Thousands of documents and testimonies collected from the very first hours of the war in Syria in March 2011, and even well before, could form the future evidence of the crimes committed by the former Syrian regime. The Syria of the Assad dynasty, whose half-century reign came to an end on Sunday, December 8, is a history of massacres and torture on an industrial scale, documented with the icy precision of the Nazi system.

"The Syrian state itself has documented almost all its acts of torture, abuse and executions in its own archives," said Peter Bouckaert, director of the NGO Fortify Rights. "Syria was a bureaucratic killing machine under Bashar al-Assad," he continued. After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, Bouckaert collected dozens of documents for Human Rights Watch from the archives of the Libyan state's civilian and military intelligence services in Tripoli in 2011. Speaking on the phone in Berlin, Syrian lawyer Anwar Al-Bunni, who for a long time pleaded on behalf of opponents of the Syrian regime before he too had to go into exile in 2014, has already "asked those on the ground to collect the documents, the possible evidence, and to keep it all until we can give it to a judge or prosecutor."

In the most serious and extraordinary hours of wars and revolutions, the vanquished destroy the evidence of their crimes. Over the past 15 years, in part because international justice has become more prevalent than amnesty laws, the rebels tried to preserve this evidence. To open the drawers of the regime to measure its full horror and one day, perhaps, judge it.

"We already have indications that, hour by hour, potential evidence from the government's repressive apparatus is becoming available as fleeing regime agents hastily withdraw," said Robert Petit, head of the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), on Sunday. Created by the UN in 2017, the IIIM is tasked with bringing together the evidence collected by dozens of investigators since the start of the war in Syria in 2011, when NGOs, lawyers and opponents of the regime began collecting evidence of abuses.

Established in 2011, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria on Sunday called on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and other armed groups to "take great care not to disturb evidence of violations and crimes" by seizing prisons. Do not contaminate the Assad regime's crime scenes. According to the commission, "Throughout the war, families have put themselves in grave danger and paid exorbitant sums in bribes to corrupt State officials for news about their detained loved ones. Now, in videos just released from inside detention facilities, we see rooms with rows of shelves filled with these files."

You have 60.34% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.