Syrian spy company focused ICIJ’s Syrian media companion, paperwork present

Syria’s feared intelligence companies launched an investigation into ICIJ’s Syrian media companion, Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism, after it reported on Damascus’ enterprise hyperlinks with Europe, inner paperwork reveal.

The paperwork, a cache of memos obtained from a state safety workplace in Damascus after the autumn of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, present how intelligence officers sought details about SIRAJ’s funding and the identities of its journalists after the media outlet revealed an article detailing how the Syrian military procured European-made vehicles to gasoline its conflict effort. The article spurred an effort by Swedish policymakers to persuade the European Union to tighten sanctions on Syria to cease these gross sales.

The surveillance effort was launched in October 2024 by the intelligence companies’ Department 279, which screens Syrians residing overseas. The memos from the safety workplace illustrate the Assad authorities’s paranoia concerning any journalistic efforts: The intelligence officers describe SIRAJ as “a suspicious entrance for espionage,” accusing it of gathering details about Syrian safety businesses after which sharing it with “a community of worldwide Western organizations linked to U.S. and European intelligence businesses.”

Department 279 referred to as on Syria’s “stations overseas” to assemble details about SIRAJ, together with particulars about “the operatives operating the suspicious platform below the duvet of being journalists.” On the identical time, the Syrian authorities’s inner enforcers raided the household house of one in every of SIRAJ’s journalists, ICIJ member Mohammed Bassiki, seizing his mother and father’ telephones and interrogating them about his present location and work.

The choice to assemble details about SIRAJ was signed by the director of the Normal Intelligence Directorate, who on the time was Maj. Gen. Hussam Luka, one in every of Assad’s most brutal enforcers. Luka, who’s nicknamed “the spider,” has been sanctioned by the United States and the United Kingdom for his alleged involvement within the bloodbath of Syrian civilians and the torture of prisoners.

Feras Dalatey, a Syrian investigative journalist, discovered the paperwork on Dec. 20 within the State Safety headquarters in downtown Damascus. The workplace was in a chaotic state, Dalatey instructed ICIJ, because it had been raided by civilians after Assad’s fall. However by the point he arrived, it had been secured by fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group that led the hassle to topple the regime, who had been checking journalists’ permits and making certain that no person took paperwork out of the workplace. The folder holding these paperwork, which was marked as holding memos forwarded to that department, was untouched.

SIRAJ, which was integrated in France in 2019, makes a speciality of coaching Syrian journalists and conducting investigations into corruption and human rights abuses contained in the nation. The journalists publicly affiliated with SIRAJ escaped from Syria throughout Assad’s rule, however different journalists labored for the outlet anonymously whereas nonetheless within the nation. Some SIRAJ journalists had been threatened by Assad’s regime earlier than fleeing the nation, and one journalist was imprisoned by the Islamic State in 2013. SIRAJ has collaborated with ICIJ on a number of tasks, together with Cyprus Confidential and The Ericsson Listing.

The paperwork point out the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Challenge, Lighthouse Reviews, the International Investigative Journalism Community, Center East Eye, The Guardian and Der Spiegel as information retailers with which SIRAJ collaborates. These collaborations are finished “below the pretext of shedding mild on corruption and human rights violations in Syria,” the paperwork state, however are in actuality an espionage effort geared toward “gathering delicate details about Syria.”

As a part of its surveillance effort, Department 279 wrote to a number of different Syrian intelligence branches to request additional details about SIRAJ, particularly urging them to offer detailed details about the outlet’s journalists.

These paperwork present a window into the safety equipment that sought to repress any unbiased activism or journalism in Syria. Reporters With out Borders ranked Syria in 2024 because the second most harmful nation on this planet for journalists. It discovered earlier within the yr that dozens of journalists had been imprisoned or held hostage within the nation, and that the Syrian regime and its supporters had killed 181 journalists because the begin of the rebellion in opposition to Assad’s rule in 2011.

In an announcement, Reporters With out Borders stated that it “welcomes the top of one of the oppressive regimes in fashionable historical past.” It referred to as for the prosecution of Assad, saying that his crimes “should not go unpunished.”

Extra reporting by Feras Dalatey.