The accounts state that Qahtan Khalil was the assistant director of Air Force Intelligence before Bashar al-Assad appointed him to the director's position as a replacement for Ghassan Ismail - Ghassan Ismail. His name was included among the five officers that the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on in 2021.

According to the "With Justice" website, Khalil was one of the supervisors of torture and killing of detainees in the notorious prison of the Almaza military airport, during the Syrian revolution.

The regime appoints officers with "criminal records" to lead security centers in Daraa

Referring to Assad's new appointments, Major Yosef Hamoud, a pilot who defected from the regime's forces, stated that "appointments to command positions in the army in the security services are no longer in the hands of the regime," and added: "Since 2015, the Russians and Iranians have rushed to appoint figures who report to them on security issues and military decision-making.

He added: "The intelligence service of the air force is the most important of the many Syrian agencies, and it controls all the other agencies, and the foreign intelligence service reports to it," and noted that the Russian side "has been working for several months to reorganize the security services of the Syrian regime , so that it will contain only 3 separate intelligence services and in order to succeed in this mission, the Russians need a criminal like General Kakhtan Khalil."

He explained that "the security services which were taken over by Jamil al-Hassan, who is the main person responsible for the imposition of terror in Syria, gave their allegiance to the Iranian side, the arrival of Kahtan Khalil as the head of the organization, meaning that the control of the intelligence services passed to Russian control."