UN war crimes investigators say Syria ‘rich in evidence’


By AFP
January 31, 2025


The notorious Saydnaya prison complex 'is pretty much emptied of any documents', a UN official says - Copyright AFP PEDRO UGARTE

Despite concerns about the destruction of documents and other indications of serious crimes committed in Syria under Bashar al-Assad’s rule, UN investigators said Friday that plenty of evidence remained unspoiled.

“The country is rich in evidence, and we won’t have huge difficulty in pursuing accountability, criminal justice,” said Hanny Megally of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria.

The sudden ousting last month of Assad after decades of dictatorship has seen the commission suddenly gain access to Syria, after striving since the early days of the civil war in 2011 to probe from abroad the vast array of alleged abuses.

“It was amazing to be in Damascus after the whole life of the commission not having access to the country at all,” Megally told the Geneva UN correspondents’ association ACANU after a recent visit to Syria.

With families rushing to former prisons, detention centres and suspected mass graves to find any trace of disappeared relatives, many have expressed concern about safeguarding documents and other evidence.

Describing his visits to prisons in Damascus, Megally acknowledged that “a lot of the evidence seems to have been tampered with, and either it was on the ground and you could see people… had been walking all over it, or had been damaged or destroyed.

“And we’ve all seen the reports of people having taken away documents with them.”



– Evidence destroyed –



The notorious Saydnaya prison complex — the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances that epitomises the atrocities committed against Assad’s opponents — “is pretty much emptied of any documents”, Magally added.

He also said there were clear signs “of deliberate destruction of evidence”, presumably by the Assad authorities before they left.

During his visit, Megally said he had seen “one or two places (with) rooms that looked to me like they were used to deliberately burn documents”.

But he voiced optimism that the Syrian state under Assad was “a system that probably kept duplicates if not triplicates of everything, (so) even if evidence was destroyed, that may exist somewhere else”.

And even in places where documents had clearly been intentionally destroyed, other parts of the building were “intact” and filled with evidence, he said.

“It seemed that there’s still quite a lot of evidence that’s protected now, and we hope can be used in future accountability.”

Megally also said the careless handling of documents seen at the beginning had swiftly been brought to a halt once the calls to protect and preserve evidence went out.

“It was impressive just how quickly it seems people have picked up the fact that even by going and looking and moving things around, you’re potentially risking tampering with evidence that could be used in future accountability processes,” he said.

His colleague Lynn Welchman also said Syria’s new authorities appeared to be “seeking to ensure the preservation of evidence for the future”.

That is essential, she told reporters.

“One of the most important things for the future will be to ensure that what has happened in Syria never happens in Syria again,” she said.

“There’s a lot of work to be done in trying to find out what happened in order for all parts of Syrian society to move forward.”

40 years on, Hama survivors recall horror of Assad-era massacre

By AFP
January 31, 2025

Hayan Hadid (centre) survived the 1982 Hama massacre - Copyright AFP -

Tony Gamal-Gabriel

Hayan Hadid was 18 when soldiers arrested him in his pyjamas and took him for execution in Syria’s Hama in 1982, during one of the darkest chapters of the Assad clan’s rule.

“I’ve never really talked about that, it was a secret. Only my family knew,” said Hadid, now a father of five.

In light of the December 8 ouster of Bashar al-Assad, “we can talk at last”, he said.

On February 2, 1982, amid an information blackout, Assad’s father and then leader Hafez launched a crackdown in Hama in central Syria against an armed Muslim Brotherhood revolt.

The banned movement had tried two years earlier to assassinate Hafez, and his brother Rifaat was tasked with crushing the uprising in its epicentre.

Survivors who witnessed extra-judicial executions told AFP that the crackdown spared no one, with government forces killing men, women and children.

The death toll of the 27 days of violence has never been formally established, though estimates range from 10,000 to 40,000, with some even higher.

“I had no ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, I was at school,” said Hadid, now in his sixties.

But “my father was always very afraid for me and my brother”, he said.

Hadid’s cousin Marwan had been an influential figure in the Fighting Vanguard, an armed offshoot of the Brotherhood.

