The gruesome video first made global headlines three years ago. At around six minutes long, the film clip, leaked by a former militiaman loyal to deposed Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, showed the massacre of at least 41 men.

Blindfolded, they were coaxed, pushed, or forced into a mass grave, where they fell onto the corpses of those who'd been killed before them, before being shot themselves.

The killings, filmed in 2013, took place in a suburb of Damascus called Tadamon and locals suspect many more could have been killed here in the same way by Assad regime forces. Thousands of Syrians are still missing after the war ended in late 2024.

Earlier this June, the Tadamon massacre, as it is now known, was back in the news again. Syria's Committee for Civil Peace — set up to ease community divisions after violence directed at minorities in March — had released dozens of former Assad regime soldiers. Among them, a man called Fadi Saqr, who had previously led an Assad-loyalist paramilitary group known as the National Defense Forces in Tadamon. They were allegedly responsible for the massacre in the video.

Syrians who had hoped for justice were incensed about the release of Saqr and others, and called for protests. Saqr told the New York Times he'd only been appointed to led the paramilitary after the Tadamon massacre, and the head of the Committee for Civil Peace told local media the decision to free Saqr and others had been made in the interests of peace and reconciliation. Saqr is apparently trying to persuade other former Assad regime supporters to back the new Syrian government.

"Achieving transitional justice in Syriais likely to take a long time," says Alaa Bitar, a teacher from Idlib who lost his brother in the Assad regime's prisons.

But releasing such well known figures without some sort of clarification is only going to make victims........

© Deutsche Welle