When rebels took power in Syria two years ago, Othman began to hunt for the man who had broken all his teeth. He could see his former captor’s face in his mind, knew the way his body moved as he meted out electric shocks. But he needed to know the name of the man who had tortured him in the air force prison.
Othman, who gave only his first name, tracked another former officer from the prison down in a small Shia town. “He was the one who gave us his complete CV: name, description, where he lives,” says the former rebel, now an industrial painter, from the Bayada neighbourhood in the central city of Homs.
He let the officer go and rode to the hills northwest of Homs in pursuit of the man who had abused him. “We went to his village. We tried to catch him,” he says. “If I caught him, I would not leave him, I would not hand him over to the security services. I would hand him over to the graveyard.”
His deep sense of aggrievement is shared by many ordinary Syrians desperate to see justice done for the crimes committed under the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator who ruled for almost a quarter of a century until he was ousted in 2024. The challenge is how to find accountability without tearing the country apart.
Other countries, such as Chile and South Africa, have struggled to balance truth, reconciliation and justice after a regime change; in Syria, where the judiciary is broken and many cities are still in ruins, the task is yet harder.
Damascus’s new leaders say they are anxious to turn the page on 14 years of one of the world’s most brutal civil wars.
Mass trials may be impossible to hold fairly and the risk of sectarian strife is rarely far away after the shift of power to the country’s Sunni majority from the Assad regime, which was dominated by his Alawite minority. The lesson of neighbouring Iraq, which was plunged into strife after the 2003 US invasion precipitated the fall of Saddam Hussein, is all too clear.
At the same time, the new government, led by former Sunni Islamist militants, know that if the people who suffered under Assad do not feel that justice is being served, they may take matters into their own hands. Civil unrest would weaken the new state at a moment when it is seeking international legitimacy and threaten the country’s fragile transition out of the Assad era.
The nature of the former regime meant that many victims experienced violence at the hands of people from the same town or who seemed familiar.
Yet in the two years since the new leadership took power, there have been few trials, and prosecutions have mainly been limited to those who held the most senior positions within the Assad regime.
Periodic sweeps of lower-level regime loyalists have resulted in an incomplete round-up of perceived perpetrators. About 5,000 remain in detention with little progress in trials, which has deepened mistrust in Alawite communities.
“The challenge is that your average person ... would feel a sense of reparation when these big names are arrested and tried,” says Zahra al-Barazi, vice-president of Syria’s National Transitional Justice Commission, “but the person living opposite them who is an informant is actually what creates the bigger issues.”
Since the authorities did not seem to be going after his abusers, Othman sought retribution himself. But by the time he arrived at his alleged torturer’s villa at the edge of town, he found it empty. The officer was said to have fled to Lebanon.
The aliases of others who had abused him during his two stretches as a political prisoner rushed through his head. Friends in the new security forces offered him tips. He would drive through the Alawite districts of Homs, scanning for a face he recognised.
Still, not a single person responsible for his pain has been caught. He says: “I feel pressure closing in on me.”
Haunted
At the end of 2024, a rebel offensive led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former militant who led a group that had once been affiliated with al-Qaeda, advanced from the north towards Damascus. Assad’s army folded; its ranks dropped their weapons and deserted.
In a matter of days, the regime’s detention facilities closed and its vast web of informants disintegrated. Details of the regime’s crimes poured into view as prisons were opened and mass graves investigated. Many regime members fled, including to Lebanon. Assad and his family escaped to Moscow. But others seemed to melt back into obscurity in Syria.
Sharaa was named as president. Disparate rebel factions, including Islamists with hardline, anti-minority views, began integrating into the new state forces. The rebels who were suddenly in charge focused on keeping basic stability in the shattered nation. Faced with immense competing priorities, progress on justice has been slow.
For the residents of Deir al-Asafir, a village in the countryside of Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, painful questions remain unanswered. During the civil war, the area was subjected to a five-year siege. Trapped in Ghouta, Sherifa Hezbar learned to eat grass and bitter corn, and to take higher ground when she smelled the chlorine of a nearby chemical attack.
When rebels in Ghouta surrendered in 2018, Hezbar and her family left on green buses for regime-run shelters. There was fresh food there. Hezbar recalls that her husband, Bassel, cried when he realised their daughter, raised in the siege, did not know how to peel an orange.
