Syria detains Assad-era general accused of bloody crackdown on protests

Major-General Mohammed Ali Durgham is accused of links to 1982 Hama massacre and 2011 protest crackdown.

Syrian authorities have announced the detainment of an Assad-era general accused of taking part in a massacre and overseeing a bloody crackdown on protests.

The country’s Internal Security Forces said on Monday that they had arrested former Major-General Mohammed Ali Durgham, who is accused of partaking in the Hama massacre in 1982 and ordering the shooting of unarmed protesters in 2011.

The detainment is the latest in a series of arrests as Syria’s government – led by figures from the former rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that deposed former President Bashar Al-Assad in 2024 after decades of brutality – attempts to bring to justice those that ran his regime.

The statement labelled Durgham “a prominent officer in the military establishment during the era of the former regime”.

He is accused of being involved in “issuing direct order” to fire on unarmed protestors in the Damascus countryside.

Human Rights Watch in 2011 quoted a Syrian army defector who said that Durgham was one of the generals who “ordered the troops to shoot at protesters when his unit was deployed to areas in and just outside of Damascus”.

Durgham was a field commander in the army’s feared Fourth Division, commanded by Assad’s brother Maher al-Assad, between 2009 and 2013.

Durgham started “as a squad commander in the Defence Brigades during the events in Hama Governorate in 1982,” the authorities said.

On February 2, 1982, amid an information blackout, then-Syrian president Hafez al-Assad launched a brutal crackdown in the central Syrian city of Hama.

The death toll ranges from 10,000 to 40,000 people killed over the nearly month-long siege of the city.

Durgham’s arrest is part of broader efforts to pursue former officials accused of crimes and abuses under the previous regime.

Since Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow in December 2024, Syria’s new authorities have arrested dozens of former security officials.

Former Major-General Jalal Kamel Saqr was detained last week for his involvement in war crimes and arbitrary detentions, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported.