On Dec. 8, when opposition forces stormed the gates of Sednaya, the infamous Damascus prison dubbed Syria’s “human slaughterhouse,” the long-reported horrors of Bashar al-Assad’s 24-year regime became undeniable. Videos captured hundreds of detainees emerging from their months or years spent in darkness—some too frail to stand, others unable to recall their names. In one video, reportedly recorded at Sednaya, a young child, silent and wide-eyed, stood among a group of female detainees as opposition forces yelled, “Bashar has fallen.”
Sednaya was not only a prison, but also an archive of horror. Files containing the names, dates, and details of the detained, the disappeared, and the dead were strewn across the floor—an exhaustive record of the bureaucratic machinery that enabled systematic torture, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings left behind in the wake of Assad’s quick fall.
These documents, and others like them, are key pieces of evidence in understanding the mechanisms of state-sponsored atrocity, identifying the perpetrators responsible, and—most importantly—delivering justice to the victims and survivors of one of the most brutal regimes in modern history. But without rapid and coordinated efforts to preserve them, the documents risk being lost—along with the opportunity to deliver long-overdue answers to the families of the disappeared as well as, in the long term, accountability.
Outside Sednaya in the days following Assad’s fall, crowds of anxious families rushed toward the prison, many sifting through discarded papers, overturned filing cabinets, and scattered documents in the desperate hope of uncovering news of their loved ones.
A report released this year by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a human rights organization, estimated that at least 100,000 people were detained and forcibly disappeared across Syria in the past 13 years. For decades, Sednaya had become synonymous with disappearance, a black hole where thousands were swallowed without a trace. For families, the papers discovered there in recent days offered a glimmer of hope and closure: answers to questions that had haunted them for years and evidence of what had happened behind the prison’s walls.
But this was not only limited to Sednaya. As opposition forces swept through detention centers, military bases, and security hubs across the country, they uncovered evidence that laid bare the inner workings of Assad’s regime. In a former security branch building located 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) south of Damascus, videos posted by local journalists showed rows of cabinets densely packed with files, reportedly containing surveillance reports on entire families from the Druze-majority village of As-Suwayda.
These documents offer a glimpse into the grip of Syria’s secret police state, where a vast web of informants, security agencies, and surveillance systems infiltrated nearly every corner of civilian life and maintained Assad’s climate of fear and control.
Throughout modern history, records such as those uncovered in Syria have often played a pivotal role in holding perpetrators of mass atrocities to account. At Nuremberg, Nazi documentation revealed the planning behind crimes against humanity and became crucial evidence for convicting high-ranking officials. In Cambodia, prison logs from the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng detention center were used decades later to convict key figures of serious crimes perpetrated during the genocide.
More recently, the fall of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant in 2017 demonstrated how such perpetrator documentation can be instrumental in dismantling systems of terror. Documents seized on the terrorist group’s battlefields helped investigators to understand the its internal structure, financial networks, jurisprudence, and crimes. This documentation served as critical evidence in trials in Iraq and third-party states.
The significance of these types of documents for Syria’s future cannot be overstated. Mohammed al-Abdullah—the executive director at the Syria Justice and Accountability Center, which has been working on the collection and preservation of evidence for more than a decade—highlighted their critical role during an interview with Foreign Policy.
“These documents contain transfer orders, details of interrogations, and several key points. These documents allow us to know who commissioned what crimes.” he said, adding, “But the first and most important role is to help clarify the fate of detainees, especially for those who have not yet been found.”
For more than a decade, victims and survivors in Syria have faced a wall of impunity, their calls for justice thwarted by a combination of geopolitical deadlock, the international community’s lack of inertia, and the Assad regime’s grip on power. Throughout this time, Syrian civil society organizations—most notably the White Helmets—have worked tirelessly to document atrocities, often risking their lives. These groups have persisted in the collection of testimonies, gathering evidence, and fighting to preserve the truth in the face of well-funded state sponsored denialism campaigns that aimed to discredit evidence and silence survivors.
A prominent example of this is the chemical weapons attack in Douma on April 7, 2018, after which coordinated efforts by regime forces and their allies sought to cast doubt on the origins of the attack and the reasons behind the deaths of at least 43 people, despite overwhelming evidence suggesting that the attack had been carried out by the state. In early December, as Douma was liberated, families of the deceased were able to reveal that they had been threatened by intelligence officers into giving false testimonies about what happened.
The work of Syrian civil society organizations has been indispensable to the United Nations’ International, Impartial, and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), a UN body established in 2016 to collect, analyze, and share evidence of international crimes committed in Syria.
The IIIM has played a critical role in bridging the gap between Syria’s grassroots documentation efforts and international justice systems. With no direct access to crime scenes in Syria or government-held records, the IIIM has relied heavily on the contributions of Syria’s civil society organizations to provide evidence of atrocities, survivor testimonies, and knowledge with regard to the inner workings of Assad’s regime.
