As opposition forces took over the Syrian capital of Damascus this month, Maryam Kamalmaz waited in Texas for news about her father.
Majd Kamalmaz, a 59-year-old psychotherapist from Virginia, had roots in Syria, and had been treating conflict victims in the region when he was arrested near Damascus in 2017. The FBI later told the family he was presumed dead.
After the fall of the Assad government, a distant relative went to Sednaya Prison, where they believe Majd had been held, and spent days scouring reams of records and recording videos to share with the family. The relative was one of thousands of people flocking to Syrian prisons, desperate for information about loved ones who had disappeared.
”I started going through all of the videos, all of the horrific images coming out of every single prison,” Maryam Kamalmaz said. She was determined to scour them all, on the off-chance “I could get a glimpse of him.”
For years, human rights activists and war crimes lawyers have been trying to build cases against President Bashar al Assad’s regime for torture, false imprisonment, extrajudicial killings and crimes against humanity. Its collapse has unlocked access to hundreds of government sites—including prisons and police stations—with potentially priceless evidence.
“We have sort of unprecedented opportunities to get to the scene of the crime—the scene of the crimes,” said Stephen J. Rapp, the former head of the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, who now helps lead the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a Europe-based nonprofit working to collect evidence of war crimes in Syria. “If this is done properly, we’ll be able to prove at the end of the day who was responsible for this machinery of death.”
On Friday, the Biden administration dispatched several diplomats to Damascus to engage the new authorities there and look for information on missing Americans. The group included the State Department’s top Middle East diplomat, Barbara Leaf, and Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens.
Still, a number of legal and practical obstacles remain. Millions of official documents that chronicle the inner workings of a bloated and secretive security state must be analyzed for evidence. And while Assad has fled to Russia, many of his former accomplices might still be in Syria, and need to be tracked down.
Then Syrians must decide who to put on trial, and how.
From Nuremberg to Rwanda
Differing models for war-crimes prosecutions have emerged in the decades since Nazi leaders were tried at Nuremberg. Some relied on a UN-backed international tribunal, while others marshaled experts and resources for a hybrid court system.
In 1993, the UN created a tribunal at The Hague to try hundreds of leaders from the former Yugoslavia for the deadly conflicts over its breakup. After the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, an international tribunal in neighboring Tanzania put nearly 100 high-ranking Rwandans on trial there, while courts inside Rwanda tried thousands of others. In some cases, the end of a conflict and a new government has allowed for the creation of in-country courts with international help, like in Sierra Leone and Cambodia.
In 2002, a treaty called the Rome Statute established the International Criminal Court at The Hague, with a mandate to try suspects in any country that was a party. Syria is not a party, although a new government could decide to make itself subject to the ICC’s jurisdiction.
A number of Western countries also claim universal jurisdiction and authority to try suspects for crimes like genocide and torture. More than 350 such cases have been heard so far related to the Syrian civil war; most have involved alleged ISIS members, but not all.
In 2022, a German court convicted a former Syrian colonel under Assad for 4,000 counts of torture, 58 killings, and rapes committed while he ran a military intelligence facility known as “Branch 251.” France issued arrest warrants in 2023 for al Assad, his brother and two generals for a chemical weapons attack allegedly committed a decade earlier. This May, a French court convicted in absentia the heads of two of Syria’s leading intelligence agencies of crimes against humanity.
On Dec. 9, US prosecutors in Illinois indicted two former Syrian Air Force Intelligence officers for allegedly torturing detainees, including US citizens, at a prison they ran at the Mezzeh Military Airport just outside Damascus. The suspects in that case are at large.
Civil Recourse
In the US, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act includes exceptions that permit lawsuits against foreign governments that have tortured or killed Americans.
A Washington, DC jury awarded $300 million in 2019 to the family of Marie Colvin, an American journalist killed seven years earlier in a Syrian rocket attack after speaking on CNN. The Syrian government ignored the trial entirely. Much of the evidence—which included witness statements as well as documents showing a clear chain-of-command order to target Colvin—was gathered by CIJA and the Center for Justice and Accountability, a California-based nonprofit.
The Center is pursuing another civil case against the Assad regime on behalf of Obada Mzaik, an American who says he was tortured at the Mezzeh military prison. “Our complaint is for Obada, but it paints a broader picture of the systematic nature of this mass campaign of interrogation, detention, interrogation, and torture,” said Daniel McLaughlin, one of Mzaik’s attorneys. Evidence related to the Mzaik case could potentially shed light on what happened to Kamalmaz too: He was also first taken to the Mezzeh prison.
