Searching for Justice and the Missing in the New Syria

When human rights attorney Noura Ghazi received the news in early December that Bashar al-Assad had fled Syria, she was overcome with shock. The regime had dictated the terms of her family’s life for as long as she could remember. When she was just 5 years old, the regime imprisoned her father for his labor activism. Her husband, in turn, was detained during the first years of the Syrian civil war. She would later learn that Assad’s government had executed her husband in prison. Now Assad was gone.

As rebel fighters overtook Damascus last month, they unlatched prison doors, allowing thousands of Syrians to walk free. People freed from Sednaya Prison, notorious as a “human slaughterhouse,” or prisons in cities like Homs rejoiced in the light of day in images circulated widely online. But as misinformation about the missing also swirled online, complicating the good news, Ghazi had little time to celebrate. 

Her organization Nophotozone, which she co-founded with her late husband Bassel Khartabil Safadi, represents 3,500 Syrian families whose loved ones were arbitrarily detained by the Assad government. An estimated 150,000 people have gone missing within Syria’s prison system throughout the civil war. With the majority of her clients’ family members remaining unaccounted for, Ghazi and her colleagues have spent the past month, through many sleepless nights, searching for them and providing medical attention to newly released individuals.

At the same time that they work to locate the living, her organization is scrambling to preserve recently unearthed documents, formerly kept under lock and key, that the Assad regime used to record their abuses.

As the country starts to rebuild and shape its new government after more than 50 years of dictatorship, Syrians are grappling with a complex search toward accountability for the war crimes committed by the Assad regime. Throughout Assad’s rule, the government imprisoned, tortured, and executed thousands of people. Its military killed thousands more during the civil war, targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals, with bombs and chemical warfare. Various rebel factions have also been accused of human rights abuses. While the overthrow has brought an end to the fighting, scars of the war threaten the newfound peace. 

“In rebuilding Syria, there will be no peace without justice and accountability,” Ghazi told The Intercept. 

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which led the 10-day offensive against Assad and has announced it will remain in place as the transitional government until March, has indicated it is serious about addressing war crimes of the past. It has announced the formation of a judicial and human rights commission that will help shape its constitution and has said it has a list of senior officials involved in torture, pledging rewards to those who have information that could lead to the capture of others. 

Fear about how the country’s new Sunni Islamist rulers will act toward Syria’s various minorities, such as the Kurds and Alawites, is already brewing. Some rights groups and critics have pointed to HTS’s own alleged rights abuses and violent crackdowns during its time ruling the Idlib province as cause for concern. 

But other rights groups credit HTS for aiding efforts to preserve evidence of mass atrocities. Along with its prisons, the Syrian government also abandoned its intelligence offices as they fled, where troves of documents and case files are kept, detailing the actions of its military and police forces. Syrian civil society organizations have rushed to enter these facilities to record as many documents that can be used to build cases for future war crimes prosecution as possible.

This approach has yielded results in the past. Earlier in the civil war, the Syrian government abandoned its intelligence facilities in regions overtaken by rebel forces. The Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre was able to collect 500,000 pages of documents from those offices, which it has stored, analyzed, and used in prosecution of cases against the Assad government throughout Europe, in the U.S., and other jurisdictions, said Roger Lu Phillips, the organization’s legal director. 

In recent weeks, the group has deployed Syrian-led teams to access the newly opened buildings to photograph as many documents it considers high-value as possible, Phillips said. Some of the facilities are guarded by HTS fighters, who have allowed human rights volunteers and press to enter at times, but have at other times denied entry. Other facilities lack any such guards, leaving potential evidence vulnerable to damage. 

“Some of the locations we entered into, we go back in a day later and the place has been burned,” Phillips said. “Some individuals are trying to destroy the documentation, probably remnants of the Assad regime, concerned with proof of what lies in the facilities.” 

Ghazi, with Nophotozone, has been vocal about the need to preserve government documents and has criticized the mishandling of documents at prison facilities, hampering efforts to locate the missing. Last month, she posted a video from Sednaya Prison showing individuals stepping on piles of documents scattered across the floor, calling on authorities and international groups to intervene. Her organization has since entered an agreement with HTS and is working with the interim government to help preserve the documents that remain and share them with international bodies, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“The most important step now is to protect the evidence, the documents, the mass graves, and then to study everything,” Ghazi said. “It needs to be a really long process in order to get to the accountability and achieve justice.”

