Buildings in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, have taken a beating over the years of Syria's civil war. Rebels held this area until the Bashar al-Assad regime reconquered it in 2018. His ouster in December has again changed the balance of power.
It’s been nearly a dozen years since Abdel Rahman Alamduwar died in a chemical weapons attack that shocked the world, and three months since the fall of a Syrian regime that used chlorine gas against its own citizens. But his family is still waiting for anything resembling justice.
“I’m ready to open up my son’s grave and show them everything,” Mr. Alamduwar’s father, Bashir, told The Globe and Mail earlier this month, adding that no one from the Syrian government, or any international body, had come since the Dec. 8 fall of Bashar al-Assad to examine the evidence of the use of chemical weapons. The strike on Aug. 21, 2013, was one of a series of chlorine gas attacks that forces loyal to Mr. al-Assad carried out against rebel-held areas of the country.
Mr. Alamduwar described in detail, supported by photographs on his mobile phone, how his 25-year-old son had been driving toward the site of a regime air strike just beyond Douma, which is part of the eastern Ghouta region outside Damascus, looking to rescue survivors, when he suddenly stopped breathing. “When we buried him, there was still liquid seeping from my son’s nose.”
Abdel Rahman Alamduwar's father keeps a photo of his dead son from 2013, when pro-Assad forces launched a chlorine gas attack.
As he spoke, other residents of Douma – a shattered suburb of Damascus that became synonymous with the horrors of Syria’s civil war – listened in, nodding their agreement.
A major problem for Syria, and for the international justice community, is where to start in attempting to bring justice to a place like Douma. The city is effectively a giant crime scene – and one that was badly tampered with after the al-Assad regime retook control of the city in 2018. And there are many such cities across Syria. Nationwide, an estimated 600,000 people were killed during 13 years of civil war.
As soon as Mr. Alamduwar finished recounting what had happened to his son, the man sitting next to him, Abdelraza Ghalib, launched into his own tale of loss and suffering. Mr. Ghalib’s father and one his brothers died in a 2017 barrel bombing that directly targeted their house – demolishing it to its foundations – because they were supporters of the Free Syrian Army that led the armed resistance to Mr. al-Assad in the early days of the war.
Mr. Ghalib himself only emerged in December from 4½ years in the notorious Sednaya Prison, a time during which the 27-year-old says he was routinely tortured and humiliated. Another of his brothers disappeared into the regime’s prison system in 2013 and was never seen again.
Abdelraza Ghalib, a survivor of Sednaya Prison, lives in Douma with his mother, Famiyeh Sreiwil.
Douma today is just a shell of the city of 110,000 people it was before the outbreak of the war. Ghostly neighbourhoods of destroyed apartment blocks, with every window blown out and seemingly every wall punctured by various kinds of ammunition, stand as testament to what happened here during the almost six years it was under the control of the rebel FSA, and later by Islamist groups, but besieged on all sides by forces loyal to Mr. al-Assad’s regime.
Yasser al-Fual, a local journalist whose video of another chlorine gas attack on Douma in 2018 was seen around the world, said 30,000 residents – or almost a third of the entire population – died during the siege. For proof, he drove The Globe to a pair of sprawling graveyards on the city outskirts, crammed with tombstones dated after 2011. “These are just the ones that have been registered,” he said.
The graveyards where the rebels had buried the victims of the chemical weapons attacks were later looted by the regime, looking to destroy the evidence, Mr. al-Fual said.
Yasser al-Fual points out the tombstones of youths who died in prison early in the Syrian revolution. Others buried here were killed by chemical weapons, which he says the regime tried to cover up through grave-robbing.
It’s only now, after the collapse of Mr. al-Assad’s regime, that it’s possible to even contemplate bringing the perpetrators to justice. Mr. al-Assad fled Damascus on Dec. 8, just before the Syrian capital was captured by forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist militia, known by its acronym HTS. (The Islamists gradually supplanted the secular FSA as the most powerful force opposing the regime.)
The scale of the carnage is such that the White Helmets rescue group – which has expanded its wartime role to effectively serve as first responders for the entire country – is still dealing with only the bodies they’ve recovered above ground. Farouq Habib, the group’s deputy general manager, said the White Helmets had confirmed the existence of 51 mass graves, and had received reports of hundreds more that they hadn’t been able to visit yet.
“We are still at the stage of detecting the mass graves, identifying where they are, protecting them. Then, at a later stage, we will exhume the bodies,” Mr. Habib said in an interview at the group’s Damascus headquarters. The White Helmets are also preserving, at a secret location, a store of evidence regarding the chemical attacks, waiting to hand it over to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which has not returned to Syria since the fall of the regime.
The OPCW visited Douma while it was under regime control in 2018 and said it had found evidence of “chlorinated organic chemicals” at two locations. Mr. al-Assad’s regime always denied using chemical weapons.
Both the White Helmets and the government are badly under-resourced, Mr. Habib said, but they still need to work faster.
“This is very sensitive for the victims and the families, those who are displaced and suffered the chemical attacks. When they don’t see a clear path for transitional justice, that provokes them to seek vengeance by themselves,” Mr. Habib said. “That also creates an environment for radical groups and extremist elements, including ISIS,” he added, referring to the Islamic State.
The Halima mosque in Douma was destroyed during the civil war, which stoked sectarian grievances that are still a source of discord in Syria.
Syria’s court system, bent and corroded by five decades of Assad family rule, has little capacity to deal with the scope and nature of the crimes committed here. Further complicating matters is the fact that Mr. al-Assad is currently in Russia, under the protection of Russian President Vladimir Putin, while other senior regime figures also appear to have vanished in the chaotic days just before and after the HTS takeover.
There are also concerns about the new government’s commitment to justice. While HTS – which began as an offshoot of al-Qaeda known as the al-Nusra Front – has been formally disbanded, the group’s former leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, appointed himself interim president, and named a cabinet dominated by veterans of his movement.
The HTS figure named as Justice Minister, Shadi al-Waisi, holds a degree in Islamic Sharia law, and previously served as a judge in al-Nusra controlled areas. Soon after his new appointment, decade-old videos emerged showing him personally overseeing the execution of women accused of prostitution.
“We have to make our courts professional courts, with Syrian judges making professional judgments. We must not kill outside of the law,” said Mahmoud Issa, a lawyer and veteran human-rights activist based in Damascus. “There are many things happening these days that put transitional justice in danger.”
Mr. Habib said the White Helmets have been lobbying for Syria to join the International Criminal Court, or to at least give the ICC temporary jurisdiction over the civil war period.
Mr. Issa said he hoped that Mr. al-Assad could eventually be brought to a trial in Syria, ideally one conducted with international support, so that Syrians could see justice delivered to the man who had tormented them for so long.
It could take a long time before Syria rebuilds infrastructure, like this agriculture building in Douma, that was damaged during the war.
In the broken streets of Douma, residents say that seeing justice delivered – to Mr. al-Assad in particular – is even more important than the massive rebuilding task that looms.
“The prosecutions must come first, the reconstruction can happen later,” said Omar al-Minsi, a 62-year-old garage owner who also spent time in Sednaya Prison. “It’s hard to live knowing the person who tortured you is still out there.”
But Famiyeh Sreiwil, who lost her husband and two sons during the war, disagreed with most of the men of Douma. Sitting on the floor of what remains of her half-destroyed family home – with only a wood-burning stove to provide light and heat for her and her preschool-aged granddaughter – the 63-year-old said it was time for Syria to focus on the future.
“God will give them justice,” she said, referring to those responsible for the destruction of Douma. “We must rebuild.”