How a Trove of Smuggled Records Could Help Syrians Get Justice for War Crimes

O n December 8, 2024, as the regime of Bashar al-Assad collapsed, Mukhtar was at his home in Idlib Governorate, in northwestern Syria. (For safety reasons, he asked to use a pseudonym.) A researcher with the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC), he watched videos of rebel forces rolling into the Syrian capital, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, whose precursor had been affiliated with Al Qaeda.

He was overwhelmed by the ebullient scenes of prisoners emerging, bewildered, from their cells at the Mezzeh military airbase and the notorious Sednaya prison. Less thrilling were the crowds of people rummaging through documents, searching for any mention of missing loved ones, scattering potentially valuable evidence of the regime’s crimes over the floors.

The next day, Mukhtar felt a sinking feeling as he watched videos of crowds of people stomping over those documents and Israeli jets bombing the Kafr Sousa security complex in Damascus, where multiple branches of the security services kept offices. He pictured thousands of records, some offering insights into the fates of what the Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates to be more than 170,000 still missing, going up in flames. “A big chaos will come,” he thought as he picked up his mobile phone to call his bosses at SJAC and tell them they should send him to the capital.

His goal was to gather up as much documentation as possible and preserve its authenticity so it could be used to prosecute accused war criminals. Similar documents had already been submitted in court proceedings by organizations like the United Nations and countries, including Canada, that had adopted universal jurisdiction laws to prosecute Syrians residing outside of Syria.

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SJAC wasn’t alone in this work. Within a few months of the start of the civil war in March 2011, Syrian activists and lawyers Razan Zaitouneh and Mazen Darwish had set up the Violations Documentation Centre (VDC), based in the opposition-held town of Douma; two months later, the UN established the Independent International Commission of Inquiry of the Syrian Arab Republic (Syria COI) to “investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law.” Soon, other Syrian activists and freelance entrepreneurs joined these efforts, including SJAC in early 2012. That same year, William Wiley, a former Canadian infantry officer turned war crimes investigator, founded the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), where he now serves as executive director. Syrian Archive was established in 2014.

The documents represented a potential treasure trove for lawyers preparing cases against alleged war criminals and activists trying to determine the fates of the missing. Some contained the names of Syrian military and intelligence officers involved in the torture and summary executions of prisoners. Others documented crimes committed by opposition groups or even outside nations that had intervened on behalf of one side or the other in the civil war, including, potentially, Russia and Turkey.

It was dangerous work. In 2013, Zaitouneh, along with her husband and two colleagues, was kidnapped from her home by armed gunmen, possibly belonging to a jihadist group the VDC was investigating, and has not been seen since. At least one of CIJA’s investigators was killed, another severely injured, and several captured and tortured by the regime and Daesh, or ISIS.

The risks CIJA took with its Syrian employees has earned it a reputation as a determined organization among a new breed of players in a field some call entrepreneurial justice. Some of the documents it has collected have been used in successful prosecution of war crimes in Germany and in issuing arrest warrants in France. They also provide crucial evidence in the ongoing proceedings Canada and the Netherlands have brought to the International Court of Justice, accusing the al-Assad government of torture and other cruel treatment of its population. (CIJA has also been targeted by a group of British academics, led by University of Edinburgh professor Paul McKeigue, in an attempt to discredit it, according to a BBC report.) At last count, CIJA had more than a million documents locked away at a secure site in an undisclosed European city. According to Wiley, those include 1.3 million pages of al-Assad regime materials, which are being digitized, and about 150,000 pages of materials related to Daesh. Other organizations have accumulated hundreds of thousands more, stored in at least one archive in Washington, DC, and spread around Europe.

“The Syrian conflict was, at least before Ukraine anyway, the most documented conflict in history,” Robert Petit, the head of the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria, told me. The IIIM was formed in late 2016 under the auspices of the UN General Assembly, in part as a response to all of the documentary evidence of war crimes accumulating outside Syria. Petit describes it as a “repository” for such evidence that can help international bodies, like the Syria COI and the International Criminal Court in the Hague, as well as national governments, investigate and prosecute some of the worst crimes committed by all sides in the conflict.

