Research by Professor Uğur Ümit Üngör of the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies has helped to uncover evidence of war crimes by the Assad regime in Syria.
Last year, Prof. Üngör was an IASH-SSPS Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, working on his project Behind the Sun’: The Logic and Forms of Violence in Syrian Prisons. Although he was unable to visit Edinburgh in person due to the pandemic, Prof. Üngör gave a fascinating and sobering work-in-progress seminar about his research.
Alongside his work on the Syrian prison system, Prof. Üngör has recently been featured in a Guardian investigation into the massacre at Tadamon, a suburb of Damascus, in 2013.
It is the story of a war crime, captured in real time, by one of the Syrian regime’s most notorious enforcers, branch 227 of the country’s military intelligence service that also details the painstaking efforts to turn the tables on its perpetrators – including how two researchers in Amsterdam duped one of the most infamous security officers in Syria through an online alter ego and seduced him into spilling the sinister secrets of Assad’s war.
Their work has cast an unprecedented light on crimes previously believed to have been widely committed by the regime at the height of the Syrian war but always denied or blamed on rebel groups and jihadists.
The full story can be read here and here, along with two podcasts featuring Prof. Üngör and Syrian researcher Annsar Shahhoud interviewed by journalist Michael Safi and Guardian Middle East correspondent Martin Chulov.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2022/apr/28/searching-for-the-shadow-man-part-2-podcast
Uğur Ümit Üngör is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. His main area of interest is the history and sociology of mass violence, with a particular focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East. He has won several academic awards and held visiting positions in Dublin, Vancouver, Budapest, Toronto, and Los Angeles. He has published books and articles on various aspects and cases of genocide, including the Armenian genocide. His most recent publication is Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford University Press, 2020), and the forthcoming Syrian Gulag: Assad’s Prison System, 1970-2020 (Boom Publisher, 2022). He is an editor of the Journal of Perpetrator Research, and coordinator of the Syrian Oral History Project. For more information, see: www.ungor.nl