A former Syrian military official convicted of torturing prisoners during the rule of former President Bashar al-Assad has been sentenced to 60 years in a United States prison. A federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced Samir Ousman Alsheikh on Thursday. A jury found him guilty in March of one count of conspiracy to commit torture and three counts of torture while in charge of Syria‘s infamous Adra Prison from roughly 2005 to 2008. “The conduct was heinous, unimaginably cruel, and almost unspeakably violent and brutal,” the judge said before announcing the sentence. Human rights groups and the United Nations have accused the Syrian government officials of widespread abuses in detention facilities, including torture and arbitrary detention of thousands of people, in many cases without informing their families.
US prosecutors said Alsheikh, seeking to quash political dissent, sent certain prisoners to a wing of Adra where they were held in small isolation cells and tortured. At the two-week trial, three victims recounted beatings while suspended from pipes on the ceiling for hours or days and the use of a device that folded their bodies in half at the waist, according to a press release from the US Department of Justice. One person testified that Alsheikh stomped on the device with his foot, according to the department. “Defendant knew that what he was doing was wrong,” Justice Department prosecutors said in a sentencing memo filed this month. “Nonetheless, he ordered and participated in the torture of his victims because he had the power to do so and because he thought he would never be held accountable.” The memo included statements from several victims, one of whom, Nidal Shikhani, said he can “still hear the screams of others begging for mercy, repeating, ‘Leave me, leave me.’” The prosecutors asked US District Judge Hernan D Vera for a minimum sentence of 80 years. Alsheikh’s lawyers, Nina Marino and Collin Cate, called for a five-year sentence, noting that he is 74 years old and has “significant medical and cognitive conditions”.
They also said he was willing to be deported to Syria, where a new government has sought to hold Assad-era security officials accountable. “Whatever moral weight this case carries in the broader arc of history — however much the world, or the victims, or the public might wish the sentence to ‘send a message’ — that desire cannot be the foundation of a just sentence,” Marino and Cate wrote in their September 3 memo. Alsheikh came to the US in 2020 and applied for citizenship, but the Justice Department said he lied about his past. Federal authorities arrested him at Los Angeles international airport in July 2024. Jurors also convicted him in March of lying to US immigration authorities and fraudulently obtaining a green card and attempting to naturalise as a US citizen. “The acts Alsheikh ordered and directly participated in are gruesome and disturbing.
We would like to offer our gratitude to the brave victims who testified leading to today’s sentencing,” Heith Janke, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal division, said in a press release Thursday. Al-Assad was ousted in a lightning rebel offensive in December 2024, bringing a 14-year civil war to an end, but the country has continued to suffer from sporadic outbreaks of violence. In March 2025, armed groups aligned with al-Assad ambushed the new government’s security forces on Syria’s coast. A government counteroffensive then spiralled into sectarian revenge attacks and the massacre of hundreds of civilians from the Alawite religious minority, to which al-Assad belongs.
On Thursday, three people were sentenced in the Syrian city of Aleppo in connection with the violence. One member of the pro-Assad groups was sentenced to death and another to life in prison, while a member of the government security forces who took part in the revenge attacks was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