Most of the credit for the documents’ existence must go to the al-Assad regime itself. It was a prolific documentarian of its own bad behaviour, operating a bureaucracy of evil that rivalled that of the Nazis. In early December, German broadcaster NDR, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and twenty-four media partners released the Damascus Dossier, which consists of about 134,000 files spanning from the mid-’90s to December 2024, detailing some of the workings of various intelligence services under the al-Assad regime. Petit, a former Crown Prosecutor from Montreal, who has worked on multiple tribunals and missions investigating and prosecuting war crimes, said the vast trove of records available should facilitate the process of bringing those responsible to justice.

That has already been the case for efforts outside Syria to prosecute war crimes committed in the country under the universal jurisdiction doctrine. But inside Syria, the results have been less impressive. Some say that human rights defenders and families of the dead, injured, and missing are losing faith in the interim government’s early promise to pursue justice against those responsible for committing atrocities. Instead, a year into the post-al-Assad era, Syrians face near daily incidents of reprisal killings. This past spring and summer, its Alawite and Druze communities suffered separate massacres that left hundreds of civilians dead and many more injured. There is a growing feeling among Syria’s minorities that they will have to defend themselves, perhaps against the new government itself. And that, experts warn, is a recipe for more violence.

Pursuing justice in a post-conflict setting like Syria is a fraught exercise. What looks righteous and fair to one group can easily feel like scapegoating to another. Unlike normal criminal cases, justice in a country transitioning out of war doesn’t simply mean investigating past crimes and determining the appropriate punishment. Transitional justice mechanisms provide a context in which a society can move from a period of war or violent authoritarian rule to, ideally, a democratic society that can redress past harms and dismantle the structures that made those harms possible. It doesn’t only play out in courtrooms or international tribunals but also in the countryside, where farmers continue to suffer because one side of a conflict decided to blow up a dam and now water is scarce, or a neighbourhood in a city still waiting for electricity because the local transformer station was hit by indiscriminate shelling.

This is what makes transitional justice so difficult, Petit told me. “If you’re investigating a murder, you start with the murder,” he said. “If you’re investigating 100,000 murders, you can’t. You start by trying to develop a holistic vision of the conflict and then build lines of inquiries that will allow you to understand patterns, understand groups of victims, understand groups of perpetrators, understand chains of command, understand communications. You develop an understanding of the structure of the conflict.”

Documents play a crucial role in these so-called “structural investigations,” helping reconstruct the environment in which crimes were committed to determine who did what, in response to what, and who is ultimately culpable. The process may sound reasonable in theory, and achievable in Syria’s case, considering the huge archive of documents out there, but in practice, it can be highly contested.

Syria’s civil war presents a particularly vexing case: a coalition of opposition groups, each with their own ideologies and grievances—some stretching back decades—ultimately emerged victorious over another coalition made up of the regime and its allies. Each side also had its international backers—in the al-Assad case, Russia and Iran, and for the opposition, Turkey—which are themselves accused of crimes.

Syria is also now divided geographically between different ethnic groups: in the northeast are Syria’s Kurds, under the protection of the United States; there are the Alawites along the Mediterranean coast, who were favoured by the al-Assad regime and ostensibly continue to have Russia’s backing; there are the Druze in Sweida province to the south, who are ostensibly backed by Israel; and there is the interim government, led by former jihadist Ahmed al-Sharaa, who now rule the country, if only loosely in some places.

Not long after al-Sharaa was appointed interim president this past January, he vowed to begin the process of national reconciliation. On March 13, he signed a new, temporary constitutional declaration that included an article promising a transitional justice commission to address people’s “right to know the truth” and provide “justice for victims and survivors.” Two months later, he issued a presidential decree establishing the National Commission for Transitional Justice, headed by Abdul Basit Abdul Latif, a police officer who had defected to the opposition shortly after the start of the civil war. The decree also gave Abdul Latif a month to appoint a “working team” and outline the Commission’s internal regulations.

Two months after the decree was issued, the Commission’s Facebook page shared an announcement from Abdul Latif stating that the team was still in the process of being formed. Two weeks after that, the page posted a hastily compiled set of graphics outlining the institutional scaffolding for what would presumably become the Commission, but still without a timeline for when it would be set up or details about its composition. Throughout the summer and fall, meanwhile, Abdul Latif met with transitional justice experts both inside and outside Syria, posting pictures on the Facebook page.

