A Background of Blood

Robin Yassin Kassab

The Shaitat massacre, like other ISIS atrocities, emerged from a specific context of political violence. ISIS grew out of, and then thrived, in the environment of two dictatorships – the Iraqi Baathist regime and the Syrian Baathist regime. It shared with them the basic principle that political opposition should be crushed with overwhelming force, and that society should be ruled by fear.

The Baath Party: Politics as Religion

 

Founded in Damascus in 1947 by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, the Baath party promulgated a romantic version of Arab nationalism which cast the Arabs as an “eternal” creative force. It dreamed of a single, unified Arab state stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Arabian Gulf.

As well as a response to colonialism, early Baathism was in some ways an attempt to build a secular religion. Its rhetoric repurposed spiritual language into nationalist discourse. One of its slogans was Umma Arabiya Wahida Zat Risala Khalida, or One Arab Nation Bearing an Eternal Message. The word umma had hitherto referred to the global Islamic community, not the Arabs, and risala is the word used for God’s message transmitted by the Prophet Muhammad, the rasool.

In its first stage, the Baath was a party disproportionately made up of intellectuals, schoolteachers and schoolboys.^[1] But many military officers were being converted to the cause. This was important, because politics in both Syria and Iraq was increasingly determined by military coup.

The February 8, 1963 Baathist coup in Iraq killed President Abdul Karim Qasim as well as hundreds of members of the Communist Party. It is believed that the American CIA provided lists of Communists to the Baathist officers who staged the coup, but this has never been proved. Writing in 2021, Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt describes the events as “shrouded behind a veil of official secrecy. Many of the most relevant documents remain classified. Others were destroyed. And still others were never created in the first place.”^[2]

The Baath Party in Iraq was ousted in November, but returned to power, by another military coup, in July 1968. This time it built a dictatorship which lasted until 2003.

In Syria, meanwhile, a clandestine military committee of Baathist officers, including Hafez al-Assad and Salah Jadid, had been founded in 1959. In March 1963, the committee launched a successful coup. Salah Jadid became president, but was ousted by Hafez al-Assad in 1970. This regime, under Hafez and then his son Bashar, lasted until December 2024.

Despite its pan-Arab ideology, the Baath Party split in 1966 into separate Syrian and Iraqi wings. The two wings vigorously opposed each other, but their enmity had little to do with abstract politics. By this point, the Baath Party in both countries had become a vehicle of power rather than a political program. Soon it became a means of fortifying two family dictatorships – in Syria, Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar; and in Iraq, Saddam Hussein and his sons and cousins. The dictators were officially worshipped almost as gods. Their statues were erected in every city and their portraits decorated offices, shops, and car windows. Hafez al-Assad was known as “the eternal leader”. Both dictatorships perpetrated numerous massacres.

Massacres had stained the region before. The nationalist convulsions that accompanied the collapse of the Ottoman empire had resulted in outbreaks of ethno-sectarian violence, from the 1860 warfare on Mount Lebanon and anti-Christian rioting in Damascus, through the Armenian and Assyrian genocides during World War One, to the Farhud pogrom of Baghdad’s Jews during World War Two. Then the series of military coups in the post-Ottoman, post-Mandate Iraqi and Syrian states brought an increasingly cut-throat style to political life. But what distinguished the Iraqi and Syrian Baathist regimes from the violence that preceded them was the centrality of massacres to their rule. Massacres, like prisons, and the fear they produced, were used to discipline society as a whole.

The Saddam Hussein Regime

The Iraqi Baath Party had seized control of the state in 1968. Saddam Hussein’s power grew within the regime until he became president in 1979. He marked his ascent to one-man rule with a purge of his party comrades, 21 of whom were executed by firing squad.

This was an early signal of the policy the regime would follow thereafter. Throughout the 1980s, all political opposition was rigorously persecuted. Many tens of thousands disappeared, especially Communists and members of the various Shia and Kurdish political parties. Most of these people are assumed to have been murdered in prison.

The regime fiercely repressed the communities whose political loyalties it doubted, particularly those living on the country’s borders, and especially during the war against Iran, which lasted from September 1980 to August 1988.