Seeking justice within Syria was impossible with the Assad regime still in power. In the United Nations, Assad-allied Russia regularly thwarted previous attempts to refer war crime cases to The Hague with its veto vote in the U.N. Security Council. So Syrian civil society has turned to universal jurisdiction to pursue war criminals in courts in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. Universal jurisdiction allows governments, organizations, or individuals to prosecute people for war crimes within a country’s judicial system, even if the crimes were committed in another jurisdiction.

The Syrian government and pro-government forces have been responsible for the majority of atrocities in Syria, but due to lack of access to evidence and witnesses, the majority of Syrian war crimes cases in Europe and the U.S. have targeted the Islamic State group. The Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre has been involved in about 100 cases related to atrocities committed during the civil war, and has tracked 350 total cases unfolding across the globe, which Phillips referred to as “just a drop in the bucket.” 

This strategy has found some success. In 2022, a judge in Germany handed a life sentence to Anwar Raslan, a former Syrian intelligence officer, for overseeing the torture of at least 4,000 people. He had fled to Europe seeking asylum before he was arrested in 2019. 

Last May, after a trial held in absentia, Paris court sentenced three former high-ranking Syrian officials to life in prison for their role in the torture and killing of a French Syrian man and his son. Two of the men, Jamil Hassan and Abdul Salam Mahmoud, are also wanted by U.S. authorities, according to a Department of Justice complaint unsealed in December that accuses them of running a prison, infamous for torture, at the Mezzeh military airport in Damascus.

Also in France, prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant in 2023 for Assad himself, who is currently living under asylum in Russia. The case focuses on the chemical weapons attacks that Assad ordered in the Syrian cities of Ghouta and Douma in August 2013, where more than 1,000 people died, according to estimates, and hundreds more suffered injuries. Some died overnight as they slept. 

The cases in Europe have been groundbreaking for Syrian society, in their scope and focus, allowing survivors and witnesses the chance to participate in criminal proceedings, with many giving harrowing testimony during trials, at times facing down the individuals who tortured them. But the European cases have also been reminders of how accountability for abuses had been absent within Syria’s own judicial system for decades under Assad.

“Right now, there’s a huge opportunity in Syria — accountability can mean a completely different thing — it’s not limited to what we can do in Europe or in the U.S.,” said Hadi Al-Khatib, founder of the Syrian Archive, which holds an open-source database of 3 million videos documenting war crimes in Syria. He and his organization have spent the last 10 years gathering and verifying the images through a painstaking vetting process to help prosecutors outside the country build criminal cases, including the landmark cases in France and the arrest warrant for Assad. Since December, when Syrian refugees began returning to the country, he and other groups have begun to form a new strategy with how to gather new evidence as more people are willing to come forward to report abuse.

“More witnesses can be heard,” said Katib, who moved to Germany in 2014. “More families of victims can participate. More survivors can participate. More diverse crimes can be prosecuted.”

Houssam al-Nahhas, a Syrian physician and researcher with Physicians for Human Rights, said he hoped a new judicial system within Syria will prioritize transitional justice, using the evidence he and others have spent years collecting and the new evidence that is already emerging. 

Nahhas himself is a survivor of human rights abuses. While a medical school student, he was part of a group of volunteers in Aleppo treating anti-Assad protesters who were wounded by the Syrian military during demonstrations. In 2012, three of his colleagues were detained by the Syrian government; two days later, they were found dead on the side of a road, their bodies shot and burned, Nahhas recalled. Several weeks later, Nahhas was also arrested and tortured by Syrian officers who questioned him on his identity and names of other physicians, as well as how he got their medical supplies. He was released after 16 days of continuous torture. 

During the rest of the war, he moved back and forth between Turkey and Syria, conducting research on attacks on hospitals and medical workers, documenting 608 attacks on health care facilities and the killing of 949 health care workers, mostly by Syrian government, pro-government forces, or allied Russian military personnel. His research also found that medical workers detained by the Syrian government for providing health care to the wounded were 400 percent more likely to be killed than medical workers detained for political reasons. 

“It showed that this goes beyond just being arbitrary, it was part of the worst strategy — the deliberate targeting of health care providers,” Nahhas said. 

Both Nahhas and Khatib said they believe the justice process in Syria will need support from international bodies, such as the United Nations, but they stressed the importance of the process being led by Syrians.

“We know the magnitude of violations that were committed on our soil and the pain is unimaginable, the suffering imposed on Syrian people is unimaginable,” Nahhas said.

Given the complex nature of violations in Syria, Nahhas said accountability should focus not only on the former government, but also other parties to the conflict. Other groups accused of violations of international law include the Islamic State, the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army, or the U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF forces are currently operating prison camps in Syria’s northeast where ISIS fighters and women and children accused of supporting them are being indefinitely held with no trial, which has drawn the condemnation of rights groups, such as Amnesty International. 

