Earlier today, Syrian security forces arrested the brother of a Syrian opposition leader in exile, Radwan Ziadeh, who is now a George Washington University visiting scholar. Thirty-seven-year-old Yassin Ziadeh was at a demonstration after prayers (for the eid al-fitr holiday), Radwan told me on the phone. “The security forces attacked the demonstrators,” says Radwan. “[Yassin] was running away and got swept up by Syrian air force security”—which is historically one of the regime’s most active security branches, in large part because former president Hafez al-Assad, the current president Bashar’s father, was a career air force man who trusted his colleagues with his life and rule. “Many of the opposition members held by air force security over the last six months have been tortured,” says Radwan. He fears that his brother, a father of two teenage girls, may suffer especially bad treatment because of his work with the opposition. “He’s got nothing to do with politics,” says Radwan. “But because of my activities, he’s been banned since 2008 from traveling outside the country, along with other members of my family.”
Some critics of the Assad regime note that Syria’s diplomats abroad have been facilitating the work of its security services at home. “You have the Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Mustafa, under investigation by the FBI for orchestrating this pattern of intimidation and violence,” says David Schenker, director of the Program in Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Syrian diplomats in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere have been tracking the work of opposition members in exile and promising to hurt their relatives back in Syria, often making good on their threats. “This is happening every day in Syria,” says Schenker. “How many family members of opposition figures have been rounded up, tortured, killed?”
