Catfishing a Killer — with Uğur Ümit Üngör, Annsar Shahhoud and Rasha Elass

When Amjad Youssef met “Anna,” a young Alawite Syrian who was studying abroad, the military man was skeptical at first. But as the months unfolded, he began to open up to his fellow pro-regime partisan over Facebook. What he didn't know was that Anna had been created by genocide researchers Annsar Shahhoud and Uğur Ümit Üngör. In this podcast with New Lines Magazine's Rasha Elass, they talk about how they used Anna to expose Amjad’s participation in the 2013 Tadamon massacre, carried out by the Syrian regime. They explain how they set about luring Amjad through social media, dark humor as a coping mechanism in a line of work which few can relate to, and what to do with the knowledge of such atrocities when facing the families of the victims. Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El Kholy