US Bans Entry to Syria Security Agent Over Killings on Video

BEIRUT—The U.S. State Department on Monday banned entry into the U.S. of a Syrian intelligence member who appeared in a video leaked last year showing him fatally shooting people during the country’s 12-year conflict.

In a statement, the State Department stated that Amjad Yousef was included in the ban. He is an officer of Syria’s Military Intelligence Branch 234, which has been criticized for its brutality.

Yousef, one of many Syrian security agents who were seen in the video where dozens blindfolded and bound men were shot before being thrown into trenches.

This decision was made just one week before Syria’s 13th anniversary of conflict. Nearly half a million civilians have been killed in the war, and large parts of Syria were destroyed.

“As a result of today’s action, Yousef, as well as his wife, Anan Wasouf, and their immediate family members, are ineligible for entry into the United States,” The State Department stated.

A 6-minute, 43-second clip of video shows intelligence personnel with a line consisting of approximately 40 prisoners. The footage was recorded in Tadamon (a suburb of Damascus just outside the Palestinian refugee camps of Yarmouk). The district served as a frontline between opposition fighters and government forces for much of the conflict.

They are tied with their arms behind their backs and blindfolded. The Branch 227 gunmen push the prisoners towards the trench, filling it with tires. They then kick or push them in and shoot them when they fall.

The agents play a cruel game with some prisoners, telling them that they’re going through a sniper’s alley. They should then run. They tumble on the corpses of their predecessors. The gunmen fire into the heap of bodies as they pile up.

To erase any evidence, the gunmen then set fire to the corpses.

According to the State Department, Yousef was a warrant officer with the Syrian security service. “gross violations of human rights” because he was involved in the shooting of 41 unarmed civilians.

According to the statement, President Bashar al-Assad was being called by the United States “to cease all violations and abuses of human rights, including but not limited to extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and torture.”

The footage from the massacres at Tadamon was shown along with ongoing atrocities in Syria, according to the report. “serves as a sobering reminder for why countries should not normalize relations with the Assad regime absent enduring progress towards a political resolution.”

After the February 6, earthquake in Turkey and Syria that killed more than 50,000, and about 6,000 in Syria in particular, several Arab foreign ministers paid rare visits to Damascus, where they met Assad, the first meeting since March 2011 when the conflict started.

In recent months, calls have been increasing for Syria’s accession to the Arab League. Syria was expelled from the 22-member organization and boycotted by its neighbors after its uprising-turned-conflict broke out.