Last August, a Syrian man posted a picture of himself on Facebook. It showed him standing somewhat awkwardly, unsmiling, in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

Al-Aroub's friends, family and colleagues probably wouldn't have been surprised to see the photo.

But a number of Syrian opposition journalists and activists were. That's because al-Aroub is close to the authoritarian Syrian regime headed by Bashar Assad. The Syrian dictator is accused of committing multiple war crimes, including chemical weapons attacks, against his own people over the course of the country's 13-year civil war.

Al-Aroub is known to be a senior member of the so-called Baath Brigades, a militia affiliated with the Assad government. Before that, he was a leader of the National Union of Syrian Students, or NUSS, which is also linked to the Assad regime.

But Al-Aroub is also the head of Syria's national Paralympics Committee, and he was in the French capital for a related meeting in the summer of 2023 when the tourist photo was taken.

Al-Aroub drew the attention of the London-based activist group Syrian British Consortium (SBC) when it was recently investigating possible war crimes committed by NUSS during anti-government protests between 2011 and 2013.

The yearlong investigation, published mid-June, confirmed "a pattern of systematic clampdowns on university students, including detentions and torture on campus," Yasmine Nahlawi, a lead SBC investigator, told DW.

"What we know is that he [al-Aroub] recruited other students to inform on protesters and to participate in the violent crackdown against protests. We know........

© Deutsche Welle