Massacres of Iraqi Kurds

One such community was the Feyli Kurds, a tribal group which speaks its own dialect of Kurdish, and which straddles the Iraq-Iran border. Between 1970 and 2003, the regime deported between 300,000 and 500,000 members of this community to Iran, with the repression at its most extreme during the war years. In 1980, Decree number 666 ordered the deportation of the community and the confiscation of its property. The regime also subjected community members to mass executions. At least 15,000 were “disappeared” in this way. In 2011, the post-Baathist Iraqi parliament recognized the maltreatment of the Feyli Kurds as a genocide.

Other Kurdish groups were also targeted. In July and August 1983, for example, over 8,000 men and boys belonging to the Kurdish Barzani tribe were summarily executed, including children as young as 13.

The massacres of Iraqi Kurds reached their height during the Anfal campaign, from February to September 1988. The operation was named after the eighth sura of the Quran, which describes the victory of a small army over a much larger force. Unlike the Quranic story, however, in this case the very large Iraqi army, armed with chemical weapons, artillery and an air force, attacked numerous civilian targets as well as Kurdish militias. Around 2,000 villages were destroyed, and somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people were killed, the vast majority of them civilians.

There were eight stages of the Anfal campaign. Seven were directed against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), while the eighth targeted the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP). Both were political parties with affiliated militias which opposed the central government in Baghdad and which sometimes allied militarily with Iran. The Baathist regime, therefore, understood the Anfal campaign as a series of counter-insurgency operations. Because the campaign sought to destroy not only the insurgents but also the population from which the insurgents emerged, however, many Kurds understood it to be a genocide. Human Rights Watch agreed.^[3]

The worst single incident of the Anfal campaign was the Iraqi army’s assault on Halabja on March 16, 1988. Halabja, a border town, had been captured by the PUK in coordination with Iranian troops. The Iraqi air force responded by dropping poison gas on the town. Witnesses report seeing white, black and yellow smoke rising from the munitions. It is assumed that the weapons deployed were a combination of mustard gas and various nerve agents. The estimates of those killed in Halabja range from 3,200 to 5,000, with between 7,000 and 10,000 injured.

Many other towns and villages were hit by chemical weapons. Villages were depopulated by this and other means. In many settlements, the men were either killed or forced to flee abroad, while the women and children were transferred to militarized state camps. The border areas which suffered the most remained depopulated until 1991, when Iraq’s Kurdish region achieved a degree of autonomy under international protection. Then in January 2010, some small measure of justice was provided to the survivors when Ali Hassan al-Majid, the officer in charge of the Anfal campaign, was hanged.^[4]

The 1991 Massacres

Civilians in Iranian cities also suffered greatly from chemical attacks launched by Saddam Hussein’s regime, and both sides lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the long Iran-Iraq war. When the conflict finally ended in 1988, Iran was able to recover somewhat, but Iraq was quickly thrust back into war by Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Kuwait in 1990. The Iraqi dictator claimed Kuwait as a province of Iraq, but the rest of the world disagreed. In January and February 1991, a coalition of 42 states pushed the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.

As well as degrading Iraq’s military power, Operation Desert Storm – also known as the First Gulf War – resulted in enormous damage to Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. Many Iraqis understood the moment of national defeat as an opportunity to remove the weakened Baathist regime. They were encouraged by a February 15 speech by US President George W. Bush, broadcast by the Voice of America radio station, which called for “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”

In March and April 1991, anti-regime uprisings raged in the Kurdish-majority north and the Shia-majority south of Iraq. In the south, deserters from the defeated Iraqi army were joined in their attacks on Baathist targets by the Badr Brigades – Iran-based Iraqi Shia militants – as well as by civilians, both armed and unarmed. Though most of the insurgents were Shia Muslims, and some of them articulated a specifically Shia rhetoric, disaffected Sunni soldiers, leftists, and other political opponents of the regime also participated.

