هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
“Mezzeh Military Airport is not merely a facility whose function can be changed by an administrative decision.” With that phrase, Syrian activist Osama Abu Zaid — a native of Daraya and a former detainee who spent most of his detention at Mezzeh Military Airport — sums up his objection to rehabilitating the site and converting it into a civilian airport.
For Abu Zaid, the airport’s facilities cannot be separated from the memory of detention and abuses that he lived through and witnessed, nor from the history of Daraya, Moadamiya, and the areas surrounding the site. For that reason, the debate over rehabilitating the airport goes beyond its future function to encompass the fate of a site associated with detention and abuses, and what evidence it may contain, as its reuse begins and its features are altered.
The General Authority of Civil Aviation and Air Transport announced on Sept. 3, 2026, that it is working on preliminary plans to reclassify Mezzeh Airport in Damascus from a military-use facility into a limited civilian airport specializing in private and executive aviation, to serve as a complement to Damascus International Airport.
According to the authority, the initial work includes clearing rubble and carrying out some infrastructure work related to air navigation, while the project’s technical and regulatory requirements are being completed. The project is scheduled to be implemented in phases, taking into account technical, operational, environmental, regulatory, legal, and community considerations.
The latest announcement comes about a year after the announcement by the Syrian authorities in July 2025 that they were moving to convert the airport into a civilian facility.
At the time, Civil Aviation Authority chief Omar al-Hasri said the project envisioned a civilian facility with a capacity of up to 30 million passengers annually — a concept that differs from the currently announced formula, which is limited to private and executive aviation.
Yet the airport’s change in function is not only about changing the site’s use. It comes at a time when rights investigations point to the presence of documents and sites suspected of being linked to victims and missing persons inside the airport and its surroundings.
Intersecting rights
Abu Zaid’s objection, expressed in a post on Facebook, is not limited to the rights dimension. He believes the future of the area surrounding the airport also affects Daraya, Moadamiya, their residents, and landowners there, given the urban, regulatory, and economic consequences that may result from converting the site into a civilian facility.
He therefore raises questions about why this airport was chosen specifically, what studies preceded the project, which parties took part in determining its future, and the extent to which residents, landowners, and affected local communities were involved in the decision.
Human rights defender and former detention survivor Mansour al-Omari, meanwhile, believes that any change in the use of Mezzeh Airport or its features must be preceded by comprehensive documentation of the site and preservation of evidence related to the abuses committed there.
Al-Omari says Mezzeh Airport and its facilities are a “red line. It is the memory of an entire people, and a horrific global heritage site bearing witness to the most appalling rights abuses and atrocities in modern history. No individual or group of individuals has the right to decide its fate.”
Al-Omari stressed in remarks to NoonPost that determining the site’s future should not take place in isolation from its rights context, calling for the involvement of bodies concerned with transitional justice, rights groups, associations of victims and their families, as well as affected local communities.
Al-Omari considers the participation of victims and their families in determining the fate of sites linked to abuses to be part of addressing the legacy of abuses and transitional justice, alongside examining property rights and historical grievances tied to the people of Daraya, Moadamiya, and the areas surrounding the airport.
He also calls for the creation of a comprehensive national registry of abuse sites, bringing together available maps and records held by Syrian and international organizations with testimonies from survivors and residents, and identifying sites that may contain physical evidence or human remains, in a way that would make it possible to set priorities for documentation, preservation, and investigation.
A record of abuses and documentation
Mezzeh Airport has a record of rights documentation accumulated by Syrian and international organizations over the years, including testimonies, documents, and materials related to abuses and missing persons. Yet the extent to which this documentation is being used in the current handling of the site remains unclear, especially as rehabilitation work begins and its use changes.
Evidence linking Mezzeh Airport to the detention and torture system dates back to the early years of the Syrian revolution. In its report issued in 2012 under the title “Torture Archipelago,” Human Rights Watch included the Air Force Intelligence branch at Mezzeh Airport among the network of detention centers it investigated.
The report was based on interviews with more than 200 former detainees and defectors, and identified the locations of detention centers that researchers were able to verify through multiple testimonies.
The report devoted a section to the Air Force Intelligence branch at Mezzeh Airport, identifying its location and documenting the existence of at least three detention facilities there, including a hangar, in addition to underground facilities used for detention, interrogation, and torture.
The history associated with Mezzeh Airport does not go back only to the years of the Syrian revolution. In a post on Facebook, Mansour al-Omari pointed to incidents dating back to the 1980s, citing a memorandum submitted to the UN Human Rights Council through Jordan’s mission.
According to what al-Omari cited from the memorandum, Mezzeh Airport was a gathering and departure point for the forces that took part in the operation targeting Tadmor Prison on June 27, 1980, during which about 1,200 detainees were killed over a short period.
The memorandum cites testimony attributed to Issa Ibrahim Fayyad, a former corporal in the Defense Companies, who said that personnel from the 40th and 138th brigades were assembled at Mezzeh Airport before being transported by helicopter to Tadmor Airport to take part in the operation. According to the testimony, the forces later returned to Mezzeh Airport after the operation ended.
In February 2025, the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability, in cooperation with the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison, published an investigation dedicated to Mezzeh Military Airport under the title “Searching for the Missing in Post-Assad Syria: Lessons From Investigating Mezzeh Military Airport.”
The investigation sought to reconstruct how the facility operated and the crimes committed there, relying on testimony from 156 survivors and eight former Air Force Intelligence personnel, in addition to satellite imagery, documents, and open-source data.
According to the investigation’s findings, more than 29,000 people were detained at the airport between 2011 and 2017, while more than 1,000 detainees were killed during the same period, based on data cross-checked against the available testimonies and documents.
The center identified seven sites suspected of being linked to mass graves, including sites within the airport grounds, based on testimonies, satellite imagery, and documents photographed at the site after the fall of the regime.
According to its findings, the investigation was also able to identify periods during which three of those sites are believed to have been used to bury detainees at the airport. Those sites, however, remain only suspected sites pending field investigations and forensic examinations to determine their nature and whether they contain human remains.
Evidence that may enter the path of justice
In the aftermath of the regime’s fall, a team from the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability entered the facility and photographed tens of thousands of documents, including detainee lists and information about sites potentially linked to burials.
In May 2025, the center published samples from the collection of documents it gathered and preserved from Syrian security and military facilities. The map accompanying the collection showed that Mezzeh Military Airport was one of the sites where government documents were found, while the center announced that it had preserved and digitized more than 700,000 documents from various facilities.
Materials linked to the Air Force Intelligence branch at Mezzeh Airport have previously been used in legal proceedings. In the case of Obadah Mzyek v. the government of the former regime before the US District Court in Washington, brought by a Syrian American who was subjected to detention and torture at the Air Force Intelligence branch at Mezzeh Airport in 2012, the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability said it submitted eight witness statements and 10 Syrian government documents linked to the branch to support a torture case.
That means the site may also be linked to evidence that could be valuable in investigations and trials related to abuses, in addition to the symbolic value it holds for former detainees and the families of the missing.
In the case of Mezzeh Airport, the issue is not a lack of documentation. Rights investigations have documented broad aspects of its history through testimonies, documents, and satellite imagery. Rather, the question is how this documentation and the related materials will be handled as the site begins to be reused, and whether the necessary measures to protect them were considered before its features were altered.
The conversion of Mezzeh Airport into a civilian facility places before the authorities a file in which victims’ rights to justice and to know the fate of the missing intersect with the rights of residents and landowners to participate in determining the future of the area.