Last week, old videos showing horrific abuses by regime military doctors against prisoners resurfaced online. The videos fueled an ongoing debate within Syrian society over the role of the regime’s military hospitals within the detention and torture network, and whether justice will be upheld against former doctors found guilty of torturing detainees or covering up their executions. A few days later, the former director of the Latakia Military Hospital was found and arrested in Jableh.
His arrest is just one of a long string of otherwise unannounced arrests targeting former military doctors. This is one of the most contentious files within the already extremely divisive transitional justice topic. Many former military doctors have, since ending their service or since the regime’s fall, opened private civilian practices. The arrests of these men – done without public announcements and often by masked armed security forces – has fueled misinformation within Alawi social media networks of kidnappings against “doctors”. Doctors are almost always framed as civilians, with no mention of their past employment.
There are two commonly understood roles of the military medical sector in the detainment system: senior doctors who signed fake death certificates claiming those murdered under torture or execution died of natural causes, and nurses and lower-level doctors who worked directly inside the prisons. A 2023 investigation by the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison into the Tishreen Military Hospital provides a detailed looked into the complex web of doctors, nurses, military police and intelligence members involved in abusing and murdering detainees within the hospital. According to the report:
“All the witnesses we met agreed that the medical staff who were allowed to access this place [the Emergency Department] were carefully chosen from regime-loyalists and could be said to be mostly Alawite. Nurses were selected by the chief of nurses in coordination with the security officer and the hospital manager and they are not held to account regarding their treatment of detainees. They exercised all forms of maltreatment including physical beating in front of officers and officials.”
When asked about the military doctors, many Alawis do not understand why they would be targeted for arrest. The intricacies of the Assad-era detention and torture network are more foreign to the Alawi community, compared to Sunnis, and it is difficult for even some anti-Assad Alawis to accept the idea that respected local doctors could have been involved. Even if people know what some doctors did in these hospitals, their relatives and friends who served there would always describe themselves as the exceptions – doctors who treated detainees well and stood up for their rights.
These divergent narratives came to a head in early February 2026, when at least seven former Tishreen doctors were arrested in Damascus, Homs, and Tartous. The rapid arrest of five doctors in Homs city alone caused viral Facebook posts about the “kidnapping” of Alawi doctors. Families of the arrested men often struggle to find information about their whereabouts or the charges against them, further fueling misinformation and fear that these are sect-based kidnappings or arrests.
I asked two Ministry of Interior investigators about these arrests later that month. They confirmed that a list of several hundred people affiliated with the military hospitals had been created throughout 2025, based on documents and witness testimonies, and disseminated to local security offices. This list included men wanted for questioning, and men wanted for crimes with which the government had strong evidence of their involvement. This campaign has clearly increased in intensity throughout the spring.
Last December I met with a former military doctor who worked throughout the war in Tishreen Military Hospital. We spoke among other topics about the treatment of Alawi military doctors after liberation and his perceptions of Tishreen and treating detainees. The doctor was arrested in February. I have edited this interview to remove any potentially identifying information about him. It is particularly interesting to note how he describes the role of Sunni doctors and the perception that they are not being targeted for arrest, and also how his descriptions of Sunni doctors changes throughout the interview.