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.
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........