After days of battles, soldiers turned up in Hadid’s neighbourhood and arrested around 200 men, taking them to a school.

When night fell, around 40 were called by name and forced into trucks, their hands tied behind their backs, he said.

When the vehicles stopped, he realised they were at a cemetery.

“‘That means they are going to shoot us’,” said the person next to him.



– ‘Please, kill me’ –



Blinded by the truck lights as he stood among rows of men for execution, Hadid said he felt a bullet zip past his head.

“I dropped to the ground and didn’t move… I don’t know how, it was an instinctive way to try to escape death,” he said.

A soldier opened fire again, and Hadid heard a wounded man say, “please, kill me”, before more shooting.

Miraculously, Hadid survived.

“I heard gunfire, dogs barking. It was raining,” said the former steelworker, who now runs the family’s dairy shop.

When the soldiers left, he got up and set off, crossing the Orontes River before arriving at his uncle’s house.

“My face was white, like someone who’d come back from the dead,” he said.

Forty-three years later, Bashar al-Assad’s ouster opened the way to gathering testimonies and combing the archives of Syria’s security services.

In 1982, Camellia Boutros worked for Hama’s hospital service, managing admissions.

“The bodies arrived by truck and were thrown in front of the morgue. Dead, dead, and more dead. We were overwhelmed,” said Boutros, now an actor.

Bodies bearing identity cards were registered by name, while others were recorded as “unknown” and classified by neighbourhood, she said.

Some bodies were kept at the morgue, while others were taken to mass graves.

“Hour by hour, the command would call wanting precise figures on how many soldiers, Muslim Brotherhood” and civilians had been killed, she said.

Boutros said the toll was “7,000 soldiers, around 5,000 Muslim Brotherhood” members, and some 32,000 civilians.

“All the relevant authorities” received the statistics, she said, adding that her registers were later taken away.



– ‘Nobody was spared’ –



From her office window, she said she saw people being shot dead in the street.

The Brotherhood is a conservative Sunni Muslim organisation with a presence around the region, while the Assads, who stem from the minority Alawite community, purported to champion secularism.

But not all the victims of the crackdown were Sunni. Boutros said a relative of hers, a Christian, was taken from his home and killed.

“Nobody was spared death in Hama… women, men, children, people young and old, were lined up against the wall and shot,” she said.

Bassam al-Saraj, 79, said his brother Haitham, who was not involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, was “shot in front of his wife and two children” outside the city’s sports stadium.

The retired public servant recalled how the elite Defence Brigades headed by Rifaat al-Assad had moved in on their neighbourhood.

Six months later, authorities detained his other brother, Myassar, rumoured to be a Brotherhood member.

“After two or three hours, they called me in to pick up his body,” Saraj said, but authorities forbade them from holding a funeral.

Over more than half a century of rule, the Assads sowed terror among Syrians, imprisoning and torturing anyone even suspected of dissent.

Mohammed Qattan was just 16 when he took up arms with the Fighting Vanguard. He was arrested in February 1982 and jailed for 12 years.

“The regime’s line was incompatible with the country’s values,” he said, citing mixed education in public schools as one of the policies he opposed.

– ‘Kill everything in sight’ –

Qattan said the authorities “discovered a Brotherhood headquarters” and a plan “to launch coordinated military action” in Hama and Aleppo further north.

After five days of fighting, “we started running out of ammunition and our frontline commanders started falling”, he said.

When government forces retook any area, “it was as if they had orders to kill everything in sight”, he said.

“The streets were littered with bodies of civilians, even women and children.”

Qattan said a dozen relatives, mostly civilians were killed, including his two brothers, one of them a Brotherhood member.

Released from prison in 1993, he became a pharmacist and returned to studying history.

When Bashar al-Assad’s 2011 crackdown on pro-democracy protests sparked war, Qattan joined an armed group, eventually seeking exile in Turkey.

He returned home after Assad’s ouster last month.

What happened in Hama “was a crime that was planned” to bring the population to heel, he said.

“And it worked — the regime hit Hama hard, and all the other cities learnt the lesson.”