Syria’s new authorities have announced the arrest of Atif Najib, a former senior security officer and cousin of ousted President Bashar al-Assad. Najib is seen by many as being responsible for suppressing the initial protest which triggered Syria’s 2011 uprising.
Najib was arrested in western Syria in the Latakia countryside, where the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported he “was hiding in a farm.”
He is the highest-ranking member of Assad’s government to be arrested since Assad was ousted from office in December.
“The criminal Atif Najib has been referred to the competent authorities to be tried and held accountable for the crimes he committed against the Syrian people,” the official SANA news agency reported, citing a senior security official.
Najib was the head of political security in Daraa in southern Syria, under Assad’s regime. Syria’s nationwide uprising was sparked by the arrest and torture of children in Daraa, whom, the Observatory said had been arrested for “writing sentences criticizing the regime on their school walls.”
The protests in Daraa that followed the children’s arrests evolved into the 2011 uprising that Assad’s government responded to with a brutal crackdown.
Ahmed al-Sharaa is Syria’s newly appointed transitional president. Before being appointed to his current role, Sharaa was the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, that spearheaded the campaign in December to wrest control of the country from Assad. Assad fled to Russia, ending more than half a century of oppressive rule by him and his late father, Hafez al-Assad.
Some information in this article was provided by Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
