On August 11, 2026, a Syrian court sentenced former president Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher to death in absentia for crimes including murder, torture, arbitrary detention, and crimes against humanity committed during the country’s nearly 14-year conflict. Assad’s cousin and former security official, Atef Najib, was tried in person and sentenced to death, while another cousin, Wasim Al-Assad, was tried and sentenced to death on August 18. The verdicts represent a major turning point for a country emerging from decades of authoritarian rule and war. But they also raise difficult questions about what justice for crimes committed under a dictatorship should look like.
These questions are not theoretical. Since the fall of the Assad government in December 2024, Syria has been constructing a formal accountability process. In May 2025, the transitional authorities established a National Commission for Transitional Justice and a National Commission for Missing Persons. Investigative bodies were also created to examine post-Assad violence that occurred in March 2025 along Syria’s western coastline and in July 2025 in Sweida in southern Syria. In April 2026, the first public trial of senior Assad-era officials began in Damascus. These steps show that accountability has moved from a political promise to an institutional process. But they also expose how difficult it will be to decide who should be held responsible, for what, and on what evidence.
The answer cannot simply be measured by the number or severity of sentences. The Assad regime left behind a vast security and administrative apparatus in which responsibility existed at radically different levels. Some officials designed and ordered systematic violence. Others implemented those orders. Many more worked inside state institutions without themselves committing serious crimes, sometimes because their jobs were their only means of supporting their families, and sometimes because refusal carried real consequences. That distinction is not an excuse for impunity. It is the foundation of credible accountability.
The Difference Between Responsibility and Survival
Decades of authoritarian rule do not produce neat factions of supporters and opponents. They produce citizens who, as a condition of survival, learn to navigate a system built on coercion.
Transitional justice literature often describes this dilemma as forced compliance. In Syria, it can also be understood as coerced displays of loyalty. Under the Assad regime, this generally took the form of ritualized loyalty: attending rallies, repeating slogans, or displaying public support. Such acts were not necessarily expressions of conviction. For many, they were the minimum outward conformity required to survive. Recognizing this distinction does not minimize the regime’s crimes; it provides the basis for holding perpetrators accountable without treating all forms of compliance as evidence of guilt.
The prosecution of Atef Najib, the former head of political security in the Daraa governorate, offers a test of whether Syria can establish a credible hierarchy of responsibility. Najib’s trial, alongside the August 11 verdict against him and the Assad brothers, demonstrates the importance of pursuing those most responsible for serious crimes. But transitional justice gains credibility not simply by reaching senior defendants. It must also demonstrate that guilt is established through evidence, due process, and individual responsibility. Syria is still developing the legal framework for such prosecutions, including how to address war crimes, crimes against humanity, and command responsibility.
Homs offers an early test of this distinction. In July 2026, the National Commission for Transitional Justice conducted fieldwork in Homs and launched truth-seeking teams in al-Houla and Tasneen to investigate past violations. The initiative is significant because a city shaped by major cycles of repression and retaliation is becoming a site of formal truth-seeking. At the same time, Homs has experienced revenge killings targeting people perceived to have links to the former regime, including alleged former security personnel and collaborators, as well as civilians caught in an environment where political affiliation, sectarian identity, and suspected responsibility were often difficult to separate.
The authorities have taken steps to curb such violence. In June 2025, the official Fatwa Council prohibited revenge killings and extrajudicial retaliation and directed disputes toward legal channels. Security measures also appear to have contributed to a decline in vigilante killings later that year. Yet rights monitors continued to document killings in Homs in 2026 and noted that many cases lacked publicly announced investigations or judicial outcomes. The mixed record highlights the central challenge of Syria’s transition: preventing accusations against “regime remnants” from substituting for evidence, while building institutions capable of investigating violations and holding those responsible to account.
International experiences provide valuable, cautionary lessons on this dilemma. When Germany reunified, it faced a crisis of forced compliance under the East German regime, where many Stasi informers cooperated under varying combinations of coercion, career incentives, and personal pressure. Opening the Stasi archives revealed that possessing a file did not, in itself, establish criminal responsibility. The experience demonstrated that reconciliation required distinguishing the architects of repression from those coerced into participation. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, by contrast, offered conditional amnesty for full confession, giving victims a platform for testimony and helping build a shared national narrative, even as it fell short on reparations. Iraq’s post-2003 de-Ba’athification offers a grim warning: its broad application weakened state institutions and fueled insurgency and sectarian grievances. Taken together, these cases suggest a lesson for Syria: accountability should focus on those who designed and directed violence while allowing a path to reintegration for those whose participation was coerced.
The Management of Justice
If forced compliance is a reality, the tools of justice cannot be uniform; managing the process is as important as the law itself. Syria must build a hierarchy of accountability that prioritizes those who designed and directed violence rather than expending judicial resources on indiscriminate low-level prosecutions.
The Assad regime turned Ba’ath Party membership into a practical gateway to professional advancement, blurring the line between genuine supporters and those who participated largely as a condition of survival. Treating all Ba’ath members, state employees, or former security personnel alike would risk reproducing the collective logic of the old system rather than dismantling it. But differentiation cannot shield those who committed serious crimes. The relevant questions are what each person did, what authority they exercised, and what evidence establishes their responsibility.
Under a pervasive security state, people often provided the minimum outward conformity required for protection. Public expressions of support, social media posts, or participation in official events therefore cannot automatically be treated as evidence of criminal responsibility. Their context must be assessed.
The term “remnants,” or fulool, has become a dangerous catch-all in Syrian discourse, sometimes applied to senior perpetrators and low-level civil servants alike. When a category becomes so broad that it includes everyone, it loses its ability to identify anyone. An effective transitional justice process must therefore resist collective labels and focus on individual conduct. Bashar al-Assad, his associates, and others implicated in serious crimes should be held accountable for their actions, not for sectarian or religious affiliation, nor simply for membership in state institutions.
Justice Without Collective Punishment
The sentencing of Bashar al-Assad and other senior figures should therefore be understood not as the culmination of Syria’s transitional justice process, but as an early test of it.
There is a legitimate demand for accountability after decades of repression. Victims cannot be asked to accept reconciliation in the absence of truth, evidence, and responsibility. But reconciliation cannot be built by putting an entire political or social community on trial.
Syria needs a justice system capable of making distinctions that authoritarianism itself refused to make: between the commander and the subordinate, the perpetrator and the bystander, the willing participant and the coerced employee, and the person who committed a crime and the person who merely lived under a criminal political system.
The measure of transitional justice should therefore not be how many people are prosecuted, but how accurately responsibility is established. Victims deserve justice, and those who designed, directed, or committed serious crimes must be held accountable. But those who were compelled to navigate the machinery of the former state should not be condemned simply because they survived within it.
A deliberate justice process is not a weak one. In Syria, that means distinguishing between those who designed repression and those who were compelled to operate within the system. Syria must establish a new principle: Accountability follows conduct, evidence, and individual responsibility, not sect, party, institution, or collective identity. That is how justice can break with the past without reproducing its logic.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.
