Bashar Assad and thousands of his henchmen will face trial for the horrific regime inflicted on the Syrian people, says a leading war crimes investigator.
Assad was given refuge in Moscow by Vladimir Putin after fleeing Syria when his regime collapsed as rebel forces, led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, swept across the country in early December.
However, Bill Wiley, a Canadian lawyer and director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, believes that in coming years Russia will hand over the tyrant to face justice.
“I do think it will happen,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“I have a bet with a former member of our board who is a very close friend that it will happen not later than January 1, 2028, he will become a liability to Moscow at some point, he has no value to them.”
As to where Assad could face justice, he added: “It can happen in any juridiction, it can happen in Syria, it could happen in a western country, perhaps an international court, tribunal, will be established to deal with this situation.
“But he will face justice and more immediately, this is the ‘bigger than Nuremberg thing’, you have got thousands of perpetrators on the run now and these men are going to turn up.”
He told of the “bureaucratic” nature of the Assad regime, documenting its brutal practices which have horrified the world as more details emerge following its fall, with mass graves being discovered and appalling stories of torture, rape and killings.
“Tens of thousands of victims have perished in this archipelago of security and intelligence centres, detention centres across Syria,” explained Mr Wiley.
He stressed that official executions by the Assad regime were “not that common”, with most victims dying from their torture or other maltreatment.
The CIJA has built up the “Assad archive”, with 1.3 million pages extracted since 2012 from Syria, often at great danger to those involved with one person being killed in a regime ambush and others also suffering harm.
“It was an extraordinarily bureaucratic state so everything tended to be papered or documented,” said Mr Wiley, 61.
“The arrest orders would go out across the country, ‘we are looking for these, these, these guys,’ men and women both, they would be hoovered in, they would be moved between detention facility, at every step of the way being abused, tortured, frequently perishing in custody.
“Formal executions were not all that common, the vast majority of people died from physical abuse and the poor detention centre condition.”
He stressed that all the documents brought out of Syria had been digitalised and sent to prosecutors in liberal democratic states across the Western world who might discover suspects on their territory.
“So, there have been quite a few successful prosecutions of regime perpetrators over the last decade or so,” he added.
He believes tens of millions more pages of evidence will now be able to be identified and recovered at some 200 regime centres around Syria, particularly security, intelligence, military and political documents.
He emphasied that this also needed to be digitalised for future criminal cases but also to provide some “succour” to families searching for their loved ones who disappeared in the brutal decades of the Assad family rule.
Earlier this week, an international war crimes prosecutor said that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has exposed a state-run “machinery of death” in which he estimated more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013.
Speaking after visiting two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, former US war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp said: “We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis.”
