After American aid worker Layla Shweikani was executed in Syria, U.S. officials spent five years building a case against the country's top officials. The inquiry aims to hold to account the key architects of a brutal system of detention and torture.
An undated photo provided via Syrian Network for Human Rights shows American aid worker Layla Shweikani.
A federal indictment accusing the men of committing war crimes would be the first time that the United States has criminally charged top Syrian officials with the very human rights abuses that Assad has long denied using to silence dissent. Although the men are unlikely to be apprehended, an indictment would signal that the United States aims to hold the Syrian government responsible.
By the time the authorities detained Shweikani on Feb. 19, 2016, along with her father and her fiancé, who were also in the country, almost every member of her relief group had been taken into Syrian custody. She would spend nearly a year in prisons on the outskirts of Damascus where cramped conditions, illness and torture run rampant: a detention facility at the Mezze airport, the Adra civilian prison and the Saydnaya military prison, where witnesses believe she was tried and executed.
Guards suspended him by his wrists, feet barely touching the floor, alternately beating him and leaving him hanging for hours to listen to the screams of men, women and children as guards set upon them.Eventually, Shweikani was moved to Adra prison, where the Obama administration dispatched the Czech ambassador, Eva Filipi, to meet her in December 2016 because it had cut off formal diplomatic relations with Syria.
But two FBI agents privately told Kinzinger that the bureau would not be dissuaded from investigating her death, the people said. Former and current U.S. officials involved in scrutinizing Shweikani’s activities also expressed doubt about Syria’s accusations of terrorism. The trailers tilted the corpses into vast trenches. “Hundreds of bodies flowed out. Some human beings looked skeletal because they were starved. Others had their guts spilling out. I would see a river of parts,” the gravedigger said. “Those that got stuck on the ledge, me and my team would have to get them into the hole.” The smell lingered in his nose and mouth for days.
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