A Criminal Justice Response to Assad Regime Criminality
William H. Wiley is the Executive Director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. Prior to the establishment of the CIJA, he served with the Canadian war crimes programme, the United Nations tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, and at the Iraqi High Tribunal during the trials of Saddam Hussein and other Baathist-era leaders.
The grim nature of the Syrian civil war, which commenced in 2011, is well enough known: hundreds of thousands killed, including tens of thousands tortured to death within the archipelago of Assad regime detention facilities; roughly half of the pre-war population of twenty-four million either displaced internally by the violence or fled abroad; and a great deal of urban and outlying infrastructure destroyed by endemic corruption and the Syrian Arab Air Force, aided and abetted by Iran and its proxy forces, and Russian fighter-bombers. This brutal attack against its own people by the Assad regime forces gave rise to regional and local power vacuums which were exploited by the so-called Islamic State – or Da’esh, in Arabic – which terrorised large swathes of Syria and Iraq, before turning its sights to Western targets. Notwithstanding the propensity of Da’esh to propagate its crimes brazenly, not least through social media to recruitment ends, the arch criminals of the Syrian war were Bashar Al-Assad and the many thousands of his fellow citizens who showed themselves prepared, for purely opportunistic reasons, to do the bidding of Assad and his lieutenants.
The Assad regime – of Hafez from 1970; and, after Hafez’s death from cancer in 2000, of his eldest surviving son, Bashar, a United Kingdom-trained ophthalmologist who has recently taken up residence in Moscow – was a power-political structure. Until 2011, it was held together by the dispersal of a great many carrots and the judicious use of stick; it was at no point, despite wartime mobilising narratives claiming otherwise, an Alawite (a sect of Shia Islam) project. Amounting to ten percent of the pre-war population, there were not enough Alawites in Syria to inflict such carnage upon the nation. As such, the regime’s perpetrators were drawn from the Alawite, mainstream Shia, Sunni, Kurdish, and Christian communities. As were the victims.
Where are the Perpetrators Today?
In any armed conflict marked by widespread criminality, the perpetrators are in the main drawn from the political, military, and security-intelligence structures of the belligerent parties. The Assad regime did not deviate from this pattern. What remains to be seen in the case of Syria is what has become of the thousands of perpetrators; in particular, those who served in any capacity within the military intelligence, air force intelligence, political security, and state security directorates – the overriding raison d’être of each being to neutralise threats, real and imagined, to a Syrian State whose interests were indistinguishable from those of the extended Assad family and its lackies. The short answer to the question posed here is that nobody knows precisely where the vast majority of perpetrators are, principally owing to the fact that there remains, as yet, a poor understanding of who served within the regime’s criminal structures, aside from those who held the highest ranks.
The aforementioned caveat noted, a number of broad observations are possible. First, most of the regime perpetrators remain somewhere in Syria; and, since the flight of Assad to Moscow on 8 December 2024, several thousand have been apprehended by forces now in control of the country. Amongst those detained to date are Mohammed al-Shaar, Minister of the Interior from 2011-2018 and a particularly nasty individual even by the deplorable standards of the late regime, and Brigadier Atef Najib, who, as head of Political Security in Daraa in 2011, oversaw the torture and murder of a handful of boys alleged to have written anti-Assad slogans. Notwithstanding his ostensibly high rank, Najib displayed the inclinations and intellect of a street thug. The children (or their remains) were returned to the families less fingernails and, in at least one case, testicles. The Arab Spring was by then reaching a crescendo elsewhere in the region, and the torture and murder of the children immediately led to non-violent protests in Daraa. The brutal response of the regime to the popular disquiet quickly gave rise to the country-wide conflagration which has – insha’allah – mercifully come to an end.
Other perpetrators are known to have fled abroad. Assad and a handful of his immediate family members are in Russia; a number of the closest lieutenants of the former dictator are in Benghazi, living under the protection of the Libyan warlord and Russian client, Khalifa Haftar; still more have taken up residence in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Amongst the lower-level suspects, roughly 2,000 are known to have made their way to the West over the years prior to the fall of the regime. How many unknown perpetrators are enjoying the fruits of life in one or another liberal democracy remains to be seen. At this juncture, it is recognised by those whose business it is to know such things that a small handful of perpetrators who fled Syria as the regime was collapsing have found their way to the Schengen Zone. Still others with the requisite financial means are seeking to avail themselves of the services of human smuggling networks of longstanding which specialise in the movement of migrants to Europe.
