This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

DAMASCUS, Syria—The past month has marked a dramatic turn in the history of Syria, a nation racked by years of civil war that only ended in December 2024. Sixteen months after dictator Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, Syria’s transitional authorities are finally turning to arresting top officials of the former regime responsible for the war’s most horrifying crimes. It could be a turning point for the fledgling government, but it’s very unclear in what direction.

In the past six weeks, security forces have arrested Adnan Abboud Hilweh, a general accused of orchestrating the 2013 sarin attack on Eastern Ghouta; Jayez al-Moussa, Assad’s air force chief of staff and an EU-sanctioned figure tied to chemical weapons attacks; Major General Wajih Ali al-Abdullah, who ran Assad’s brutal military affairs office for 13 years; and Amjad Yousef, the intelligence officer accused of leading the 2013 Tadamon massacre, in which at least 41 civilians were marched into a pit and shot, documented on video by the killers at the time.

The arrests were announced in a blizzard of social media posts and on Syrian TV. The names are well known to most Syrians, the “big fish” of a brutal system of repression. The arrests also coincided with the opening of the trial for Atef Najib, a symbolic first choice because he’s known as the man whose violent torture of young Assad opponents helped sparked the 2011 uprising that led to his downfall more than a decade later.

On May 10 in a Damascus courtroom, Atef Najib, Assad’s cousin, sat shackled in a metal cage dressed in a drab striped prison uniform. He was the security chief in the southern province of Daraa when schoolchildren were arrested and tortured for writing anti-Assad graffiti on the........

© Slate