Published on 08-01-2025, Last modified on 08-01-2025
Rights Bites: Syria after Assad: A Long Road to Justice
In 2011, Syrians took to the streets en masse to demand freedom and basic rights. The Assad regime immediately crushed the peaceful protests with extreme violence, employing a strategic narrative that categorized demonstrators as “terrorists,” “enemies of the homeland,” and “radical Islamists.” These categorizations built upon decades of the regime’s systematic exploitation of religious and ethnic differences to divide and rule. The fissures and ruptures fed polarization and led to the transformation of what started as a civil revolution into a civil war. Over the years, Syrian territories evolved into multiple war fronts, not crushing the revolution but also entrenching the Assad regime’s control. These geographies became also stages for various groups and militias fighting proxy “anti-terrorist” wars, legitimized by ISIS’s rise and expansion. As the conflict became increasingly fragmented and internationalized, the (shifting) conflict lines marked four geographical zones where various groups vied over power: the territory under the regime’s control, supported by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah; the northeastern region under the Syrian Democratic Forces with U.S. backing; the far northwestern zone controlled by armed groups such as the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian National Army with Turkish support; and the central northwestern region governed by the Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
After years of war, December 8, 2024 brought an unprecedented change: HTS in collaboration with other opposition forces managed to topple the Assad regime through a combination of military offensives and strategic alliances. In the light of this change, Ahmad al-Sharaa, HTS’ commander, assumed the role of the commander of the Syrian transitional government, announcing promises of alignment with human and democratic rights, justice, reconstruction, constitutional reformation, refugees’ safe return and governmental restricting that encompasses all the Syrian mosaic.
Nonetheless, ongoing complexities within the rapidly changing Syrian political landscape, coupled with foreign meddling and military incursions by Israel and Turkey, make the transition towards stability and democracy a formidable challenge. Yet, this transition does not start from scratch, as Syrian human rights defenders and dissidents have experimented with the transitional justice paradigm to advance justice during the ongoing conflict. Despite waning international attention, “Syria fatigue”, and the prevailing dominant narrative framing the conflict as a binary between the regime and ISIS, these justice actors have relentlessly pursued their struggle for justice. Notably, their efforts in documentation, truth-seeking, and advocacy around the issue of enforced disappearance has brought attention to one of the regime’s most egregious crimes. The scenes and testimonies from Saydnaya prison, the fate of over 130,000 people still missing and the ongoing discovery of mass graves all over the country, are revealing the regime’s sophisticated apparatus of disappearance and annihilation, reinforcing calls for justice.
In this session, Layla Zibar and Brigitte Herremans will provide an overview of the Syrian political system under Assad, his downfall, and the challenges to a political transition. Particular attention will be given to the role of transitional justice and the efforts to address the legacy of the regime’s human rights violations.
Dr. Ir. Layla Zibar is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at Justice Visions, focusing on Forced Migration Urbanism, and questions of reconstruction, home and time.
Dr. Brigitte Herremans is a postdoctoral researcher at Justice Visions, and part of the iBOF project “Future-Proofing Human Rights: Developing Thicker Forms of Accountability”.