Syria and France call on Lebanon to arrest Jamil Hassan
Syria and France have called on Lebanon to arrest former Syrian Air Force Intelligence chief Jamil Hassan, believed to be on Lebanese soil, on charges of war crimes and for allegedly engineering the ousted Syrian regime’s collective punishment campaign after the Syrian revolution erupted in 2011.
The Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed French official on Thursday, 11 December, as saying that Paris and Damascus asked Beirut to arrest Hassan, who was convicted in absentia in France for his role in crimes against humanity. He is also wanted under an arrest warrant in Germany and sought by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for his role in the kidnapping and torture of American citizens.
The newspaper also quoted a senior Lebanese judicial official as saying that the Lebanese government has no confirmed information on Hassan’s whereabouts. Hassan fled Syria after the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December 2024.
Hassan’s hiding place remains unknown, but many current and former Syrian and Western officials suspect he is in Lebanon, where former intelligence officers are rebuilding a support network.
On 9 December 2024, the US Department of Justice charged Hassan with using torture methods including “whipping, electric shocks, burning, and hanging detainees by their wrists for long periods,” in addition to threatening detainees with “rape and murder.”
This is not the first request of its kind. Germany sought Hassan’s extradition in February 2019, when he was reportedly receiving treatment at a hospital in Lebanon.
Planning to suppress the revolution
According to a security document cited by the newspaper, Hassan and other security chiefs met in central Damascus to plan a disinformation campaign and violent crackdown two years after the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011.
Throughout the Assad family’s rule, Air Force Intelligence was often described as the “most brutal and secretive” of the four intelligence services at the time (State Security, Political Security, Military Intelligence, and Air Force Intelligence). Hassan took command of the agency in 2009.
In the document, security chiefs laid out a plan and initialed it. A former Syrian security official showed the document to The Wall Street Journal, and another official confirmed it.
According to the document and other records, Hassan favored using overwhelming, bloody force against protesters and opponents. His message to Assad was: “Do as your father did in Hama,” a reference to the massacre carried out by former president Hafez al-Assad in Hama that killed more than 40,000 people in 1982.
The former regime’s security chiefs wrote that any place where protests slipped out of control should be besieged.
The document added that snipers would be deployed to shoot crowds, with orders to conceal the source of fire and not to kill more than 20 people at a time, to avoid clearly linking the killings to the state.
The document said: “No leniency will be shown toward any attack on the supreme symbol, whatever the cost, because silence would only encourage our adversaries.”
Documents collected by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability show that Hassan ordered security forces to fire on peaceful protesters.
Torture of civilians
Hassan played a central role in the campaign against Daraya (a city in the Damascus countryside, southwestern of Damascus) in 2012, when the former regime’s army sent tanks accompanied by Air Force Intelligence personnel, who worked over two years to arrest and torture civilians.
Air Force Intelligence also had its own special field military court in Mezzeh (a neighborhood in western Damascus) that issued death sentences or transferred those convicted to the notorious Saydnaya Prison.
The Air Force site also contained its own mass grave, according to the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression in Washington, which based its findings on satellite imagery and a visit to the location after the regime fell.
“Inventor” of barrel bombs
Jamil Hassan is from al-Qarnaba (a village in Homs province, central Syria). He was born in 1952 and joined the military academy in 1972, specializing in air defense. He rose through the ranks until he reached the rank of major general in 2009, the year he was appointed head of Air Force Intelligence.
Hassan was deputy to Abdel Fattah Qudsiya when the latter headed the agency. He previously served as head of the Air Force Intelligence branch in Syria’s eastern region in Deir Ezzor (eastern Syria) in 2009, according to the “Pro Justice” organization’s website.
Hassan is accused of originating the idea of barrel bombs used by the former regime to bombard opposition-held areas, killing thousands of civilians. Lebanese analyst Michel Awad confirmed this in a televised interview, in which he thanked Hassan for what he called his invention.
[Source: Enab Baladi]
