FBI arrests former Syria intelligence official who oversaw torture, executions in notorious prison

The United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has arrested a former Syrian intelligence official accused of running an infamous prison and authorising the torture and execution of thousands, in the latest charges to be brought against a former Syrian regime official living abroad.

According to media reports, federal law enforcement agents arrested and detained 72-year-old Ousman Al-Sheikh in Los Angeles just before his scheduled one-way flight to Lebanese capital, Beirut, last Wednesday, following federal investigators’ request to a judge to approve his arrest warrant the day prior.

The arrest was due to a criminal complaint filed last week, which alleges that Al-Sheikh had been a police commander, intelligence officer and brigadier general back in his native Syria throughout the ongoing 13-year-long civil war, as well as reportedly having ran the Adra prison complex on the outskirts of Damascus from 2005 to 2008.

With that prison being amongst the many jails infamous for holding protestors, political dissidents and other civilians who are routinely starved, tortured and abused by regime authorities, an affidavit filed at the US Department of Homeland Security cited five former detainees as recalling Al-Sheikh’s oversight of those very crimes.

According to the former detainees, Al-Sheikh would often walk the prison with his aides while giving his approval for executions, with inmates reportedly being hanged in a part of the prison known as “execution square”.

One former detainee recounted how prison guards broke his back under Al-Sheikh’s authority, with another recalling how guards stripped prisoners naked and beat them until they became unconscious, when they would then drag the detainees down the stairs.

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Following the outbreak of peaceful protests throughout Syria amid the revolution in 2011, Al-Sheikh also reportedly played a prominent role in the brutal suppression of those demonstrations while he held the position of Governor of the eastern Deir ez-Zor province at the time, especially due to his closeness to President Bashar Al-Assad himself.

The New York Times quoted one man, Zyad Al-Kadhem, who worked in the province’s department of agriculture under the official as recalling how Al-Sheikh “fired on protesters and disappeared countless thousands of civilians”, as well as having threatened government workers with execution, arrest and torture if they attended protests or even missed days off work.

Amjad Al Sary, a Syrian activist who documents war crimes, stated in a separate interview that the official’s “appointment was not arbitrary”, as he was seen by the regime as the right man to brutally suppress dissent in the province. “He was willing to kill, maim and terrorise people, and Assad knew only he would be able to stop the protests.”

Aside from the accusations and evidence of his role in the rampant torture committed under the Syrian regime, Al-Sheikh is charged with lying on his applications for an immigrant visa and for his naturalisation process for US citizenship, in which he is accused of “falsely stating that he had not committed, ordered, incited, assisted or otherwise participated in extrajudicial killings, political killings or other acts of violence.”

After his wife became a naturalised US citizen, she reportedly filed papers in 2017 for Al-Sheikh to join her in Los Angeles, resulting in his immigrant visa and flight to the Californian city in March 2020 using a green card.

His reason for trying to fly to Beirut has not yet been revealed, but it is speculated that he may have been attempting to escape further detection and investigation by US federal authorities, particularly after he had apparently been spotted and reported on by Syrians in LA earlier this month.

According to Andrew Tabler, former director for Syria on the National Security Council under the Trump administration and senior adviser to the US special envoy for Syria, “Adra prison is one of the crown jewels of the Assad regime’s gulags”. He added that “The fact that someone who was in charge of this torture chamber made it into the United States is on par with Nazi commanders living comfortably in Latin America after World War II.”

READ: UN expert ‘alarmed’ at allegations of ongoing torture in Syria