As of this writing, it’s still not clear who the members of the Commission will be and how they will be selected. No tangible work appears to have been done to develop a broad-based transitional justice framework, leading some Syrian activists to claim the Commission is little more than a way for the al-Sharaa government to gain international legitimacy while it continues to target its perceived enemies inside Syria.

Critics have also expressed concern about the wording of the presidential decree, pointing out that it focuses on uncovering the truth about “grave violations caused by the former regime,” which they say amounts to a free pass for opposition groups, including al-Sharaa’s own HTS. Human Rights Watch called out al-Sharaa for limiting the scope of the Commission to crimes committed by the al-Assad regime; twenty-one Syrian rights organizations signed a joint statement expressing concerns that the decree could “become a pretext to use part of the truth to construct a selective and partial form of ‘justice.’”

Petit, however, notes that “the Transitional Justice Commission, at least the head of it, is on record as saying that the exact wording is crimes ‘caused’ by the al-Assad regime,” he said. “So, for him, it includes all the crimes, even those committed by [ISIS] or those from various active groups because all the crimes committed—and with that, I actually agree with him—all the crimes committed in Syria were caused by the response of the regime in March 2011.”

From a transitional justice perspective, the difference between “caused” and “committed” is key, said Lucy Gaynor, a historian and doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam. “To me, it sounds like the work that that sentence is doing is really to enable both legal prosecution and a more reconciliation and peace-building aspect, rather than solely going after dry, judicial, legal justice.”

Gaynor, who is studying transitional justice mechanisms in Rwanda and Africa more broadly, cautioned that a poorly structured transitional justice process can do more harm than good. “There was this very simplistic assumption in the ’90s that transitional justice mechanisms, whatever they may be, are unquestionably good,” she said of the years when the modern concept of transitional justice was still in its infancy. “But if we look at the history, you have truth commissions and transitional justice mechanisms that are used to legitimize regimes. So, they’re not used for these allegedly pure humanitarian purposes. And I think a lot of criticism maybe stems from an awareness that transitional justice can be used illiberally.”

In 1974, Uganda’s Idi Amin passed a legal notice that set up a commission of inquiry into disappearances during the first three years following the military coup that brought him to power. According to the African Transitional Justice Hub, it conveniently found that Amin himself was not responsible, placing the blame on Ugandan security forces trained by the British and Israel. Later in the 1980s, Robert Mugabe, under pressure to investigate massacres carried out by his own military while he was prime minister of Zimbabwe, set up a commission of inquiry. Its findings were never made public.

The most recent example of a transitional justice project gone off the rails, and one that offers a cautionary tale for Syria, is Iraq: both the al-Assad dynasty and Saddam Hussein emerged out of the mid-twentieth-century militarism and pan-Arab nationalism of Ba’athist ideology. Instead of following the socialist and anti-imperialist arc Baathism’s founding intellectuals had hoped for, both countries fell under the spell of personality cults and devolved into totalitarian rule. Both operated elaborate systems of surveillance and control that ensured a minority group of elites retained their grip on power. And both extensively documented their crimes.

In Iraq, those documents were shuttled out of the country in what’s known as the Ba’ath Party Records affair and were held for years at the Hoover Institution in California, functionally out of reach of many Iraqi academics and researchers. Transitional justice in Iraq never gained traction. The de-Ba’athification program, led by the American-installed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), forced countless Sunni Iraqis into destitution and was directly responsible for the subsequent sectarian civil war and the eventual rise of ISIS.

Some activists and experts worry Syria may be heading in a similar direction. Mohammad al-Abdallah, the executive director of SJAC, points to what he calls a systematic “de-Alawization” program that has purged the Alawite minority from the bureaucracy and security services. The targeting of Alawites in a large-scale attack along the Mediterranean coast this past March, he claimed, was triggered by former regime soldiers, mostly Alawites who, after surrendering, had their military IDs confiscated and replaced by paper IDs. “That piece of paper was a lead to tell checkpoints you were actually a former soldier,” he said, “and that was the basis for abuses and humiliations on the checkpoints. [Regime] remnants claimed that was the reason they rebelled and took over those checkpoints and killed everybody on them.”

