Will Syrian war criminals be punished?

The gruesome video first made global headlines three years ago. At around six minutes long, the film clip, leaked by a former militiaman loyal to deposed Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, showed the massacre of at least 41 men.

Blindfolded, they were coaxed, pushed, or forced into a mass grave, where they fell onto the corpses of those who’d been killed before them, before being shot themselves.

The killings, filmed in 2013, took place in a suburb of Damascus called Tadamon and locals suspect many more could have been killed here in the same way by Assad regime forces. Thousands of Syrians are still missing after the war ended in late 2024.

Earlier this June, the Tadamon massacre, as it is now known, was back in the news again. Syria’s Committee for Civil Peace — set up to ease community divisions after violence directed at minorities in March — had released dozens of former Assad regime soldiers. Among them, a man called Fadi Saqr, who had previously led an Assad-loyalist paramilitary group known as the National Defense Forces in Tadamon. They were allegedly responsible for the massacre in the video.

Released in ‘interests of peace and reconciliation’

Syrians who had hoped for justice were incensed about the release of Saqr and others, and called for protests. Saqr New York Times”>told the New York Times he’d only been appointed to led the paramilitary after the Tadamon massacre, and the head of the Committee for Civil Peace told local media the decision to free Saqr and others had been made in the interests of peace and reconciliation. Saqr is apparently trying to persuade other former Assad regime supporters to back the new Syrian government.

“Achieving transitional justice in Syriais likely to take a long time,” says Alaa Bitar, a teacher from Idlib who lost his brother in the Assad regime’s prisons.

But releasing such well-known figures without some sort of clarification is only going to make victims upset and everyone else angry, he told DW. 

The controversy has raised further questions about the transitional justice process the new Syrian government has committed to.

In May, the head of Syria’s interim government, Ahmad al-Sharaa, issued two presidential decrees, number 19 and number 20, establishing two commissions: the National Commission for Transitional Justice, or NCTJ, and the National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared, or NCM.

The NCTJ came in for criticism almost immediately. The language of the decree seems to indicate the commission would mainly be going after Assad regime allies. They are responsible for the bulk of crimes committed during the civil war.

“The [NCTJ’s] mandate, as laid out in the decree, is troublingly narrow and excludes many victims,” Alice Autin of Human Rights Watch’s international justice program wrote shortly afterwards. Amnesty International and Syrian rights groups were similarly critical.

“By anchoring its mandate solely to one perpetrator group, the decree forecloses the possibility of investigating atrocities committed by other actors, some of whom are still active and influential in transitional institutions today,” Syrian human rights activist Mustafa Haid pointed out in a text for Justice Info, a Swiss-funded media outlet specializing in transitional justice issues, last week.

Critics note that crimes were committed on all sides, including by the extremist “Islamic State” group and anti-Assad rebel groups. Al-Sharaa previously led one of these, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

“Some view the focus on the crimes of the Assad regime as fair and long overdue,” Joumana Seif, a Syrian lawyer working with the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, wrote recently. “Others, however, have strongly criticized the apparent discrimination among victims.”

Transitional justice committee: no trust

Beyond problems with the objectives of the initial decree, since then there’s been a troubling lack of transparency and progress, observers say.

“In my opinion, the transitional justice process is not going well,” Mohammad al-Abdallah, director of the Washington-based Syrian Justice and Accountability Center, told DW. “The NCTJ is lagging behind. Just compare it to the missing persons commission, which was established by the same government on the same day. It’s more public, they’ve started technical discussions and are drafting a plan to search for the missing.”

Meanwhile the NCTJ is more secretive, al-Abdallah noted. “There’s no comprehensive plan or understanding about why the arrest — or non-arrest — of certain people is happening. Basically nothing is transparent and there’s very little trust.”

Of course, the mission to find missing Syrians is much easier for the state than achieving transitional justice, he argues.

“The humanitarian nature of this mission [to find the missing], the vast majority of the responsibility is on Assad’s security agencies, there’s no trial and no headache for the government,” al-Abdallah said. “It’s a win-win situation for them, while transitional justice is much harder.”

Of course, nobody is saying that the interim government can achieve justice in a matter of months or that they should arrest everybody, al-Abdallah continued.

And certainly, observers say, Syrians have different ideas of what justice could be.

“People do not necessarily want their suffering retold,” one participant at a recent workshop held in Damascus by the Syrians for Truth and Justice group pointed out. “Some seek material and moral compensation while others want to see executions in public squares.”

But what’s happening now could actually be making things worse.

Increase in vigilante justice

“The government’s slow response to pursuing criminals, coupled with the release of individuals accused of serious crimes — often without trial or explanation — has severely eroded public trust,” Haid Haid, a consulting fellow with the Middle East program at British think tank Chatham House wrote for London-based media outlet Al Majalla last week. “In the void left by these failures, many have turned to their own means of justice.”

Haid described a wave of assassinations in the southwestern city of Daraa as “a form of vigilante justice — long-standing scores settled with bullets instead of due process.”

In May, the Syrian Network for Human Rights documented 157 extrajudicial killings in Syria and experts suggest that around 70% of them are the result of some kind of vigilante justice or targeted killing. Often these involve former Assad regime supporters.

Al-Abdallah says he’s heard the government may conduct three or four major trials soon, after which there will be more focus on national peace building.

“Which is obviously important too,” he argues. “But to put peace-building in confrontation with justice, that’s a fake choice.”

Syrian lawyers have already argued that decisions about people like Fadi Saqr made by the Committee for Civil Peace infringe on the NCTJ’s jurisdiction.

“We want justice and peace, and we can do both,” al-Abdallah says. “You will not have a lasting peace if you don’t have some elements of justice. But the government doesn’t seem to be willing to accept that.”