Shortly after they arrived, Assad’s forces took Bassel from the shelter to prison. More than 100 people from Deir al-Asafir were similarly detained, according to the European Institute of Peace. In total, 215 people from the village remain forcibly disappeared, according to a union of their relatives. Hezbar never received official confirmation, but she believes Bassel probably died in detention.
Now, Hezbar is part of a Coalition of families of the missing in Eastern Ghouta. They want the truth, reparations, and cards for their children certifying their parent was a martyr, a matter of honour. They also demand that those responsible – many of whom they say they knew personally – be held to account.
“I’m in a constant battle with my son ... trying to keep him in check,” Hezbar says, adding that her son was livid each time he saw a former regime collaborator in the village who had taken their land. “I’m trying to convince him that there’s a state that will bring justice for him, let it take its course, okay, and if the state doesn’t act? He will repeat [the violence].”
Even before the rebels took Damascus, Sharaa was aware of the very real threat of civil unrest, according to four people who described meetings with him during the preparation for and aftermath of the offensive.
Wary of triggering a sectarian conflict, Sharaa argued that only the most senior figures and those behind the worst massacres should be tried, the people say.
The great majority of those who staffed the regime’s security apparatus and fought in its affiliated militias would not face criminal investigation. Some bureaucrats and public employees would even be kept. People would have to move on.
Syria’s new leaders say mass trials could be felt as collective punishment of Alawites. “The mistakes of Iraq” loomed large, says Ibrahim Khalil al-Hassoun, head of the ministry of justice’s Higher Judicial Institute.
After the 2003 invasion that helped bring that country’s Shia majority back to power, a US-designed process disbanded the army and culled people from the state based on their membership in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
It disproportionately affected the former Iraqi dictator’s Sunni sect and led to a sense that Sunnis were collectively guilty, deepening sectarian grievances. In the years that followed, Iraq was torn apart by social and political conflict, the rise of Sunni Islamist militancy and armed Shia factions aligned to Iran.
Sharaa disbanded Assad’s security forces, mirroring what the US did in Iraq, and many former state employees were dismissed, leaving huge numbers of Alawites out of work.
Regardless of his Syrian government’s rhetoric of inclusion, a streak of Sunni revanchism has manifested itself in violence since it took power, from insults to evictions to killings – deepening mistrust and fear among minorities.
In the first year of Sharaa’s rule, tensions twice turned into full-blown sectarian slaughter. In March 2025, an attack by Assad loyalists in Syria’s coastal Alawite heartland triggered sectarian violence that resulted in the deaths of about 1,400 people, mainly civilians. An investigation by the UN Syria Commission of Inquiry found that massacres were carried out in part by members of armed groups under the control of, or nominally affiliated with, Sharaa’s government.
A few months later, in July, clashes between Druze militias, Bedouin fighters and government forces left 1,700 dead, according to the UN. The majority of those killed were from the Druze minority.
Unfurnishing
Distrust between neighbours is acute in Homs, the bastion of a 2011 uprising against Assad and the site of some of the former regime’s worst brutality.
When Tarek Baderkhan, a former activist in those 2011 protests, returned to his home in the Sunni-majority Khaldieh district in 2025, having been displaced for a decade, he found the furniture was gone, the doors were missing and the light switches were stripped.
Like the rest of the neighbourhood, his home had been subject to “taafish” – unfurnishing – a systemic looting by Assad supporters during the civil war of opposition areas in Homs. Paint was peeling off the walls. On one, an intruder had written in black ink: “We will not have mercy and we do not ask for anyone’s mercy. [His name], Homs, al-Zahraa, Abu Jaafar Special Forces.”
Baderkhan went to look for him in al-Zahraa, a nearby Alawite-majority district, hoping to bring a legal complaint. “I asked the local leader, but he acted like he didn’t know who he was,” he says.
In Homs, instead of reconciliation, there has been retribution. Alawites and Shia have sold their homes cheaply out of fear or had their properties seized.
There have also been shootings. Armed men driving through Alawite neighbourhoods on motorcycles. In some cases, the attacks seem to be targeted acts of revenge; in others, they appear to be a form of collective sectarian punishment, according to residents and a report by the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, a non-profit human rights organisation.