The attacks on checkpoints triggered a brutal response by al-Sharaa’s security forces that left more than a thousand civilians dead. On November 18, the al-Sharaa government began public trials for dozens of suspects involved in the coastal violence, including al-Assad loyalists blamed for instigating attacks, as well as members of the new government’s security apparatus accused of committing atrocities. Al-Abdallah is skeptical that the trials will meet the bar set by international norms governing transitional justice. He points to the almost apologetic tone of a July 22 press conference held by the al Sharaa-appointed fact-finding mission into the violence, which claimed the atrocities committed by government security forces were not systematic and resulted from “fear for their country and families of the return of the al-Assad regime.” A report from a separate, UN-led fact-finding mission published a month later found the exact opposite: the violence perpetrated by the security forces was indeed systematic.

Gaynor argues that the trials are just normal punitive justice being labelled as transitional justice. In the absence of a full reckoning of what happened, one that takes all of the evidence into consideration and treats all sides as potential perpetrators, a durable transition would be extremely challenging, if not impossible, says Petit. Al-Abdallah agrees and adds that Syria needs time to build those capacities and develop the appropriate legal frameworks.

One potential, and partial, solution, Petit told me, could be to set up an independent international tribunal similar to what was done for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. That would be the fast-track path, where the international community would, by and large, take over large parts of the transitional justice process. That seems unlikely in Syria: the interim government, and al-Sharaa in particular, appears determined to maintain some level of control over the process. An alternative might be a hybrid tribunal similar to East Timor and Sierra Leone, which would include both Syrians and internationals, “where there will be an element of national law and an element of international law and where different skills and experience and cultures will come together,” Petit said.

The fact that so many documents are being held by an organization led by non-Syrians—CIJA—isn’t helping either. Some experts have likened Wiley’s operation to a neo-colonial project that repeats what happened in Iraq and prevents Syrians themselves from pursuing justice as they see fit. “The shadow of that entire Iraqi heist hangs over the Syrian Civil War,” Uğur Ümit Üngor, a historian and sociologist at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide studies, told me. “They took the documents out. They said it’s unstable, there’s a civil war, people are burning, looting, stealing, selling, etcetera. Okay, fair enough. But some parts of Iraq were relatively stable. In the north, in the south, in many areas. Why didn’t they take the archives there? Why all the way to California? In CIJA’s case, why to [Europe]? There are some serious concerns there. CIJA is not sensitive enough to the anti-colonial critique. They just have this justice warrior mindset.”

Wiley sees it differently. He says that CIJA materials are accessible to Western law enforcement authorities and are not available to the general public, so as to protect the identities of perpetrators from reprisal killings, which, he says, are a serious problem in Syria at the moment.

Transitional justice norms, Gaynor countered, are defined by Western ideas of what justice should look like. “The concept developed out of the idea of a transition from authoritarian rule to Western-style democracy,” she told me. But not all transitions look the same. Most people would agree that it would be unreasonable to expect Syria to suddenly transform into a democracy so quickly after decades of brutal authoritarian rule followed by a devastating civil war. The transition needs a transitional stage.

But time is short. The spectre of another civil war is ever-present. Tensions between the interim government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the north over integrating the SDF into state institutions have already escalated into violent clashes. Al-Abdallah would like to see the IIIM expand its mandate to include offering institutional capacity-building inside Syria. But the organization still has not received permission from the new government to enter the country—an indication, perhaps, that al-Sharaa is concerned about the group’s non-discriminatory approach to justice, which could potentially implicate the new rulers themselves.

Some of Syria’s human rights defenders are losing hope that al-Sharaa and the groups under his control, which include violent jihadists, are interested in pursuing broad-based justice. Actions on the ground, they told me, suggest otherwise. “If they are serious, why not just say ‘all violations’?” Bassam Alahmad, the executive director at Syrians for Truth and Justice, said about the ambiguity in the decree setting up the transitional justice commission. “You can simply say that [there will be] justice for all victims.”