Though disorganized, the southern uprising temporarily took over the major cities in southern Iraq, including Basra, Amarah, Diwaniya, Hilla, Karbala and Najaf. Significantly, however, the US did not come to the aid of the uprising as some of the insurgents had expected. In some cases, US troops destroyed ammunition dumps which had been captured by the insurgents. In other cases, they even defended Iraqi army sites from the insurgents. The ceasefire agreement signed by Iraqi military officials and Coalition commander Norman Schwarzkopf Jnr. allowed the Iraqi regime to continue flying its helicopters. This was crucial for the regime’s fightback. It was able to put down the uprising primarily by use of helicopter gunships.

In his 1995 book “My American Journey”, General Colin Powell, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, wrote, “our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to Iran.”^[5]

Southern Iraq paid an enormous price for this intention, and for the ruthlessness of the Iraqi regime. During the battles to seize back control of the cities, indiscriminate tank, artillery and helicopter fire killed many thousands of people. Religious and cultural sites were deliberately targeted. Thousands more people were rounded up and summarily executed, their corpses buried in mass graves.^[6]

Hundreds of thousands of fighters and civilians sought shelter in the Hawizeh marshes, an area with a unique ecology, an ancient civilization, and a long history of sheltering exiles and dissenters. Once it had pacified the cities, the Baathist regime attacked the marshes, summarily executing hundreds of people. In July 1992, it began draining the marshes, reducing them to a fraction of their former size. This not only ended the ancient way of life of the Madan people who inhabited the marshes, it also destroyed populations of mammals, birds and plants, and has been called an “ecocide” as a result.^[7]

The uprising in the north of the country, meanwhile, was somewhat better organized than in the south. Led by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party, it soon took control of every major northern city except Mosul. In Sulaymaniyah, the insurgents captured and massacred several hundred Baathist officials. Rebels also captured enormous numbers of documents detailing Iraqi regime crimes during the Anfal campaign, 14 tons of which were later obtained by Human Rights Watch.

As in the south, however, the regime was able to rapidly reimpose its rule. It recaptured the cities, driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into Turkey and Iran. Hundreds of refugees a day were killed as they stepped on landmines or were shot at from helicopter gunships. Again, there were many reports of mass executions, both of Kurds and of members of other communities. During the March 28 Altun Kupri massacre, for example, hundreds of Turkmen men and boys – all the males who were left in the town – were rounded up and shot into a pit, which then became a mass grave.

From March 1991, the US enforced a No-Fly Zone over the north of Iraq. This afforded some protection to civilians and allowed Kurdish militias to keep fighting until October, when they were able to negotiate autonomy in three Iraqi provinces. The Kurdistan Regional Government was set up then, and still exists today.

US Invasion and Civil War

In March 2003, the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq and deposed the Baathist regime. The occupying forces then perpetrated several massacres of their own. In the Haditha massacre of November 19, 2005, for example, US marines killed 25 unarmed civilians, apparently randomly, after an IED killed an American officer. American officials attempted a coverup, but the attempt was foiled by Taher Thabet of the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, who had videoed the aftermath of the massacre, and by the investigative journalism of Time Magazine’s Tim McGirk.^[8]

Leading figures of the Iraqi Baathist regime were pursued and arrested by the occupation authorities, including Saddam Hussein himself, who was captured in December 2003. The former dictator was put on trial for his role in the Dujail massacre, and executed by hanging on December 30 2006.

The Dujail massacre was perpetrated on July 8, 1982 in the town of the same name as a collective punishment following an assassination attempt against Saddam Hussein. At least 140 inhabitants of Dujail were killed. Hundreds more were exiled or had their homes demolished.

Some Iraqis argued that Saddam Hussein should have been charged with all the atrocities he had committed, not just the incident at Dujail. The execution of the man responsible for so many massacres was a kind of justice nevertheless, but was tainted by the fact that the trial had been held under American occupation, and by the sectarian chanting of the guards present at the execution itself.