Officials claim they are holding perpetrators of sectarian vigilantism to account, but analysts say they need to do more to break the sense of impunity.
Despite the lack of prosecutions so far, Syrian officials publicly insist that all those reliably accused of “grave violations” during the Assad regime fall within the scope of criminal trials. Some of the 5,000 regime suspects in custody were detained in sweeps in the weeks after the regime fell, based on their military or security rank.
The number of suspects is far higher than the judiciary has the capacity to handle. If all “grave violators” were prosecuted, it would probably mean the kind of mass trials that the state deems risky. Hard evidence of crimes is often missing, complicating prosecutions.
“Alternatives to criminal accountability” are needed to address the vast number of violations, Barazi of the transitional justice commission says. These could include confession, moving city or asking for forgiveness. But those methods have to be determined on a local level, she says.
Assad
This summer, former rebels aligned to the administration organised demonstrations demanding more accountability.
Alarmed, authorities quickly held the first batch of trials for high-profile regime figures. Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher were sentenced to death in absentia, while Atef Najib, a security chief whose crackdown on protesters in Deraa helped spark the wider revolt, was also given the death penalty and is in custody. A handful of notorious regime figures have been convicted since. Many Syrians celebrated.
Some rights groups criticised the rushed and theatrical nature of the trials, saying they should have waited until Syria passed its Transitional Justice Law.
But Hassoun, of the justice ministry, says the government realised it could not afford to wait for that legislation, which is still under consideration by parliament. Noureddine al-Baba, a spokesperson for the ministry of interior, says the “threat” of public anger and mistrust of the security and judiciary apparatus has declined since the rulings.
For many of the people who worked for the regime at the lower levels, legal stasis has descended.
Under Assad, many residents of the quiet Alawite village of Nawa, east of Homs, worked in the regime’s security forces or as public employees. Since his downfall, many have fled or have tried to emigrate. Others lined up at the village school in January 2025 to hand over their weapons and regularise their status as part of the new authorities’ settlement process.
That day, a group of men were separated based on their military rank and taken to prison, where they have remained since. Similar sweeps happened in Homs’s Alawite districts.
Syria’s justice ministry is ill-equipped to process so many cases. Its new leaders have dismissed about 300 judges but retained some from the regime era to keep the institution running. Recruitment and training of replacements could take years, says Hassoun, who is overseeing the process.
Um Aziz used to run a grocery store in a windowless room on Nawa’s main road. But since she ran out of money to source products, she distributes only bread. Her son, who was in air force intelligence, and her son-in-law, who was a lieutenant colonel, never came home after they left to normalise their status, she says. Instead, they were taken to a prison and remain in detention.
Like many in Nawa and Homs, the men had volunteered to join Assad’s security forces out of economic need, she says. Often the families of former soldiers – even those who served more than a decade and reached middle ranks – recognise regime violence occurred but cannot contend with their relatives taking part and claim they were merely couriers, drivers or cooks.
After the regime fell, the demobilisation process was the priority of the new security forces, says the interior ministry’s Baba. “The fundamental choice [was] a push towards settlement and handing over weapons, rather than arresting them,” Baba says.
But Baba says the process, which included 250,000 people, had also been useful for gathering information about regime suspects.
Evidence
As people rejoiced at the convictions of Assad and Najib this summer, Amer Zaidan, a former resident of the Damascus suburb of Jobar, was organising a protest.
Almost every week, Zaidan marches with other Jobar residents through its chalky streets. In the shells of their homes, the sky is visible from the ground floor because the ceilings have been removed to get the metal inside.
After Assad’s trial in August, Zaidan’s target was the luxurious home of Mohammad Hamsho, a businessman close to the regime accused of destroying Jobar to extract its steel. This year Hamsho cut a settlement deal with the new government.
“Shame, shame! He’s the one who plundered the country,” the protesters clapped in rhyming Arabic.
Defenders of the deals suggest they are the only way to get access to information on the funds of regime cronies and that they do not preclude future criminal prosecution.
But for many, deals with alleged collaborators like Hamsho have undermined the government’s promises of justice.
“You convicted Atef Najib and sentenced him to death. Great job, now what are we demanding?” Zaidan says, adding that people like Hamsho should also face justice. “He’s still there and everything’s going well for him.”
