Act Daily News
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The US State Department on Monday imposed a visa sanction on a Syrian navy official whom it says killed no less than 41 unarmed civilians in a neighborhood of Damascus in April 2013.
Amjad Yousef, a navy intelligence officer for the regime of Syrian chief Bashar al-Assad, and his instant household shall be blocked from coming into the United States, Secretary of State Antony Blinken mentioned in an announcement.
Video proof of the bloodbath in Tadamon, which Blinken described as being “carried out coldly and methodically,” publicly emerged in 2022 “after a long and comprehensive investigation by independent researchers.”
“Today, we are taking action to promote accountability for this atrocity,” the highest US diplomat mentioned.
The announcement of the visa restriction comes as a rising variety of nations have renewed no less than some stage of contact straight with the Assad regime, notably within the wake of final month’s devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
“The footage of this massacre, coupled with the ongoing killing and abuse of countless Syrians, serves as a sobering reminder for why countries should not normalize relations with the Assad regime absent enduring progress towards a political resolution,” Blinken mentioned.
“The United States calls on the Assad regime to cease all violations and abuses of human rights, including but not limited to extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and torture,” he mentioned.
Blinken famous that March “marks the twelfth year of conflict in Syria during which the Assad regime has committed innumerable atrocities, some of which rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
In an April 2022 article printed in “New Lines Magazine,” the 2 researchers who helped expose the bloodbath mentioned that the movies, which had been “already shocking for their atrociousness, stand out in their brevity and callousness among the thousands of hours of footage that we have examined throughout our respective careers as researchers of mass violence and genocide in Syria and elsewhere.”
“Particularly shocking about the Tadamon videos is the fact that the intelligence officers who committed the massacre were on duty and in uniform; they report to President Bashar al-Assad himself, and yet they chose to show their faces in the incriminating footage. At several points during the video, they looked straight into the camera seemingly relaxed and smiling. In documenting their own actions, they used HD video quality,” Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör wrote.
Yousef, the official who was sanctioned by the State Department Tuesday, “is focused, stoic and precise, and he works efficiently toward completing the task within a matter of 25 minutes,” the researchers wrote.
“After a few months, we confronted him with the massacre and let him know that we had seen the footage,” the researchers described.
“First, he denied it was him in the video. Then, he said he was just arresting someone,” they wrote. “Finally, he settled on the justification that it was his job and expressed his content: ‘I am proud of my deeds.’”
Source: www.cnn.com