Syrian children and adults receive treatment for a suspected chemical attack at a makeshift clinic in the rebel-held village of al-Shifuniyah in the Eastern Ghouta region of Syria on Feb. 25, 2018. Hamza al-Ajweh/AFP via Getty Image
Article initially published by Foreign Policy on December 8, 2024 and written by: Annie Sparrow and Ken Roth
One can only rejoice in the demise of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Much is uncertain about Syria’s future, but there is no question that the 24 years of Assad’s rule, preceded by 30 years under his comparably brutal father, Hafez al-Assad, have been utter hell for the Syrian people. No crime was too heinous for the Assads as they did whatever it took to retain power. Few governments worldwide have been as ruthless.
The catalogue of Bashar al-Assad’s atrocities quickly transcends the toolbox of a run-of-the-mill dictator. It is deeply moving, if horrifying, to see people emerge from his prisons after decades in custody. In most countries, families can learn about their loved ones in detention, but few people departed from Assad’s worst prisons, leaving the inmates completely isolated. Their families had no idea if they were still alive.
Many were not. A Syrian military police photographer who adopted the code name “Caesar” had the unenviable task of documenting the bodies of Syrians who had been executed or tortured to death. (Even dictatorships want assurance that their orders are being carried out.) In August 2013, Caesar defected, taking with him tens of thousands of photographs showing at least 6,786 bodies of people who had died in Syrian government custody. Most had been detained by just five intelligence agency branches in Damascus, their bodies sent to at least two military hospitals in Damascus between May 2011, as Assad crushed an initially peaceful uprising against his rule, and when Caesar fled Syria.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) documented 157,634 people who had been arrested between March 2011 and August 2024 and who remained in custody. Many had been forcibly disappeared. These included 5,274 children and 10,221 women. For some, we will only now begin to learn of their fates.
Assad’s slaughter was not limited to prisons. Having inherited his father’s chemical weapons program, he was a rare leader who used these banned weapons against his own people. (The only other ones in recent history were Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who used chemical weapons in his 1988 genocide against Iraqi Kurds, known as the “Anfal” campaign, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who deployed the nerve agent Novichok against selected dissidents.) In August 2013, for example, Syrian forces fired rockets filled with sarin gas on Ghouta, a rural area east of Damascus that at the time was held by the armed opposition. The attack killed an estimated 1,466 people, mostly women and children.
Under threat of military intervention after then-U.S. President Barack Obama had declared that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line,” Assad in September 2013 agreed to surrender his chemical weapons. However, because chlorine has legitimate uses, the government was not required to eliminate its chlorine stockpiles. Between 2014 and 2018, the Syrian military periodically used chlorine as a chemical weapon, even though such use violates the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria had ratified. In April 2014 alone, there were 10 attacks in which chlorine was dropped on civilians in villages in northern Syria. An April 2018 chlorine attack on Douma in rural Damascus killed 43 people. Moreover, the government secretly kept a stash of sarin, which it used most lethally in an April 2017 attack on Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province, killing at least 90 people.
(U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday mocked Obama for not having used military force to enforce his red line. However, when Trump, along with Britain and France, responded to the Douma attack by bombing three suspected Syrian chemical weapons facilities in April 2018, it “prompted defiant celebrations in Damascus … as it became clear that the limited attack posed no immediate threat to President Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power and would likely have no impact on the trajectory of the Syrian war,” as the Washington Post reported at the time.)
Horrible as chemical weapons are, their death toll was dwarfed by conventional bombing. The Syrian air force notoriously dropped “barrel bombs” on residential neighborhoods in parts of the country controlled by the armed opposition. Barrel bombs were improvised weapons: oil drums filled with explosives and metal fragments that were dropped without guidance from helicopters, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverized neighborhoods, destroyed entire buildings, and left broad strips of death and destruction. One of the most dreaded sounds of the conflict was the “swish-swish-swish” of the barrels as they tumbled, with people below waiting horrible seconds to learn whether they would survive.