Mounting a Justice Response
The known and suspected perpetrators in Syria and the West can expect to face justice. Ahmad Al-Sharaa (aka Abu Mohammad al-Julani), Syria’s new Head of State, has signalled publicly his government’s commitment in this regard – no doubt with an eye to both principle and political necessity, given demands from the populace for a comprehensive response to Assad regime criminality. Likewise, Western States are obliged by their domestic laws and the body politic to act. Wherever they are found, justice can be expected to take several forms, given the juxtaposition of the immense number of perpetrators against finite resources.
In Syria, the criminal justice system has, for all intents and purposes, collapsed. The Assad regime’s investigative bodies and the related criminal courts were subordinated for more than half a century to the requirements of the dictatorship, such that they are today not fit for purpose. Recognising this reality, the interim Government of Syria is mooting the establishment of a special tribunal to hear the most egregious cases. Lower-level perpetrators might be dealt with in lower-level courts, once the latter have been re-established in accordance with the principle of the rule of law. At the same time, there is a clear awareness within the new administration that the bulk of Assad regime criminality will necessarily be dealt with by non-criminal justice means. To this end, the interim authorities are looking for guidance to the sort of truth and reconciliation processes established in the wake of war and mayhem elsewhere, for example, in Latin America and South Africa.
For the suspects who have made their way westwards, where sufficient evidence is available there is no alternative to criminal prosecution. Syria-related trials in European and North American courts, pursuant to the principle of universal jurisdiction for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide (i.e. in the absence of any need for a nexus between a given jurisdiction and the location at which the crimes were perpetrated), have been ongoing for a number of years. The collapse of the Assad regime, and the sudden availability of the totality of its records, will facilitate a great many more prosecutions in the jurisdictions to which the majority of Syrian suspects have found their way (e.g. Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden). Given the roughly 2,000 regime suspects identified to date, dealing with this backlog is going to place significant strain upon a number of European jurisdictions. And that is before consideration is given to the ramifications arising from any failure to interdict additional suspects before they make their way to the West.
Finally, the establishment of a dedicated (to the Syria war) international tribunal, along the lines of those created to address war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and elsewhere, should not be anticipated, principally for reasons of cost. In a similar vein, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has no jurisdiction over the Syria situation.
Available Evidence
Whilst some Assad regime records were looted or otherwise destroyed in the midst of the mayhem which characterised the closing chapter in the history of that mob, the overwhelming bulk of the relevant materials have survived; most especially, those generated by the key perpetrating institutions of the dictatorial State (again, the military, political, and most especially the security-intelligence structures). It is estimated here that the security-intelligence paperwork alone amounts to somewhere in the region of twenty to thirty million pages, which (at last count in January 2025) were spread between no fewer than 270 erstwhile former regime facilities.
Criminal investigations require that these materials be digitalised and uploaded to a centralised evidence-management system (EMS) supported by artificial intelligence software. The latter has advanced rapidly over the last decade, to the point that it can readily read, search, and translate Arabic language documentation to a remarkable degree of accuracy, be the images in typed or handwritten form. The completion of this necessary first technical step will facilitate the execution of a number of priority tasks; not least, the compiling of a roster of all erstwhile Assad regime security-intelligence personnel for suspect tracking purposes, and the running through the EMS of the names of all suspects known currently to have made their way to the West. The digitalisation of the regime materials is likewise required for the building of complex criminal cases against higher-level perpetrators. Files of this nature rest heavily upon contextual evidence concerning the institutions in which such suspects held command appointments.
