William Wiley, the founder and executive director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), was captured during an interview at the organization's headquarters in Western Europe, pictured here on Jan. 9.Maria Abranches/The Globe and Mail
On the day Bashar al-Assad fled Syria as his army collapsed, there was the briefest of celebrations at the organization that had spent the previous 12 years collecting evidence of the regime’s crimes.
There was champagne for some of the staff, and beer for its Canadian founder. Then it was back to work. The Dec. 8 fall of the regime meant that, for the first time in a decade, there was real hope that Mr. al-Assad, the deposed president who inherited the leadership when his father Hafez died in 2000, could face justice. Such a prosecution would be built at least in part on the 1.3 million pages of evidence collected by Bill Wiley and his staff at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.
CIJA, a non-profit funded by Western governments, has been compiling the case against Mr. al-Assad and his top commanders ever since the organization was founded in 2012, a year into Syria’s civil war. The long and painstaking effort has seen CIJA investigators repeatedly sneak in and out of the country to secure evidence, often at high personal risk. One was killed by regime fire, another was kidnapped and never heard from again.
Mr. Wiley – a veteran war-crimes investigator who took part in the international tribunals set up in post-war Rwanda and Yugoslavia – says the existing trove is enough to prove the criminal culpability of Mr. al-Assad and top members of his Mukhabarat intelligence service in a string of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Now, with the regime gone – and cities such as Damascus, Aleppo and Latakia suddenly accessible to CIJA investigators – Mr. Wiley estimates there could be another 20 or 30 million pages of potential evidence, scattered among some 200 state security and military intelligence bases around the country. Those files could eventually help bring more regime officials to justice.
As soon as their short celebration was over, Mr. Wiley wrote to his 150-member staff with a message: Enjoy the moment, because the workload was about to get much heavier. “I realized that indeed it was merely the end of the beginning,” Mr. Wiley said in an interview at the organization’s headquarters in a Western European city.
The Globe and Mail is not identifying which city, or even which country, CIJA is based in, out of concern the organization and the evidence it has collected could be targeted by Assad regime loyalists or their Russian allies. The organization has already had to move offices once because of security concerns.
Last Thursday morning, Mr. Wiley was on the phone with his team on the ground in Syria, authorizing them to rent an apartment in Damascus – and tasking them with formally reaching out to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that has emerged as the most powerful force in the new Syria. The hope is that HTS will understand that it needs the help, and welcome the assistance.
“The Syrian criminal justice system is a mess, as you can imagine. It’s been subordinated to the needs of the regime for 50 some odd years, and so needs to be rebuilt. And we’re talking thousands and thousands of suspects – just from the security intelligence services,” Mr. Wiley said, one in a succession of Cuban cigars burning in his hand. “Syria couldn’t deal with this many people, not even close.”
The 406 boxes of evidence that CIJA already has – which includes everything from execution orders to battlefield maps – fill two entire rooms at its headquarters.Maria Abranches/The Globe and Mail
While HTS is still considered a terrorist group by Canada, the United States and the European Union, the U.S. State Department temporarily lifted some sanctions against Syria last week, clearing the way for humanitarian assistance to be delivered to the country, and for NGO activities that “support the rule of law, accountability and transparency.”
If and when HTS – or whatever Syrian government emerges – agrees, CIJA can begin moving evidence currently in unsecured sites around the country to central, guarded storage facilities, where the documents can be digitized and then analyzed. Mr. Wiley said he wasn’t overly alarmed by the scenes of armed rebels, and then crowds of ordinary citizens, entering detention centres and former Mukhabarat offices, trampling, and in some cases removing, potentially critical evidence.
The documents already in CIJA’s possession show the regime was so bureaucratic that nearly every piece of paper was copied at least once, and thus anything lost or destroyed likely existed in multiple locations.
CIJA’s team on the ground says it’s a relief to be able to work inside Syria without fear for the first time since the start of the county’s civil war in 2011.
“In past years, we worked under a great deal of pressure and constant fear, as we were at risk of either getting killed or arrested at any moment,” said CIJA’s chief investigator, a man in his 50s who works under the pseudonym Adel because of lingering security concerns. He was in the southern Syrian city of Daraa last week when he exchanged messages with The Globe.
“I am very happy that I am now able to return to Syria normally and move freely throughout it without fear. It is an incredible feeling that I cannot express in words. … I can now work almost publicly to secure and preserve documents and contribute to the prosecution of war criminals from the Assad regime, and help build a new state based on the rule of law, justice and accountability.”
The 406 boxes of evidence that CIJA already has – which includes everything from execution orders to battlefield maps – fill two entire rooms at its headquarters. In addition to evidence against the Assad regime, the archive also contains documents produced by The Islamic State while it controlled a large part of eastern Syria and western Iraq between 2014 and 2017.
Mr. Wiley founded CIJA to help fill what he saw as a crucial gap in the international justice system, which in his estimation often waited too long to begin collecting evidence, opening the possibility for key proof to disappear or be destroyed. The organization has also helped gather evidence against the military junta in Myanmar, and is assisting the Ukrainian government’s efforts to collect and analyze evidence of war crimes committed since Russia invaded that country almost three years ago.