When Russia joined the conflict in September 2015 to prop up Assad’s regime, the Syrian-Russian alliance attacked more precisely. Jets targeted hospitals, schools, markets, and apartment buildings—deliberate war-crime attacks on civilians and civilian institutions—with the aim of depopulating regions in the hope of facilitating follow-up ground attacks on the rebel forces who lived there. The devastation was so bad that many compared the destruction of eastern Aleppo to Russia’s decimation of Grozny during the Second Chechen War. Russian and Syrian government airstrikes have killed more than 100,000 Syrians since 2011, according to SNHR.
The government’s bombing and persecution forced more than 14 million Syrians to flee their homes, half abroad and half within Syria—more than any other country. That represents some two-thirds of Syria’s prewar population.
Assad also used starvation and deprivation to force opposition-held areas to surrender. In eastern Ghouta and eastern Aleppo, Syrian forces imposed a total siege. Even when humanitarian agencies occasionally were allowed to deliver medical supplies, the Syrian military would “delete”—or ban—much of what was most urgently needed, a blatant violation of the legal duty even in time of war to allow humanitarian access to people in need. Gradually, one by one, these areas succumbed, with occupants given the “choice” to take their chances under Assad’s rule or to board the government’s dreaded green buses for a one-way trip to Idlib in northwestern Syria, the last area under the rule of the armed opposition. Most chose Idlib.
Idlib borders Turkey, making a siege impossible, but the Syrian government, with Russia’s help, tried to limit humanitarian access even there. They used a deeply disputed ruling by U.N. lawyers, backed by Secretary-General António Guterres, that cross-border humanitarian aid required either the consent of the Assad government or an increasingly difficult-to-obtain U.N. Security Council resolution. Over time, the Russian and Syrian governments limited aid there. Meanwhile, the U.S. and other governments gradually reduced the aid they supplied, overburdened by new crises in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan and conscious that the Syrian government was siphoning off large amounts of the aid delivered through Damascus.
With Assad and his henchmen now on the run, the prospect of bringing them to justice for these mass atrocities is no longer theoretical. There are two options.
The first is for national prosecutors in countries outside Syria to file charges under the concept of universal jurisdiction, which allows any authorized national court to address certain of the most heinous crimes, including torture as well as the war crimes of attacking civilians and weaponizing health care. Several governments have already initiated such prosecutions, mainly for lower-level officials who happened to be in custody because they had fled Syria. For example, a German court convicted a Syrian military intelligence officer for overseeing a torture center and sentenced him to life in prison.
France has also charged Assad for the August 2013 sarin attack on eastern Ghouta. As a sitting head of state, Assad had arguably enjoyed immunity for such national prosecutions under a controversial International Court of Justice ruling. Having now been deposed, he no longer enjoys any such protection.
The second is for International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan to file charges. There is no question that Assad’s atrocities are worthy of ICC attention; Khan’s challenge has been jurisdiction. Syria never joined the court, and a U.N. Security Council effort in 2014 to confer jurisdiction was vetoed by Russia and China.
However, facing a similar challenge in Myanmar, Khan pursued a novel legal theory, obtaining jurisdiction by focusing on the Myanmar army’s mass forced deportation of Rohingya to Bangladesh, which is an ICC member. He is now seeking an arrest warrant for Myanmar’s junta leader. Despite the considerable global demands on him, Khan should use a similar theory to obtain jurisdiction over senior Syrian officials, including Assad, for their atrocities that drove hundreds of thousands of Syrians into Jordan, which is also an ICC member.
Such prosecutions are important not only as a measure of respect for the victims and an acknowledgment of their plight. They are also a critical tool for the future. We can only guess how Syria’s new rulers will act. Will they fall back on their jihadi roots, or will they abide by their recent more tolerant rhetoric? Establishing a precedent of accountability for the atrocities of the past would be a significant way for the international community to signal expectations for the future.
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