officials informed the family of Majd Kamalmaz that he died in Syria after disappearing there in 2017. Like the case of Mr. Tice, Syria never acknowledged holding Mr. Kamalmaz, and there was little information about his whereabouts.
Mr. Moustafa said he and his research team strongly suspected that Mr. Kamalmaz was imprisoned, at least for some of his time in Syria, at the Mezzeh air base.
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