However, the sheer magnitude of this task is staggering. Unlike the records left behind by the Islamic State or even the Khmer Rouge, these documents are not the remnants of a short-lived terror campaign. They represent nearly 25 years of oppressive rule under Bashar al-Assad, built on the legacy of his father’s brutal regime—including nearly 14 years of documented crimes committed during the conflict that began in 2011.
These crimes include chemical weapon attacks, mass torture, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, land seizures, and the systematic displacement of millions. The scope of this documentation—spanning decades of state-sponsored violence—is unparalleled, and Syrian civil society groups alone cannot shoulder the burden.
“These documents represent the possibility of closure for the families of the missing, and we now have opportunities for justice and accountability that were not there two weeks ago,” said Robert Petit, the head of the U.N.’s IIIM for Syria, in an interview with Foreign Policy.
A coordinated global effort is required to preserve these records, both for long-term accountability and immediate answers for families and survivors. Syrian organizations are capable, experienced, and deeply connected to the affected communities, but they are also resource-constrained and overwhelmed by the scale of what lies ahead. To strengthen their capacity, immediate international support should be provided; this could include funding; training programs; technical assistance; and tools to digitize, catalogue, and secure the vast volume of evidence now coming to light.
“There is so much work to be done, and that is evidenced by the many needs and demands for justice and truth that have yet to be met,” said Veronica Bellintani, the head of the International Law Support Unit at the Syrian Legal Development Program. “But there needs to be sustainable and long-term funding directed specifically to Syrian NGOs, rather than dispersed to external actors lacking Syria-specific knowledge,” she added. “This funding must also be flexible and enable Syrians to develop Syrian-led responses, rather than being forced to follow preimposed scripts of what justice and the future of Syria should look like.”
Simultaneously, the IIIM must be strengthened to coordinate these efforts and ensure that the evidence collected meets the standards of international criminal law. These efforts must also take into account current or future Syrian criminal and procedure laws to ensure the broadest possible usability and admissibility. Without this support, there is a real risk that this historic opportunity for justice could be lost, leaving Syrian victims and survivors to continue their fight for answers in the shadows of impunity.
Two immediate priorities are securing the sites where this documentation is held as well as the establishment of mobile preservation units that are equipped with digitization technology and staffed by forensic documentation experts. These units must deploy rapidly to high-risk sites, such as detention centers and former security branches, where documents are at a greater risk of destruction or tampering.
In addition, digital repositories must be established to store both scanned hard copy documents as well as entire information systems—such as electronic databases, servers, hard drives, laptops, mobile devices, and email systems—into a digital evidence management system modeled on the blueprint of that already in place at the IIIM, in order to handle the sheer scale of this material.
Such a system would require investments in physical and computing infrastructure to scale up digitization and processing capacity, and it should include tools for cataloguing, metadata tagging, and cross-referencing documents to identify patterns and links between crimes and perpetrators.
Most importantly, Syrian expertise must remain central to this process. Local knowledge is indispensable for decoding the regime’s bureaucratic systems, identifying key personnel implicated in crimes, and contextualizing the evidence.
“Syrian civil society has been until now, and will continue to be, absolutely essential to these efforts,” said Petit, of the IIIM, adding, “The IIIM does not have the resources to be everywhere at once—but it doesn’t need to be. By coordinating efforts with civil society actors and others, the work can be divided into manageable tasks, with each operating in their area of expertise. Inclusive justice for Syria will require this kind of collaboration.”
The transitional government and local actors—including groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that currently controls key territories—must recognize the preservation of these records as a national priority as they take on the duties of governance. Their cooperation will make or break the prevention of unauthorized access or destruction of evidence, beyond the damage that has been witnessed so far. Foreign governments must also recognize this priority and offer both diplomatic backing and practical support to safeguard these records as vital tools for truth and justice efforts.
Agreements between Syrian civil society organizations and local authorities should be established to facilitate the secure transfer of documents to trusted repositories and ensure that preservation efforts are maintained for use in fair and independent criminal proceedings conducted by competent domestic courts in Syria and in third states.
Lastly, transparency and accountability mechanisms must be put in place to ensure that these processes serve both justice goals and the immediate needs of victims and survivors.
Documents are often the last line of defense against denial and revisionism. In the hands of families searching for closure, these records provide answers. In the hands of future prosecutors, they deliver justice. And in the hands of the global community, they reaffirm our shared commitment to the principle that no regime, no matter how powerful, is beyond accountability.
To act now is to affirm that no perpetrator, no matter how powerful, is beyond the reach of justice. This must be done to honor the sacrifices of those who risked their lives to preserve the truth and to ensure that the voices of victims and survivors are not drowned out by silence. Syria’s evidence is not just a record of the past; it is a promise to the future—a promise that the world will not forget, and it will not turn away.
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