ALEPPO — Two men were sentenced to death by a military court here on Thursday, while two Defence Ministry members tried in the same case for intentional homicide were acquitted for insufficient evidence. A third ministry member, convicted of torture, received three years.
Syria’s state news agency SANA reported that the Military Criminal Court ruled on 10 defendants accused of committing violations during the coastal events of March 2025. Al-Waddah Ismail and Maher Ali were convicted of assault intended to incite civil war and sectarian fighting and of leading armed gangs. Mohammad Bakour, of the Defence Ministry, got 20 years for intentional homicide, and Maher Othman 12 years for involvement in fighting and assault. The verdicts follow a summer in which a Damascus court sentenced Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia.
Three more ministry members or affiliates, Ammar Abdul Aal, Captain Shannan bin Mustafa and Khaled al-Hamid, were convicted of torture and received two to three years. Al-Hamid got an extra two months for violating military orders. Mahmoud Shaheen was given two months for causing injury, a term the court treated as served in pretrial detention. Abdul Raouf Bakrjan and Mohammad Zarzouri, both ministry members, were cleared of homicide.
The tally matters because the record underneath it is disputed. In a July 2025 report, Syria’s national fact-finding committee said attacks on army and security headquarters on March 6, 2025, killed 238 personnel, and that the violations against civilians that followed were “individual and random in nature rather than part of a systematic pattern,” according to SANA’s account. A UN investigation found that violence against civilians by government-aligned factions was “widespread and systematic,” Al Jazeera reported, and the national commission itself counted at least 1,426 dead, mostly civilians, and identified 298 suspects.
Set against that list, the court has now ruled on 14 defendants by SANA’s count: four on Sept. 17 and ten on Thursday. Kamel Atli, head of the Aleppo branch of the Bar Association, told SANA that hearings would continue until every case, including those of defendants who remain at large, had been considered. SANA’s report does not say how many of the 298 are in custody.
Later on Thursday, the General Intelligence Service announced the arrest of Ali Kayali, also known as Mihrac Ural, accused of a leading role in the 2013 massacres at al-Bayda and Ras al-Nabaa in Baniyas, Arab News reported. He was detained while trying to flee across the border, though SANA did not say where. The Syrian Network for Human Rights counts 264 civilian deaths at al-Bayda and 195 at Ras al-Nabaa; Human Rights Watch documented at least 248. Justice Minister Mazhar al-Wais called the arrest “a new achievement” for the state.
Damascus has been loudest with Assad-era defendants: in August a court sentenced Bashar al-Assad’s cousin Wassim al-Assad to death in person. The Aleppo docket is where government-linked personnel are tried, and no official quoted by SANA has said whether the rest of the committee’s list will follow.
