The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 opened a rare window into the inner workings of one of the world’s most secretive authoritarian governments. Among the most alarming revelations emerging from the “Damascus Dossier” – a trove of 134,000 Syrian intelligence documents obtained by Germany’s NDR and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its partners – is the discovery of how Syriatel, the country’s largest telecom operator, functioned as a surveillance arm of the Syrian regime.

For decades, Syrians suspected they were being monitored. What they did not know was the staggering scope of this intrusion – how deeply intelligence agencies penetrated private communications and how systematically the country’s telecom infrastructure was repurposed to track, intimidate, and silence dissent. The newly uncovered documents now confirm those fears with chilling specificity.

Syriatel’s ties to the Assad family have never been a secret. Its former chairman, Rami Makhlouf – Assad’s powerful maternal cousin – built an empire under the protection of the regime. Makhlouf was sanctioned by both the US and the EU for financing Assad’s brutal crackdown on civilians, and his companies were widely understood to be financial arteries feeding the regime.

Yet the Damascus Dossier reveals a deeper, more structural relationship: Syriatel was not just a regime-friendly company but an active collaborator that enabled one of the most sophisticated domestic spying systems in the Middle East.

A 2020 intelligence report from Branch 251, part of the notorious General Intelligence Directorate, documents interrogations of several individuals linked to Makhlouf, including Syriatel’s then–IT director. The testimony describes how Syriatel’s IT department handed over “all information related to subscribers and their communications” to the Communications Directorate – a military intelligence unit within the Ministry of Defense.

This was not an occasional request for information, nor something narrowly targeted at suspects. According to the interrogation file, Syriatel uploaded its subscriber data and backup databases directly into a system belonging to the Communications Directorate. It was a continuous, automated pipeline: a master key to millions of private calls, messages, numbers, and metadata.

Despite being questioned by an agency long associated with torture, the documents provide no explicit evidence that coercion was used during this particular interrogation. Regardless, the pattern that emerges from the materials is unmistakable: surveillance was institutionalized, normalized, and integrated into Syriatel’s core operations.

Corroborating the dossier’s findings, former Syriatel employee Nidal Zarifeh told reporters that sharing customer information with intelligence services was unavoidable. “It was not a matter of choice,” he said. “The information was available to the Communications Directorate, and consequently to the state, in a detailed and obvious way.”

Zarifeh’s comments reflect a mindset common among professionals who lived under the Assad regime. He described a belief that the telecom infrastructure they were building would outlast the dictatorship and serve the Syrian state in the long term. This sense of patriotic duty coexisted with – and arguably facilitated – the normalization of mass surveillance.

Syriatel itself refused to comment on the revelations.

The Damascus Dossier makes clear that Syriatel was not alone in supporting the security establishment. Internal memos from 2024 show that the Communications Directorate shared data with the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) originating from multiple telecom providers in Syria.

While only Syriatel is explicitly named in the documents, details in the memos imply the involvement of at least one other company. Lists of phone numbers, SIM card information, subscribers’ identities, and even call content were exchanged between agencies.

One memo from the Communications Directorate included a list of 26 users, complete with full names, parents’ names, dates of birth, ID numbers, and home addresses. Another attached stored text messages and metadata for numbers communicating with two Syriatel subscribers.

This ecosystem of surveillance was sprawling, bureaucratic, and deeply embedded in the state’s apparatus. Each branch of intelligence – from Military Security to the feared Air Force Intelligence – accessed phone data to monitor perceived threats, activists, and anyone suspected of undermining the regime.

The stories of individuals named in the memos underscore the human cost of this system. Reporters traced one number referenced in documents to Fouad Adel Abu Hamdane, a political activist from Suwaida. Under the previous regime, his communications were intercepted, and he was constantly at risk of arrest or disappearance.

“They surveilled us – all our movements,” Abu Hamdane said. “Anyone who said his opinion on Bashar Al Assad was considered wanted.” His description of living in fear of being abducted by intelligence officers is consistent with the experiences of tens of thousands of Syrians over the past decade.

Another activist, Ahmed Abazeid, recounted discovering handwritten transcripts of citizens’ phone calls inside a military security office in Suwaida. These were not digital files – but physical documents that staff had copied manually, showing the extraordinary lengths intelligence agencies went in order to monitor the population.

Abazeid said it was common knowledge that phone lines were unsafe: “There was a reluctance to discuss political matters on the line.”

The Assad regime’s reliance on telecom surveillance was not simply about monitoring known dissidents. According to Zarifeh, the system reflected a much broader paranoia.

“Assad’s regime was always concerned with not knowing something,” he said. As a result, every major telecom operator became a conduit for intelligence gathering. The objective was not merely prevention of dissent but the cultivation of a society in which the fear of surveillance itself functioned as a tool of repression.

The pervasive monitoring created an atmosphere of self-censorship, shrinking political space and dismantling trust within communities.

Since the fall of the Assad regime, Syrian authorities have sought to distance themselves from the old surveillance architecture. The new Ministry of Communications claims that phone data is no longer shared routinely with security forces and that any access to citizen information now requires a court order.

Whether these assurances reflect meaningful institutional reform or political rhetoric remains to be seen. Syria’s post-Assad future is still uncertain, and dismantling a surveillance system as entrenched and widespread as the one built over decades will require more than public statements.

What is undeniable, however, is the scale of wrongdoing documented in the Damascus Dossier. Syriatel’s complicity in enabling mass surveillance illustrates how private companies – especially in authoritarian contexts – can become extensions of state repression. It also raises broader questions about accountability: who will be held responsible, and what justice looks like for the millions of Syrians whose privacy was systematically violated?

For now, the dossier stands as one of the most detailed records ever uncovered of a modern surveillance state. It exposes the machinery of fear that sustained Assad’s rule and offers a sobering lesson on how easily technology can be weaponized against a population when concentrated in the hands of unrestrained power.

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Damsana Ranadhiran, Special Contributor to Blitz is a security analyst specializing on South Asian affairs.