Fourth Criminal Court, Palace of Justice, Damascus

Rule Changes

Trying Najib and in-absentia defendants

On April 26, 2026, a brigadier general in a brown prison uniform stepped into an iron cage at Damascus's Palace of Justice. Atef Najib — Bashar al-Assad's cousin and the man whose 2011 detention of graffiti-scrawling teenagers in Deraa lit the fuse of Syria's civil war — became the first official of the fallen regime to face a public trial. Above him, prosecutors displayed a photograph of Hamza al-Khatib, the 13-year-old whose tortured body became the war's first martyr image.

Updated Yesterday