The prosecution of persons alleged to have perpetrated international crimes is based invariably and ideally upon documentary evidence of this nature; that is, upon paperwork generated by perpetrators and the institutions within which they served. Such was the case at the post-Second World War Nuremberg trials, and this approach has characterised successful prosecutions since the re-emergence of international criminal law practice upon the establishment of the Yugoslavia Tribunal in 1993. Witness testimony is a secondary matter, to the extent that it is very often fraught – bedevilled by imperfect memories and untruths – such that witness testimony is, wherever possible, used by prosecutors only to fill gaps in the documentary record or otherwise to assist with the interpretation of same. For this reason, so-called insider witnesses (i.e. individuals who themselves served in the perpetrating structures relevant to a given trial) are preferred by prosecutors to crime-base witnesses (i.e. victims), the latter understandably possessing, save in rare instances, little or no understanding of those most responsible for their suffering.
A Blueprint for Syria
Assad regime-related criminal trials concluded to date in Western jurisdictions have, to a greater or lesser degree, all been informed by the archival holdings of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a non-profit registered in The Hague. The CIJA was founded by Alistair Harris and William Wiley in 2012 as the Syrian Commission for Justice and Accountability (SCJA), on the basis of a project initiated in Syria by Harris and Wiley in 2011, with the support of the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office (as it then was). From the start, the purpose of the undertaking was to collect prima facie evidence in Syria, such that the materials might inform domestic and international criminal prosecutions. Public advocacy has never been part of the CIJA’s mission, although the organisation’s efforts have nonetheless attracted a good deal of attention from Russian disinformation networks, including proxy actors and useful idiots spread across the West – a depressing number of whom are resident in the United Kingdom. An unsuccessful Russian State cyberattack upon the CIJA systems is a matter of public record.
Over the course of the late war, the SCJA, and later the CIJA, maintained up to forty personnel in Syria. Such remains the case today. Deployed CIJA personnel have always been directed from CIJA headquarters in Europe, where collection efforts are brought together with sophisticated analytical, evidence management, and suspect tracking capacity. The crowning achievement of the Syria-deployed personnel has been the collection of over 1.2m pages of Assad regime records, all of them digitalised and searchable. These materials remain housed at CIJA headquarters in Europe, and it is hoped by the CIJA that this evidence, which has always been held by the Commission in trust for the Syrian people, might be returned to Syria at the earliest possible opportunity.
Since 2015, the CIJA has received up to 200 formal requests for assistance annually from Western-based public authorities, in the main domestic investigative and prosecutorial bodies, relating to persons suspected of having perpetrated crimes in Syria from 2011. The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 led the CIJA leadership to conclude that the end of the initial investigative process had been reached, albeit a great many years later than had been anticipated a decade and more ago. In light of the recent political transformation in Syria, the CIJA’s focus has turned to engaging with the interim government of that State, on the basis of lessons learned by the CIJA in Syria and in the midst of other conflicts (e.g. Ukraine, Iraq, Libya and Myanmar), in a manner consistent with existing sanctions arrangements, the sensitivities of the CIJA’s donors, all of whom are Western States, and the CIJA’s core mission, which remains the provision of support to law-enforcement and judicial authorities situated in the West. The overriding objective of the CIJA’s engagement in Syria was and continues to be that the hard-pressed people of that nation might see a greater measure of criminal justice than has heretofore been possible.
Final Remarks
Over the next two years, observers and supporters of criminal justice accountability can expect to see a significant uptick in Syria-related criminal prosecutions in both the West and in Syria. Concomitantly, a measure of relief will be offered to the families of the missing as the fate of the disappeared is determined with certainty from the documentary record, and, in many cases, their remains recovered.
The necessary starting point for all Syria-related justice initiatives, not least those falling squarely into the realm of criminal justice, is the digital capture and exploitation through analytical processes of the immense volumes of paperwork abandoned by Assad regime forces and their allies as they disintegrated in the face of the final opposition offensive. Whilst efforts to proffer the Syrian people a greater measure of justice, which they so richly deserve and need, have taken longer than anticipated, the Syrian people and their supporters may now rest assured that the most heinous criminals will be prosecuted – and, where the evidence warrants, punished accordingly.
*title image shows one of the archive rooms containing Assad regime documents at CIJA HQ in Europe.
The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not necessarily of the RSAA.
