An Austrian court on Monday convicted two officials under Syrian former dictator Bashar Assad for torturing opponents of his regime.
The crimes, dating back more than a decade, were being prosecuted on the basis of universal jurisdiction, by which courts can investigate and prosecute certain particular serious crimes — like genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity — regardless of where they were perpetrated or of the nationalities of the perpetrators or victims.
It’s the latest of several cases in European countries against individuals accused of wrongdoing amid Syria’s protracted civil war that can trace its roots back to the so-called Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2010.
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Who was on trial and what were their sentences?
The primary defendant, Khaled al-Halabi, was a general who headed the General Intelligence Directorate in the city of Raqqa from 2011 to 2013.
He was sentenced to eight years in prison on the basis of testimony from more than a dozen victims. The court previously found him guilty of torture, aggravated bodily harm and sexual assault, committed against 21 people between 2011 and 2013. Witnesses spoke of abuses like kicks to the head, electric shocks to their genitals and water-based torture.
The other man on trial in Vienna was Musab Abu Rukbah, a criminal police investigator in the city, who was convicted on similar charges except for those pertaining to torture. Prosecutors said he was nicknamed “the Angel of Death.”
The court said both men had sometimes ordered these offenses, sometimes failed to prevent them and in some cases carried them out themselves.
The two men had initially fled to Austria in 2015 as part of a secret agreement between Israeli and Austrian intelligence services, Austrian prosecutors said. They had been living as refugees in Austria prior to the case developing.
The verdict can be appealed. Both defendants pleaded not guilty.
The former intelligence boss questioned the witness testimony and said he was acting under orders, prompting public prosecutors to say these comments echoed those made by war criminals in the Nazi era and the so-called Nuremberg defense, which was rejected as a valid excuse for war crimes in those cases.
How did Raqqa feature in Syria’s civil war?
Raqqa, an ethnically diverse city on the Euphrates east of Aleppo, has seen a lot of conflict after the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011.
In 2013, rebels from several Islamist groups — including the al-Nusra Front led at the time by Syria’s new President Ahmed al-Sharaa — overran government loyalists in the city and took control. It was the first provincial capital to fall to opposition fighters.
Fighters from other war-torn cities like Aleppo, Homs and Idlib flocked there, and in 2014 the so-called “Islamic State” group (IS) declared the Syrian city its headquarters.
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Raqqa remained more or less under IS control until 2017, when Kurdish-led fighters supported by the US claimed control of the city, most of which was leveled after massive bombardment from all sides in the previous few years.
The political arm of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) retained control of Raqqa until January 2026, well past the December 2024 collapse of Bashar Assad’s government. But al-Sharaa’s government claimed around 80% of the Kurdish-run territory in the north and east, including Raqqa, in a rapid offensive in mid-January.
Edited by: Zac Crellin
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