These chants fed into the sectarian civil war which had taken hold of the country, particularly after the February 22, 2006 bombing of the Askari Shrine in Samarra, which is sacred to Shia Muslims. Throughout 2006 and 2007, car bombs exploded regularly in busy markets in Shia-majority residential areas, and almost every morning bodies of Sunni civilians were found blindfolded, handcuffed, and shot in the head. Sunni militants cast Shia Muslims as traitors who collaborated with the Americans, while Shia militants blamed Sunni Muslims collectively for terrorism, and for the crimes of the old regime.

The Assad Regime

Politics in Syria was conducted as violently as in Iraq. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood as well as leftist groups challenged the Hafez al-Assad regime, and suffered mass imprisonment and extrajudicial executions as a result. The Muslim Brotherhood’s militant wing, the Fighting Vanguard, responded to the regime’s repression with its own extreme violence. On June 16, 1979, for example, members of the Fighting Vanguard separated 83 Alawite cadets from their Sunni comrades at the Aleppo Artillery School before shooting them dead.

The Muslim Brotherhood also attempted to assassinate Hafez al-Assad. The next day, June 27, 1980, Hafez al-Assad’s brother Rifaat organized a “revenge” massacre of up to 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood members detained at Tadmor (Palmyra) Prison.^[9]

The violence reached its peak in February 1982 in the city of Hama. The Fighting Vanguard briefly took control of the city and killed 70 Baathist officials. The regime responded by placing the city under siege, bombing it from land and air, and then by committing house-to-house killings. Two thirds of the city was destroyed, and between 25,000 and 40,000 people were killed, almost all of them civilians.

The Syrian Revolution

The silence ended early in 2011 with the eruption of the Syrian Revolution. The regime’s response was to attempt to reimpose the fear barrier either by rounding up and torturing protestors or by opening fire on them. Mass anti-regime demonstrations were held on Fridays, and usually ended with dozens killed by regime fire.

Men in rebellious areas began to form self-defence militias. Before too long this process led to the full scale militarization of the revolution. The regime increased its violence in response, attacking civilian neighborhoods with weaponry better suited to a war between armies. Syrian cities were steadily destroyed and depopulated by barrel bombs, artillery shells, tank fire, and scud missiles.

The regime also perpetrated a series of massacres at close quarters, particularly in 2012 and 2013. The massacres usually followed the same pattern: first the army shelled a village or neighborhood to neutralise or expel the rebels holed up there; then irregular shabiha militiamen moved in to shoot, burn, or cut the throats of civilians. Women and children were targeted in particular. The civilian victims were always Sunni Muslims, while the shabiha militiamen were usually Alawites. These massacres had a sectarian character, therefore, though they were not the kind of spontaneous slaughter between rival communities that are often associated with sectarian civil war. The killing was planned and organized by the authorities, and seems to have been a deliberate attempt to sectarianize the conflict in order to force the obedience of Syrian minority groups.^[10]

The massacres of this type include the May 25, 2012 massacre at Houla, in which 108 were killed, most of them women and children; the June 6, 2012 massacre at al-Qubeir, where 55 to 87 killed, most of them civilians; and the July 12, 2012 massacre at Tremseh, where estimates of the dead range from 68 to 103, both rebel fighters and civilians.

Those and other atrocities were carried out at locations in central Syria, around Homs and Hama, where Sunni and Alawite communities lived in close proximity. But the regime perpetrated massacres elsewhere in the country too. At least 700 people, mainly civilians, were killed by the army and shabiha militias in Darayya, a Damascus suburb, between August 20 and 25, 2012.^[11] In Aleppo between January and March 2013, revolutionary activists claimed to have found 230 bodies floating down the Queiq River from regime-controlled areas. Human Rights Watch was able to identify 147 victims of the Queiq River massacre.^[12] All were males aged between 11 and 64, and had probably been killed in detention. On April 16, 2013, 280 civilians were shot dead at the edge of a mass grave in the Tadamon neighborhood of Damascus.^[13] And on May 2 and 3, 2013, 300 to 450 victims were killed in Bayda and Baniyas on the coast.

