DAMASCUS, Syria — The crowd surged forward, thousands cheering, waving and jostling their way around Damascus’ Al Ashmar Square, all positioning themselves for the best view of a hanging.
“Hurry up,” a mother scolded her child as they walked along the roadside. “We don’t want to be late.”
A fire truck approached, spurring a chorus of shouts by those thinking a condemned man was inside. Young men scampered onto the truck, hoping to glimpse Saleh al-Ras, an enforcer for former Syrian President Bashar Assad, who was ousted by rebels this month after 13 years of civil war.
Al-Ras led a militia that oversaw security in the district of Tadamon, just outside Damascus, and is widely believed to be responsible for numerous atrocities there, including a 2013 massacre that killed nearly 300 people. People in Tadamon have a nickname for the toothbrush-mustached henchman: “Syria’s Hitler.”
“This man, he and his people, they were animals,” said Majed Shaaban, 32, who works for a cleaning services company. “I came to see him die.”
A crowd gathers after hearing that a militia commander would be publicly hanged.
Shaaban and the rest of the crowd would eventually leave the square in disappointment.
Syria’s new leaders have promised justice for a population that had been terrorized for decades by a government that imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, killed and used sexual violence as a weapon of war. But in keeping with the rebels’ quest for international legitimacy, they have also vowed to deliver it through the rule of law, with prosecutions that could take years.
That timescale is unlikely to satisfy ordinary Syrians clamoring for vengeance.
::
Within days of the rebel victory, pro-rebel activists reported that Al-Ras had been one of several figures detained in a countrywide dragnet by the interim security authority led by the rebel faction Hayat Tahrir al Sham.
Government officials did not confirm whether Al-Ras was captured, but before long word was spreading in Tadamon that he was to be publicly hanged.
Waiting for the execution in Al Ashmar Square last week, people in the crowd explained why they wanted to witness Al-Ras be put to death.
“If he wanted a woman he saw at the checkpoint, he would arrest her husband and threaten to kill him if she didn’t let him rape her,” said a woman in her 30s.
The woman said that four of her relatives, including her uncle and nephew, had been taken by Al-Ras’ men and that almost certainly they were dead.
“I won’t tell you my name, or my age — I’m too afraid,” she said. How could she be sure the militia commander somehow wouldn’t return to power? “Anyone could inform on you; the grocer, the restaurant waiter, the neighbor — everyone.
“It’s only been a week without them,” she said. “We need time to get used to this new life.”
Next to her, a 62-year-old man, also too afraid to give his name, agreed that Al-Ras was a perpetrator of rape and murder.
“Sometimes he would just shoot the husband, rape the wife, then shoot her too,” he said. “If they put this man in front of us on the ground, all the women of Tadamon would jump on him and rip him apart.”
A man sifts through rubble for human remains in the Tadamon neighborhood at the edge of Damascus.
After a few hours, with no sign of Al-Ras, the bearded militants maintaining order informed people there would be no execution for two days, until Friday after noon prayers. The crowd reluctantly dispersed.
But when Friday came, word spread there would be no execution after all. The hanging had been a rumor.
An official in the Ministry of Interior, who was not authorized to speak to the media, said the government had no plans to execute any former government figures without trials.
“There are many rumors about executions, but this is just people’s talk,” he said. “We’re not going to have reprisals.
“We will have justice for everyone, but first we have to form a government so we can have proper courts,” he said.
In a statement last week, Ahmad al Sharaa, the leader of the Hayat Tahrir al Sham faction, said the government planned to release a most-wanted list of members of the former government and offer rewards for information leading to their arrests.
“We will pursue them in Syria, and we ask countries to hand over those who fled so we can achieve justice. … The blood of the innocent martyrs and the rights of the detainees are a trust that we will not allow to be wasted or forgotten.”
At the same time, Al Sharaa said, the new leadership was offering amnesty to conscripts and would open so-called reconciliation centers.
::
When rebels overran portions of Tadamon early in the civil war, the district became an emblem of the resistance. Then when evidence emerged of mass killings, it seemed to encapsulate the sadism of Assad’s security forces. In the days since the government’s disintegration, Tadamon has illustrated the search for the missing, and for answers.
Last week in Tadamon, where bombed-out husks of buildings rise out of a sea of rubble, Usama Kastana, 40, and a few other residents explored the ruins near Al-Ras’ checkpoint for the first time, including the site of the 2013 massacre that had been off-limits to residents for years.
“You couldn’t even come close to this block,” Kastana said. “We weren’t allowed.”
Two years ago, a member of the government-backed militia gave researchers 27 videos of intelligence and militia personnel leading blindfolded detainees to a ditch filled with tires and shoving them in or shooting them in the back as they ran, then igniting the tires to burn the bodies.
Researchers and journalists combed through the videos and identified 288 people — including seven women and 12 children — who were killed.
Bones lie on the ground in the Tadamon,
Fouad Shawakh, 56, said executions were routine in the neighborhood right up until government forces withdrew this month.
“You’d hear shooting,” he said. “Then there would be this smell all over the place, of burning flesh.”
Mohammad Darwish, 23, pointed to a pile of trash and shredded clothing in the rubble, along with what appeared to be human bones.
“Look, here’s the top part of the skull,” Kastana said.
“Search each of these buildings and you’ll find bones in every single one,” Darwish said before leading a reporter to a nearby mosque that had been commandeered by Al-Ras’ men throughout the war.
“We spent the last day taking bones out of there as well,” he said.
During his search, Darwish had discovered a tunnel. It stretched dozens of feet but had been partially blocked by debris. Darwish was sure there would be remains inside.
Though they would have been happy to see Al-Ras punished, many here insisted their priority was to know the fate of their missing loved ones.
Men gather around a hole leading to a tunnel found in Tadamon.
“The worst thing authorities could do now is execute him,” said Walid Al-Abdullah, 56. “We know he did the crime and he should be punished, but they need to keep him alive until we find out what happened.”
Al-Abdullah, an engineer, remembers the date — July 27, 2013 — when 15 members of his family, including his parents, sisters and four of his nieces and nephews, disappeared. He found the family home ransacked and no trace of his loved ones, he said.
“I don’t care to get compensation or for anything that was lost from the house. None of it,” he said. “I just want to know the fate of 15 people.”
For years, Al-Abdullah said, he sent official requests for information to the ministry of interior and the intelligence agencies. He got no answers, only punishment, he said, including losing some benefits at his state job.
He held out hope that his family was alive — thinking there were kids among those taken, so surely they would be fine — until two years ago when he saw the massacre videos.
After a visit to Tadamon, Human Rights Watch issued a report Monday urging Syria’s transitional authorities to secure and preserve physical evidence across the country of “grave international crimes by members of the former government.”
Remains have been found at what appear to be mass graves just outside Damascus.
(Ayman Oghanna / For The Times)
“The loved ones of people so brutally killed here deserve to know what happened to them,” said Hiba Zayadin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The victims deserve accountability.”
Al-Abdullah was waiting for a government to be formed so he could restart his search requests. He wants to know what happened to them, even if he may never understand the reason.
“Why would they kill kids?” he asked.
Beside him stood Ali Fadhel, who said he was imprisoned for more than three months after asking about his two brothers, taken by the militia.
“With them there was no why or why not,” he said. “They just took you.”
