After a decade of war and 500,000 dead, the corrupt and murderous Assad dynasty has finally fallen. Good riddance. Syria’s former dictator, Bashar al-Assad, deserves to live out his remaining days in a prison cell in Damascus or The Hague, not a luxury apartment in Moscow. My new year’s wish is that he faces the justice that he denied to so many others.

I’ve spent more than a decade working on the Syrian crisis, including human rights advocacy with the UN Security Council in New York. I remember the hope in early 2011 when the first bold demonstrations in Daraa quickly grew and engulfed the entire country. In March it will be 14 years since Assad responded to those peaceful protests with tanks and bullets. Bashar, who inherited the presidency from his father, chose to burn Syria to the ground rather than loosen his necrotic grip on power.

Syria’s former dictator, Bashar al-Assad, deserves to live out his remaining days in a prison cell in Damascus or The Hague, not a luxury apartment in Moscow.”

Working with Syrian human rights defenders and other NGOs in New York at that time, we did our best to expose what was unfolding on the streets of Damascus, Hama and elsewhere. For these efforts I experienced the sneering condescension of Bashar Jaafari, Syria’s then Ambassador to the United Nations. No atrocity was too heinous, no evidence too overwhelming, for Jaafari to not concoct some dubious denial. Not even the revolting August 2013 sarin gas attack on civilians in Ghouta, where more than 400 children were among the victims, could shake his loyalty to Assad. Jaafari denounced some of our humanitarian colleagues as terrorists and tried to blame the Ghouta attack on the victims, saying they may have been sacrificed in an attempt to discredit the government.

Assad fled to Moscow on 8 December, abandoning those who had committed crimes against humanity in their attempt to keep him in the presidential palace. It was only then that Jaafari gave an interview where he suddenly denounced the “corrupt mafia” running Syria – a mafia he faithfully served and whose atrocities he defended in front of the UN Security Council and the world until the very last moment.

Since Assad’s overthrow a few weeks ago I have mostly been thinking about those brave activists, “citizen journalists,” White Helmets and others who did not live to see a free Syria. Far too many of them are no longer with us because they were killed in airstrikes, or disappeared into detention, never to be heard from again. I remember sitting for a TV interview on the day that Aleppo fell to Assad’s forces in December 2016 and realizing that every person I knew in that city was now displaced, missing or dead.

On the same day that Assad fled, the rusty doors of Sednaya prison were finally forced open. Sednaya is a place that Amnesty International once described as a “human slaughterhouse.” I texted with Noura Aljizawi, an exiled Syrian activist friend from Homs who is today a member of CVT’s board of directors, barely able to fathom what was unfolding.

Branch 251 in Damascus was also liberated that Sunday night. It was there that a guard once told a prisoner, Hussein Ghreir, that “I will take you behind the sun, where even the flies will not know where you are.” All sides of Syria’s bitter civil war committed atrocities, but only Assad had the capacity to perpetrate them on an industrial scale. Our colleagues at the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) have documented that between March 2011 and December 2024, government forces tortured 15,102 people to death, including 190 children. Not even ISIS, whose cruelty is legendary, detained and tortured children with such regularity.

Jana, a 10-year-old girl, was abducted off the street by Assad’s security forces and kept in an underground dungeon for three weeks in an attempt to force her father to surrender. While in detention Jana witnessed another child being beaten to death and experienced unspeakable horrors. Her family became refugees and she eventually made her way to our clinic in Amman, Jordan.

Jana, a 10-year-old girl, was abducted off the street by Assad’s security forces and kept in an underground dungeon for three weeks in an attempt to force her father to surrender.”

Jana is just one of more than 1,200 traumatised Syrian children who have sought clinical services from CVT. But over 13 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes since 2011 and 6.4 million have fled to another country, making Syrians the largest refugee population in the world.  

Inaction at the UN Security Council, the result of multiple vetoes by Russia and China, emboldened Assad and other perpetrators. The price of international failure has not just been mass graves and millions of refugees. It has also led to a global weakening of human rights, international humanitarian law and principles like the “responsibility to protect.” Today, vulnerable civilians in Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza are paying the price.

But it is not too late to bend the arc of history. The Syrian people remain thirsty for justice. Thankfully, the catalogue of evidence collected by SNHR and other organizations, like the UN-mandated International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism for Syria, is immense.

But it is not too late to bend the arc of history. The Syrian people remain thirsty for justice.”

Tracking down perpetrators and conducting trials is expensive. The international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda ran for years and cost $2.2 billion and $1.3 billion respectively. Hybrid courts in Sierra Leone and Cambodia were cheaper but still amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. But accountability will cost less than another season of death and dictatorship across the Levant. And the struggle to end impunity is part of a wider battle for Syria’s future that the world cannot afford to lose.

Assad is now in Moscow under the protection of President Vladimir Putin. But there is a long and sordid history of exiled dictators and fugitive war criminals being handed over by their former patrons. Liberia’s Charles Taylor, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosovic, and Chad’s Hissène Habré all ended their days in handcuffs. Putin desperately wants to retain Russia’s naval base at Tartus, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. Is it worth more to him than Assad’s luxurious exile?

I still mourn for all the inspiring Syrian colleagues and friends we lost over the past decade. We should not rest until we see Assad and his accomplices in a courtroom. Not for revenge, but because it is only through upholding universal human rights and pursuing justice for atrocities that the United States and the entire international community will be able to redeem itself from under Syria’s rubble.

About The Author

Dr. Simon Adams is President & CEO at CVT

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