Many Syrians have also become disillusioned with international bodies and other nations who have exploited the civil war for their own political purposes, said Khatib, while the Syrian government continued detaining and killing thousands of civilians. 

“That’s why I think if it’s with a Syrian ownership and a Syrian-designed justice process that is inclusive, it’s something I feel will bring more peace to the country and bring more reconciliation between different actors within the country,” Khatib said. “Otherwise it might be used as a political tool between different actors, which might increase the instability of the country. It’s all about sustainable peace and making sure that people acknowledge what happened and are speaking to each other, even if not everyone is tried, but that there is a record of what happened and that people involved are not part of a new Syrian government again.” 

Once the new government establishes a constitution and judicial system, many questions remain as to how justice will be pursued. Syria could consider becoming a party to the Rome Statute, similar to its new ally Ukraine, which would open up avenues of prosecution through the International Criminal Court. Rather than going through the U.N. Security Council where a Russian veto likely awaits, it could instead refer a case directly to the international war crimes court in The Hague.

It also remains unclear what prosecution would look like within a newly formed Syrian judicial system.

Phillips, with the Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre, has been a part of previous accountability efforts after the fall of a dictatorial regime. He worked on the Cambodia Tribunal, established in 1997, which sought to hold members of the Khmer Rouge accountable for atrocities.

“What kind of trials do they foresee?” said Phillips, referring to the eventual Syrian justice system. “And is there room for the international community to support them, or for the diaspora civil society who have been collecting documentation for the last 12 years to support them and provide documentation to them in a domestic war crimes prosecution tribunal?” 

Other war crime tribunals that have been set up in postwar nations in recent history include the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda after the Rwandan genocide and a regional tribunal in Sierra Leone, established in 2002 following the Sierra Leonian civil war. The Special Court for Sierra Leone — made up of judges from Sierra Leone, other African nations, and figures from Canada and the United Kingdom — led to the war crime conviction of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, the first of its kind for a head of state in Africa. 

David Crane, an American attorney who helped found and served as chief prosecutor of the Sierra Leone court, said a similar court could be set up in Syria. Crane was also co-author of the influential Caesar Report, submitted to the U.N. in 2014, highlighting images smuggled out of Syria by a former Syrian intelligence photographer who took photos of the bodies of detainees who were tortured to death. Crane said he is prepared to aid such an effort to set up a court in Syria, which would likely begin with a resolution passed through the U.N. General Assembly. But he warned that such a process should be focused on what justice looks like to the people of Syria and other Arab nations. 

“International criminal law tends to be kind of, frankly, white man’s justice — it’s very European-centric,” said Crane, who also founded the Syrian Accountability Project at Syracuse University College of Law. “It approaches the law in that sense, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that we also have to be very sensitive.” He added that any process would have to acknowledge the scars left on the Arab world by Western colonialism.

Ghazi said she is open to working with experts from across the international community to contribute to the justice process in Syria, but also emphasized that survivors of the war crimes should be at the center.

“I prefer it to be Syrian-led, and also not just Syrian civil society organizations, but most importantly, the families of those victims, they are the most important. They should decide what they want, and we as experts, as human right defenders, as civil society organizations, we should just fulfill their needs, we should try to achieve their demands,” she said.

As the search for justice continues, Syrians are also working to find the missing dead. Ghazi still hopes to collect the remains of her late husband. 

Within Syria, mass graves have been turning up throughout the country, and with the opening of government morgues, individuals and Syrian civil society organizations have quickly begun to exhume bodies and search body bags in hopes of locating their relatives. Ghazi and civil society groups are now warning that hasty search efforts may damage evidence and have called on people within Syria to preserve such sites until a forensic examination and excavation can take place.

Over the past few years, Ghazi has been able to process the loss of her husband Bassel Safadi. Before he was imprisoned, the pair had become engaged; he was arrested weeks before their scheduled marriage. Over two prison visits, Ghazi and Safadi got married, two years before his execution. 

Living in France, she said she is now engaged to a new partner. But the events of the last month have been retraumatizing. Last week, she told nonprofit Syria Untold that she now in recent days has struggled to sleep, and when she does, she suffers nightmares. And after seeing many former detainees presumed dead reunited with their families, she once again wonders if her husband is still alive. 

While Ghazi continues to help families with hopes of reuniting with their missing relatives, many others are also trying to confirm their deaths, or, like Ghazi, attempting to recover their remains. For families of the missing, burying the dead can be the first step toward justice.

“I will fight until the end to get Bassel’s remains,” she said, “and everyone’s remains.”