- In 2013, Syrian officials arrested the family members of the Syrian-French citizen Obeida Dabbagh.
- In 2014, Dabbagh's nephew died in a notorious prison; his brother suffered the same fate in 2017.
For five years, Obeida Dabbagh held his breath, hoping that his brother and nephew were just missing or in prison.
But in the summer of 2018, he received news through official Syrian government death certificates about his family members that was all too familiar to Syrians: His brother, Mazen Dabbagh, died in 2017 in the Mezzeh prison — a gruesome theater of torture and death — near the Damascus airport. Mazen's son, Patrick, died in the same prison years earlier, in 2014.
The war in Syria has raged since 2012 following a mass uprising against dictator Bashar Assad that his government responded to with gunfire, indiscriminate arrests, and torture. Over 15,000 Syrians have died from torture at the hands of Syrian intelligence officials, and more than 111,000 Syrians have been forcefully disappeared, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group.
Throughout the war, the United Nations estimates that more than 300,000 Syrian civilians have been killed — and the international body has deemed Mezzeh, the prison where Dabbagh's family members died, to have one of the highest mortality rates in the country.
It can be difficult to find closure after a loved one's disappearance. It is especially hard when it happens the way it does in Syria, where the truth can be hard to come by.
"There is still a bit of doubt, even if it is 1%, that they are still alive and that this was all just a machination of the regime," Obeida Dabbagh told Insider over a phone call from his home in Paris, with a hopeful, but hardened tone.
And loss forced Obeida Dabbagh, a dual French-Syrian citizen in France, to spring into action and pursue a mission that has brought him to Paris' highest court, all in hopes of successfully holding accountable the top-ranking Syrian intelligence officials who he alleges tortured and killed his brother and nephew.
A familiar nightmare sets in
The Dabbagh family nightmare started in November 2013.
At the time, Patrick Dabbagh, Mazen's son, was a second-year university student in Damascus studying psychology.
"He was a warm, kindhearted young man with youthful folly," Obeida Dabbagh told Insider.
Among the family, who was part of Syria's professional upper-middle class, Patrick Dabbagh was the first target of the government.
On November 3, 2013, at midnight, several soldiers and police officers arrested him and brought him to the Mezzeh prison. They arrested his father, Mazen Dabbagh, the following morning on an accusation that he failed to properly raise his son, according to Obeida Dabbagh's lawyer.
Neither of the men were activists, who are typically targeted, Obeida Dabbagh said.
Their family received little information from the government beyond the news of their arrest.
In February, the French government brokered the release of a French-Iranian academic who was held in an Iranian prison, the product of months of negotiations. Dabbagh wished the same kind of urgency and success had applied to his family.
"I think the French authorities could have intervened," Obeida Dabbagh told Insider. But they did not, "and unfortunately, my brother paid for it with his life."
"They often help save French people abroad," Obeida Dabbagh continued, "and my brother was someone who was French and worked in a French school and gave 25 years of his life to spreading French culture. And they did nothing to stop their deaths."
23 victims of torture band together
The personal feeling of resentment, coupled with the lack of sustained pressure against the Syrian government at the international and UN levels, did not make Obeida Dabbagh — or countless other Syrians with detained and disappeared family members — lose hope.
In 2016, Obeida Dabbagh and three nongovernmental legal organizations — the International Federation for Human Rights, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, and the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme — filed a criminal complaint against Maj. Gen. Ali Mamlouk, the head of the Syrian security services and a close advisor to Assad; Jamil Hassan, the director of the Syrian air force; and Abdel Salam Mahmoud, the head of investigations at the military airport of Mezzeh in Damascus.
Months after Obeida Dabbagh received Mazen's and Patrick Dabbagh's death certificates from Syria, a French criminal prosecutor in Paris indicted the three high-ranking Syrian intelligence officers and issued international arrest warrants in October 2018.
In France, 23 Syrian victims of torture at the Mezzeh prison provided testimony and evidence that allowed prosecutors to build a case against the government's top brass.
And the past five years have been filled with more motion on the part of the French judiciary. The litigation has mirrored, in some ways, the case against and convictions of Syrian intelligence officers in a regional court in Koblenz, Germany. They were found guilty of crimes against humanity.
Dabbagh has been represented by Clémence Bectarte, a human-rights lawyer with FIDH.
"When the arrest warrants were issued, we know that the prosecutor couldn't have supported the arrest warrants if there was not somehow a greenlight from the French government," Bectarte told Insider.
'More than symbolic'
The prosecution of war crimes is tricky, as not all populations can bring cases in their own countries or via the International Criminal Court, to which Syria is not a party. At the United Nations, Russia, a key ally of Syria with a veto at the Security Council, has vetoed inquiries into alleged Syrian government war crimes.
Universal jurisdiction, the third-best option, is an international legal mechanism in which Syrians living in countries such as Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden can submit complaints to the states' investigative war-crimes units for violations they say Assad loyalists, or others in Syria, committed.
Obeida Dabbagh and Bectarte are hopeful that successful localized cases will be key in broader justice efforts down the line.
"I think that this is more than symbolic because we would also have a recognition of the crimes and the responsibility of these individuals who are very high up in the Syrian regime," Bectarte told Insider, referring to the French case. "But there wouldn't be any more legal capacity from French courts to enforce the decision than the international arrest warrants."
This year, five years after learning about his family members' deaths, Obeida Dabbagh received the news on January 27 that the top French prosecutor's office released an advisory opinion that the three intelligence officers be sent to trial in Paris over charges of complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes in relation to the arrests, disappearances, and deaths of Patrick and Mazen.
The officials' case will go to trial
On March 29, the Paris judicial court issued a final indictment order to send the three to trial, with a date expected to be set in 2024. Obeida Dabbagh said the final order and indictment from the Paris prosecutor were a "great victory."
There are unknowns ahead of the trial.
European law allows for absentia trials, meaning that the three officers will likely not show up or send counsel, and the public trial will go on in front of three professional judges, as opposed to a jury.
Another provision allows for defendants to have a retrial if they're absent during the first trial.
"If one day they were to be arrested, they would be allowed a whole new trial," Bectarte said.
The verdict could also have major reverberations, as Mamlouk is the most senior Syrian intelligence officer responsible for the government's external intelligence relations. He traveled to Italy as recently as 2018, according to Obeida Dabbagh's lawyer.
If the officers are found guilty, Obeida Dabbagh and his legal team hope that other European Union countries will help extradite them to France.
Adding insult to injury
Mazen's and Patrick's bodies were never returned to the Dabbagh family, and the family still doesn't know where, or if, they were buried.
One of the intelligence officers in the trial, Mahmoud, brought government eviction documents to Mazen Dabbagh's family, evicting Mazen and Patrick's family after the men were detained.
"It was a Mafia-like act. They took out the son and the father, and then they took over the house," Obeida Dabbagh said.
Mahmoud and his family now live in the house where Mazen and Patrick last celebrated life together, Dabbagh told Insider, adding that they were spreading false rumors to neighbors that Mazen was detained because he was a spy.
"We'll never know what happened to them or why," he said. By contrast, "the officers will have a right to a fair trial and retrial in France."