Conclusion

As damning as the information presented in this paper may be, it is merely a first glimpse of the enormous body of evidence of the Assad regime's systematic crimes against humanity over the past dozen years. As we stated in our introduction, we intend to follow this study with others that draw upon the vast archival troves and witness testimonies that exist and are growing by the day. We also aim to help open these sources to other scholars and analysts, since the subject matter is vast. Scholars, analysts, and investigators will be working with these sources for many years to come.

But this effort is more than just an academic exercise. Though the examples of Assad regime criminality set out in this paper are now more than a decade in the past, Assad and many of the others responsible for them remain in positions of power in Syria and continue to perpetrate the same crimes today. The criminality we highlight here, in particular by the Syrian state security apparatus, did not start in 2011, but began half a century before in the early days of the regime of Bashar’s father, Hafez al Assad. When Bashar made the decision in 2011 to respond to the civil protest movement with systematic violence, he simply expanded the scale of the security apparatus so that it victimized a great many more innocents. Assad and the system he inherited will murder, torture, and kidnap incessantly until they are stopped.

Syria can never be whole and stable as long as its people have no justice for the crimes committed against them. Accountability is therefore crucial for resolving the Syrian conflict and stabilizing the entire region. But accountability in Syria is not just a matter of interest for the Syrian people: it is an imperative for all of us if we are to have the slightest hope of deterring other such regimes from emulating Assad’s crimes in the future and making the twenty-first century as horrific a theater of suffering as the twentieth.