The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 opened a rare window into the inner workings of one of the world’s most secretive authoritarian governments. Among the most alarming revelations emerging from the “Damascus Dossier” – a trove of 134,000 Syrian intelligence documents obtained by Germany’s NDR and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its partners – is the discovery of how Syriatel, the country’s largest telecom operator, functioned as a surveillance arm of the Syrian regime.

For decades, Syrians suspected they were being monitored. What they did not know was the staggering scope of this intrusion – how deeply intelligence agencies penetrated private communications and how systematically the country’s telecom infrastructure was repurposed to track, intimidate, and silence dissent. The newly uncovered documents now confirm those fears with chilling specificity.

Syriatel’s ties to the Assad family have never been a secret. Its former chairman, Rami Makhlouf – Assad’s powerful maternal cousin – built an empire under the protection of the regime. Makhlouf was sanctioned by both the US and the EU for financing Assad’s brutal crackdown on civilians, and his companies were widely understood to be financial arteries feeding the regime.

Yet the Damascus Dossier reveals a deeper, more structural relationship: Syriatel was not just a regime-friendly company but an active collaborator that enabled one of the most sophisticated domestic spying systems in the Middle East.

A 2020 intelligence report from Branch 251, part of the notorious General Intelligence Directorate, documents interrogations of several individuals linked to Makhlouf, including Syriatel’s then–IT director. The testimony describes how Syriatel’s IT department handed over “all information related to subscribers and their communications” to the Communications Directorate – a military intelligence unit within the Ministry of Defense.

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