Former Assad-era security official Atif Najib appears inside a courtroom cage in Damascus as a court official calls out the names of ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher al-Assad for their in absentia trial.

Najib is a former Syrian brigadier general and intelligence officer who served as head of the Political Security Branch in Daraa, southern Syria, under the government of former President Bashar al-Assad.

He is also Assad’s first cousin.

He is widely known for his role in the 2011 arrest and torture of teenagers in Daraa who had written anti-government graffiti on a school wall.

That incident became one of the key triggers of the Syrian uprising, which later escalated into the country’s civil war.

After the fall of Assad’s government in late 2024, Syrian authorities arrested Najib in January 2025 in rural Latakia, where he was reportedly in hiding.