2026-05-18
24 分钟The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.
I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, the next in our America at 250 series
and a curious whiskey-making boom in China.
First...
In a Damascus courtroom, an old man stands in a cage.
He has a pained expression on his face.
He's wearing a black and white prison uniform.
Gareth Brown is a Middle East correspondent for The Economist.
Artif Najib is on trial for murder, torture and orchestrating massacres.
15 years ago, this man was the security chief of Dera, a city in southern Syria.
When the parents of children arrested in protest in 2011 came to Mr Najib,
who was head of security in the city at the time, to beg for mercy.
He told them to forget about their sons, to go home and to make new ones.
That brutal period in Dera.
Morphed into nearly 14 years of nationwide repression, bloodshed and war.
But on May 10th, the Syrian courts finally began to catch up with the criminals
who ran Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Artif Najib is the first man to take the stand.