The regime perpetrated so many massacres that it is impossible to mention them all here. Perhaps the worst atrocity was on April 21, 2013, when the regime attacked communities in the eastern and western Ghouta suburbs of Damascus with sarin gas. An estimated 1,500 people died in agonizing pain as a result, almost all of them civilians. This was the single largest massacre of the Syrian war, and the worst chemical atrocity since Saddam Hussein’s massacre at Halabja.

Meanwhile, an unseen massacre was being perpetrated behind the walls of the Assad regime’s prisons. In the days following the regime’s final collapse on December 8, 2024, tens of thousands of political prisoners were liberated, but around 100,000 of those disappeared by the Baathist state were not found. It is presumed that these missing people were murdered in prison, and that their bodies were buried in the mass graves uncovered in the days following the fall of the regime.

ISIS: Religion as Politics

ISIS grew out of an Iraqi context, then exploited the Syrian context to expand.

Its roots lay in al-Qaida, which approved of massacring non-Muslims for political ends. The organization specialized in the kind of spectacular violence whose apotheosis was the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States, which killed around 3,000 people. The success of the 9/11 attacks (from al-Qaida’s point of view) magnified the importance of this small organization, and changed American political priorities. The “War on Terror” which 9/11 catalyzed led to drone strikes in countries such as Somalia and Yemen, and full scale invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In turn, the occupation of Iraq and the chaos which ensued changed the nature of the jihadist threat, and offered it a new field of operations. The Jordanian jihadist known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi moved to Iraq shortly before the American invasion. Once Saddam Hussein was toppled, Zarqawi brought together al-Qaida-style Salafi-Jihadists with former security and military officials of the deposed Baathist regime to form Jamaat al-Tawheed wal-Jihad. This organization and its successors would become key protagonists in the coming Iraqi civil war.

In October 2004, Zarqawi and his group pledged allegiance to al-Qaida, and became known as al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), but this public allegiance masked a disagreement between Zarqawi and the leaders of al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri supported the mass murder of non-Muslims but not of Muslims. Zarqawi, on the other hand, saw all Shia Muslims and those Sunni Muslims who collaborated in any way with the American occupation and the new Iraqi government as “apostates” deserving of death.

Now al-Qaida in Iraq launched an intensifying campaign of suicide bombs and car bombs against mainly civilian targets. On March 2, 2004, it was the prime suspect behind a series of blasts in Baghdad and Karbala which killed at least 158 Shia civilians during their commemorations of Ashura, a Shia day of mourning. On February 28 2005, one of its car bombs struck a crowd of police and National Guard recruits in Hilla, killing 125. Then on September 14, 2005, AQI organized over a dozen blasts at different locations in Baghdad, killing an estimated 182 people, most of whom were unemployed construction workers.

Zarqawi was killed by US forces on June 7, 2006, but his death failed to contain the violence of the organization he had built. It rebranded as the “Islamic State of Iraq” (ISI) on October 15, 2006. At this point, the civil war was well underway, and the ISI struck civilian targets on a daily basis.

The violence was finally brought under control by 2008. This was achieved in part by a surge in the number of American troops on the ground, but more importantly by the formation of anti-ISI militias in the Sunni community, known as the Sons of Iraq, or the Awakening Movement.

Iraq enjoyed a brief respite, but the sectarian policies of the Iraqi government and the repression of Sunni communities soon offered the ISI a new opportunity. By December 2013, war once again raged between the organization and the Iraqi government. The ISI perpetrated numerous massacres during this period. The most spectacular of these were the Badush Prison massacre of June 10, 2014, when 670 Shia prisoners were separated from Sunni prisoners and then murdered; and the June 12, 2014 massacre at Camp Speicher, near Tikrit, in which between 1,095 and 1,700 Shia Muslim cadets were killed. Far from seeking to hide evidence of this latter crime, the ISI released footage of the slaughter in one of its propaganda videos. The political purpose of these massacres was to terrorize opponents and make them flee.

In August 2014, the ISI murdered up to 5,000 men of the Yazidi sect in Sinjar. Thousands of Yazidi women were abducted and enslaved. This assault on the Yazidi community seemed designed not just to punish disloyalty or to deter potential resistance, but to wipe it out entirely. As such, it can be classified not only as a massacre but as a genocide.

