Assad's killing machine

Syria: Leaked video exposes Assad killing machine

A leaked six-minute video shows scenes of a grizzly Damascus massacre by Assad forces. The perpetrators have been identified.

It took months for a pair of researchers to identify the man who helped kill 41 people in Syria

In late April 2022, a Syrian defector leaked a video of the Tadamon massacre. Hundreds of Syrian families watched the clip, hoping to learn what had happened to their missing sons.

The Siyam family watched it, too. Their son, Waseem Siyam, left his home in Damascus in the early morning of April 14, 2013. He had been ordered by the government to deliver flour to a state-run bakery in the city's southern Tadamon neighborhood. The 34-year-old never returned from what should have been a routine task.

For many years, the Siyams, who now live in Germany, believed Waseem had been arrested at a checkpoint and taken to a government jail. Yet the leaked video finally revealed to them the grisly details of his disappearance.

The clip shows a blindfolded man in a white t-shirt and jeans being led through an empty alley to a pit filled with corpses.

"My father was the first to recognize him [in the video]," says Tasnim Siyam, Waseem's sister, adding that her father recognized his son by his gait. "He looked so different, they had beaten him already, maybe it was also the fear."

They made Waseem jump into the pit and shot him dead.

"It is surreal, how can I process the fact the man being killed in the video is my brother," asks Tasnim Siyam.