Najib was charged with 10 crimes during the session, including murder, torture, and responsibility for massacres during his time as the head of political security in Daraa [Izz Aldien Alqasem/Anadolu via Getty Images]
The second session of a landmark trial against a former prominent member of the Assad regime, who was responsible for overseeing a violent crackdown during the 2011 uprising, was held in Damascus on Sunday.
The trial against Atef Najib, the cousin of former dictator Bashar al-Assad, held its second session at the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus with both an open and closed session.
The closed session was held to offer protection to some witnesses as well as confidential information, according to the Syria-based outlet Enab Baladi, though the Ministry of Justice is still set to release recordings of the proceedings.
Najib was charged with 10 crimes during the session, including murder, torture, and responsibility for massacres during his time as the head of political security in Daraa province, southern Syria.
In his position in Daraa, Najib oversaw the detention and torture of school children who had graffitied anti-regime slogans in Daraa, in a move that sparked the revolution in 2011.
The crackdown in Daraa later became synonymous with the torture and killing of 13-year-old Hamzah al-Khatib, whose mutilated body was returned to his family weeks after his detention in 2011.
Images of the child’s body shocked Syrians and became one of the defining symbols of the Assad regime’s repression during the early months of the uprising.
Human rights groups and activists linked the abuses to the security apparatus overseen by Najib in Daraa.
The trial is seen as being a move towards justice for the many victims who died under his general command, with Hamzah’s mother, Samira al-Hahami, said seeing Najib stand trial had “slightly eased” the family’s pain.
The charges come after 75 plaintiffs filed cases against Najib, according to Al Jazeera.
The session was attended by victims’ relatives, members of the National Transitional Justice Commission, as well as representatives of international legal and humanitarian organisations.
Alongside Najib, other regime figures, most notably Assad and his brother Maher, are also being tried, though their trials are in absentia due to their escape from Syria to Russia after the regime fell in December 2024.
Najib is one of many former members of the regime who are currently held by Syria’s transitional government, having been arrested in January 2025 in Latakia.
Most recently, Syria’s interior ministry said it arrested Sahr Fajr Hassan, a former brigadier general who had been involved in the violent repression of protests in 2011, later having served in several fronts during the war.