The handful of nonprofits collecting evidence related to the Syrian war often work in concert, because of the vast amounts of material to sift through. Many have been following the frontline in the country’s civil war, using moments of calm to slip into suddenly abandoned records rooms, collect documents, and spirit them to safety. With Assad gone, that task will presumably be much easier.
Rapp, who served as a prosecutor at tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, is currently in Syria. He arrived after calls from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the opposition group that has taken over the country, for international war crimes experts to provide assistance.
HTS has said it plans to hold senior regime officials accountable for war crimes. But it faces a number of more pressing problems: Syria has almost no foreign currency reserves, and is largely dependent on imported food from Russia, which is pulling out of the country. And HTS, formerly an offshoot of al-Qaeda and ISIS, has gone to lengths to assure minorities and women will be protected, but the US and UN still consider it a terrorist organization.
Amid the political uncertainty, civil society groups have begun uncovering mass graves in the country. At one dusty unmarked field in the district of al Qutayfah just north of Damascus, rights groups say more than 100,000 people may have been buried after being executed.
The Global Criminal Justice Office, the lead US agency working to prosecute Assad officials, is supporting international and local efforts to collect, analyze and archive evidence, including preserving remains at mass graves. “These efforts are extremely time-sensitive, especially in the chaos of transition,” the agency’s head, Ambassador Beth Van Schaack, said. “We are still in the very early days of the transition so it is unclear what form accountability will take, but we are far more hopeful of the possibilities.”
Her predecessor, Rapp, is confident recovered evidence would hold up in any court. Officials in the Assad regime’s military and intelligence, he said, kept meticulous records, and relayed to superiors and each other what they were doing. “They had meetings and they had minutes, and they signed copies of the minutes,” he said.
In a video posted on social media days after the regime’s fall, civilians in the city of Sweida are seen walking the offices of the former Political Security branch – one of four Syrian intelligence agencies that surveilled, arrested, tortured and killed regime enemies. It’s a warehouse, brimming from floor-to-ceiling with aisles of binders and filing cabinets labeled by family names.
There are dozens of security archives like the one in Sweida, and each will have “room upon room upon room of binders,” said Roger Lu Phillips, Legal Director at the Washington, DC-based Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC).
The nonprofit was founded in 2012 by a Syrian-American and former prisoner, and has built a treasure trove of documentation for use in prosecuting actors in the Syrian war, including Assad officials and groups like ISIS.
SJAC has catalogued, tagged and uploaded more than 2 million pieces of evidence, including half a million official documents, and made the database accessible to attorneys, prosecutors, and UN experts.
The documents include lists of individuals sought for arrest, records of prisoners and executions, and orders to security agencies to deal with protesters that simply say “do whatever is necessary.” Groups like a special UN body set up to monitor Syria have used this kind of evidence to create detailed reports on how Syrian prisons were run.
Phillips, who previously worked at the UN-backed tribunals in Cambodia and Rwanda, said this was a “one-of-a-kind moment in history” to hold officials responsible for war crimes.
Those kinds of records have been used in trials to corroborate witness testimony, and explain the orders behind attacks on civilians depicted in millions of videos and images uploaded to the internet during the 13-year civil war.
Posts on sites including Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, X, and TikTok have been carefully documented by groups like the website Syrian Archives, launched in 2014 by activist Hadi al-Khatib after he noticed social media moderators deleting content.
“Open source info was a key to understanding what was happening in every location in Syria,” he said.
Today, Syrian Archives has more than 6 million pieces of curated and tagged content.
Hoping for Answers
Back in the US, Maryam Kamalmaz hopes new evidence in Syria will shed light on what happened to her father. The last the family had heard through contacts inside Syria was that he was being held in isolation at Sednaya prison.
Their contacts told them someone found a list of prisoners—and Majd’s name was on it, underlined in red, but no one knows what that signified. This July, the family filed its own civil suit against the Assad government.
A few days after Sednaya prison emptied, Maryam says she came across a video online of a former inmate, now hospitalized, who looked like her father. Her relatives flocked to the hospital, but the man was unable to communicate. They arranged a DNA test but before it happened, another family showed up and claimed the man was their relative.
“It was the worst couple of days ever. It was a lot worse than when they told us he’s passed away,” Maryam Kalamaz said. “So now we’re back to searching for him, trying to see if we can find him, if there’s anything, any sort of details, anything to connect the dots of what happened to him. Where did he die? Did he die? Exactly what happened? Where was he buried?”
She hopes, even if Majd doesn’t turn up alive, one day there will be a criminal trial for those responsible.
“If we find out who these people are, we are not going to let them go so easily,” she said. “We’re going to have to hold them accountable for the crimes they’ve committed, and for whatever they’ve done to my father.”
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