The Syria archives, Mr. Wiley believes, contain more than enough evidence to convict Mr. al-Assad. CIJA holds documents bearing Mr. al-Assad’s signature, showing he personally headed the Central Crisis Management Cell, a war cabinet that oversaw the regime’s bloody response to the first anti-government protests in 2011.
“Bashar Assad is 100-per-cent culpable,” the 61-year-old said, between puffs on another cigar. “He personally oversaw the security and intelligence and military response to the uprising, so there’s no doubt about his criminal culpability.”
And while Mr. al-Assad and his wife, Asma, are currently in Russia, where they have been granted political asylum by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mr. Wiley is confident that Mr. al-Assad will one day end up in a courtroom, facing the evidence that CIJA has compiled. “I’ve got a bet with one of the members of our board that by the first of January, 2028, [Mr. al-Assad] will be in custody somewhere.”
Mr. Wiley said he believed that Mr. al-Assad is no longer of any use to Mr. Putin, and could therefore be exchanged either as part of a deal with the new Syrian government that would allow Russia to keep its military bases in the country, or as part of some larger arrangement with the West whenever the war in Ukraine comes to an end. “The Russians don’t owe him anything,” Mr. Wiley said of the former Syrian dictator.
Mr. Wiley envisions at least two different legal streams emerging to deal with the crimes of the Assad regime. The larger one will likely take place in Syria, with international support. The other is already unfolding in the West, where evidence supplied by CIJA has been used in 24 trials against former regime officials who were captured after fleeing abroad. There have been three key convictions so far, two in Germany and one in the Netherlands, plus a U.S. civil case that found Mr. al-Assad’s government guilty of “targeted murder” in the 2012 killing of British journalist Marie Colvin. (A third possible avenue could see Syria join the International Criminal Court, of which it is not currently a member, or give the ICC limited jurisdiction over a specific time period.)
Mr. Wiley believes the Syria archives contain more than enough evidence to convict Mr. al-Assad.Maria Abranches/The Globe and Mail
Estimates of the death toll in Syria’s 14-year civil war range from just over 500,000 to as high as 620,000 people. The country had a pre-war population of 22 million.
CIJA’s existing archive pertains mostly to the estimated 100,000 Syrians who “disappeared” into the notorious prisons and torture chambers maintained by the Muhkabarat. The documents and photographs illustrate that the regime kept meticulous records of everything – right down to writing numbers on corpses of those who were executed or otherwise died in captivity, numbers that corresponded with files now in CIJA’s possession.
“It’s about diffusing individual responsibility. Nobody wants to be solely responsible for any action or decision, except at the very, very top. Even at the top, the second-tier guys get Assad to take responsibility for everything, because if the regime changes tack, nobody wants to be holding the can for some policy that’s just changed 180 degrees,” Mr. Wiley said. “From a criminal case-building point of view, it’s fantastic that they have that ethos to cover their ass by generating paper about everything.”
The evidence made accessible by the Dec. 8 fall of the regime may also facilitate prosecutions for other alleged crimes, including the army’s use of weapons such as prohibited chemical weapons and crude “barrel bombs” against civilian areas that were under rebel control.
One thing that vexes the Toronto-born Mr. Wiley is that Canada – initially one of CIJA’s biggest backers – stopped funding the organization in 2022. CIJA’s work is currently funded by the U.S., British and German governments.
Mr. Wiley is hopeful that, with additional funding urgently needed to handle the additional work in Syria, Ottawa will resume its support. He said that both the RCMP and the Canada Border Services Agency make use of the CIJA archive, usually to check names for possible Islamic State affiliations.
Global Affairs Canada did not directly respond to questions from The Globe and Mail about why it stopped funding CIJA, or if it would resume in the current situation.
“Canada believes true justice for victims in the aftermath of the Assad regime must be comprehensive and include accountability for perpetrators of human rights violations, focus on missing persons, repairing the harms caused to survivors, including survivors of torture and sexual violence and the trauma suffered by their families,” read an emailed statement sent by Global Affairs to The Globe.
“Canada supports a comprehensive mapping, collection, registration and preservation of evidence and testimonies of human rights violations, and recognises the important role these play in the pursuit of criminal accountability and in furtherance of transitional justice processes.”
In addition to the physical threats faced by CIJA investigators, Mr. Wiley said the organization has had to deal with escalating cyberattacks, as well as disinformation. Russia has targeted CIJA ever since Moscow joined Syria’s civil war in 2015, providing air power that helped stabilize Mr. al-Assad’s regime until its collapse last month. The cyberattacks – most of them aimed at accessing the organization’s servers – multiplied after CIJA began sending investigators to Ukraine in 2022.
While there’s formidable evidence of Russian war crimes – and a warrant for Mr. Putin’s arrest has already been issued by the International Criminal Court – Mr. Wiley doesn’t expect that the long-ruling Kremlin boss will ever end up in a courtroom. He pointed to Russia’s clout as a nuclear power and as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
But for those working to bring Mr. al-Assad to justice, there’s more optimism than ever before. “We hope,” said Adel, CIJA’s lead investigator, “to finish the mission we started in 2012.”