Syria’s former grand mufti, not seen since the fall of the regime, has been spotted in Aleppo province, with calls for the cleric to be detained due to his links to Bashar Al-Assad.
Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun was Syria’s grand mufti from 2005 until the position was abolished in 2021, forcing the Sunni religious figure into retirement.
Hassoun was a highly controversial figure in Syria due to statements about the Syrian revolution and justifications for the Assad regime, which had detained around 120,000 political opponents – most of them killed in prison – and responsible for the vast majority of Syria’s 500,000 war dead.
After largely retiring from the public eye in 2021 when his state-appointed position was discontinued, a video emerged this week reportedly showing Hassoun in the northern city of Aleppo, the first time he has been since the Assad regime collapsed on 8 December.
In a video widely shared on Monday, Hassoun was spotted in the passenger seat of a car in Aleppo before daring to his home.
After the video went viral, a crowd protested outside his home and reportedly stormed the building in the Al-Furqan district of Aleppo, calling for Hassoun’s detention.
In another video that emerged, Hassoun is interrogated by a crowd where he claimed to have been detained three times by Assad and rejected a claim from the cameraman as he was the “mufti of the barrel regime”, referring to the crude unconventional bombs dropped by the Syrian airforce on opposition towns and cities.
Hassoun had reportedly been detained and released by Syrian security forces and the fate of the figure is not known, although it is believed he had fled before his house was raided by protesters.
Despite being largely out of the limelight in recent years, his name recently reemerged during Tulsi Gabbard’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing regarding her appointment as the director of national intelligence.
There have been concerns over Gabbard’s alleged links to Russia and the Syrian regime, including about her previous controversial visit to Assad’s Syria.
She was questioned on whether she was aware that Hassoun had warned Europe and the US in 2011 that Western intervention in Syria would unleash a wave of suicide bombers when she met him and Assad in 2017.
Hassoun was largely seen as a Sunni ‘talking head’ for the Assad regime, lacking the religious and intellectual credentials of Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Bouti, the imam of Damascus’s Ummayad Mosque, who was killed in a suicide bombing in 2013.
He had made numerous statements supporting the Syrian regime during the war and spoke out against rebel groups working to overthrow Bashar Al-Assad.
Hassoun also regularly met foreign delegations viewed as supportive of the Assad regime including far-right European politicians and justified the massacres of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority.