By now, the ISI had exploited the war in Syria to establish a foothold there. First acting in concert with some Syrian opposition militias, then turning on the Syrian opposition and declaring itself the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” (ISIS), the organization perpetrated a new set of massacres. On June 11, 2013, for example, Kuwaiti ISIS members killed between 30 and 60 Shia villagers in Hatla, near Deir ez-Zor. ISIS also participated (alongside Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham) in the August 2013 rebel offensive in the Latakia countryside, an area inhabited primarily by members of the Alawite sect. At least 190 civilians were killed during the offensive, and many others were abducted. Then in October 2014, ISIS perpetrated a series of massacres of Shaitat clansmen in Deir ez-Zor province. This atrocity was the second worst mass-killing event in the Syrian war, after the 2013 sarin gas attacks in the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus.

At first sight it seems contradictory that former officers of the avowedly secular Iraqi Baath Party now staffed the ranks of ISIS, the most extreme of religious organizations, but there was a clear ideological link between the two. This was the belief in the importance of violence, and specifically of massacres, as a governing strategy. The Iraqi Baath, the Syrian Baath, and ISIS all agreed on this point; they didn’t wish to win hearts and minds, but to rule by terrorizing their subject populations.

“It is better to be feared than loved,” wrote the Renaissance philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli. For several decades in Iraq and Syria this statement looked like an axiomatic truth, but today neither the Syrian or Iraqi Baath regimes nor the ISIS “caliphate” exist. It is to be hoped that a new dynamic will take root in both countries, and that the next decades will be more peaceful than those which have passed.

1. For a detailed history of the Syrian Baath Party, and analysis of its social composition, see Hanna Batatu. Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics. Princeton University Press, 1999. ↑

2. See Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq. Stanford University Press. 2010. ↑

3. Human Rights Watch. Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds. July 1993. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/ANFALINT.html ↑

4. Ali Hassan al-Majid, known to Kurds as Ali Chemical, or Ali Anfal, was a cousin of Saddam Hussein and Secretary General of the Northern Bureau of the Baath Party. He had authority over all state agencies in northern Iraq during the Anfal campaign. ↑

5. Colin L Powell, Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey, Random House, 1995. ↑

6. After the fall of the Baathist regime in 2003, the mass graves were uncovered and investigated. Between 2003 and 2006, the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry recorded 200 mass graves, most of them in southern Iraq. ↑

7. See Alec Absaroka Konigsberg, Ecocide: Saddam Hussein’s Destruction of the Iraqi Marshlands, the International Journal for Water Equity and Justice, Volume 10, Issue 1. https://penn.manifoldapp.org/projects/ijwej-1 ↑

8. Tim McGirk, Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha? Time Magazine, March 19, 2006. https://time.com/archive/6676621/collateral-damage-or-civilian-massacre-in-haditha/ ↑

9. See Razan Saffour, Remembering Syria’s Tadmur Prison Massacre, 44 Years On. Al Jazeera. June 27, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/6/27/remembering-syrias-tadmur-prison-massacre-44-years-on ↑

10. For more detail on these massacres and the probable strategy behind them, see chapter 6 of Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. Pluto Press, 2016. ↑

11. The figure is based on research by investigators backed by the Syrian British Consortium. see The Guardian, Ten Years On, First Full Report Records Syrian Regime’s Massacre at Daraya, Aug 25, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/aug/25/ten-years-on-first-full-report-records-syrian-regimes-massacre-at-daraya-assad ↑

12. Human Rights Watch, Syria: A Stream of Bodies in Aleppo’s River,June 4, 2013. https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/06/04/syria-stream-bodies-aleppos-river ↑

13. The Tadamon massacre was not widely known at the time. The facts were brought to light by two researchers, Uğur Ümit Üngör and Annsar Shahhoud, and were then verified and published by New Lines Magazine. See New Lines Magazine, How a Massacre of Nearly 300 in Syria was Revealed, April 27, 2022. https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/how-a-massacre-of-nearly-300-in-syria-was-revealed/ ↑