Assad's death sentence rings hollow for Syrian survivors demanding deeper justice

In mid-August, a Damascus court handed down death sentences against Bashar Assad and other senior members of his regime for premeditated murder, torture, and crimes against humanity. The former dictator, now living in Russia after his government collapsed in late 2024, will almost certainly never face execution. Yet the verdict rippled through Syria anyway, celebrated by many as a symbolic reckoning after 14 years of civil war. For survivors, though, the conviction feels incomplete—a beginning that stops short of the full accounting they say the country needs.

Huda Khayti, a Syrian women's rights activist, was near the epicenter of a chemical weapons attack on eastern Ghouta in 2013. She remembers the screams, the burning in her eyes, the fear that she and those around her would be next. Her brother was killed in the bombing. Her women's center was destroyed. Her home was destroyed. In 2018, she fled to Idlib, a rebel stronghold in the north. Since Assad's overthrow, she has traveled regularly between Idlib and her hometown of Douma, about six miles northeast of Damascus, where she is now working to open a new women's center. Every return confronts her with the physical remains of war—ruined houses, shattered infrastructure, the visible weight of trauma layered across the landscape.

The court's conviction of Assad carries real symbolic weight. Lina Chawaf, a Syrian journalist and researcher at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, noted that the verdict was widely celebrated as a victory and understood by many as part of Syria's emerging transitional justice process. Yet the practical reality is far more constrained. Russia and Syria signed an extradition treaty in 2023, but observers say Russia is unlikely to send Assad, a longtime ally, back to face trial. The treaty itself may provide an escape route: if the death penalty is likely, that can be grounds for refusing extradition. Syria's Deputy Justice Minister said in August that the country had established a commission to work with Interpol and pursue extradition of other fugitives, but Assad's case remains frozen in legal limbo.

What troubles survivors and human rights advocates most is not just that Assad may never be punished, but that the focus on him obscures a vastly larger accounting that remains undone. The Syrian Network for Human Rights has documented that over 234,000 civilians were killed during the war, with at least 202,000 of those deaths attributed to Assad's regime and its allies. There are at least 181,000 cases of arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearance to investigate. At least 45,000 people died under torture. The network has also documented 217 chemical weapons attacks by the regime. These numbers are believed to be conservative; the actual toll is likely far higher. Transitional justice, as human rights experts understand it, encompasses far more than criminal trials of top officials. It includes searching for missing people, investigating crimes, determining reparations, and reforming institutions—all with victims and survivors at the center.

Khayti's vision of justice extends beyond Assad himself. She wants to see convictions for the bureaucrats who wrote the reports that sent people to Saydnaya, Syria's most notorious torture prison. "These individuals are just as guilty as the torturers themselves," she said. For now, though, it remains unclear how thoroughly Syria will confront its past. Sophie Bischoff, managing director of Adopt a Revolution, a German-Syrian human rights organization, noted that the new Syrian state has only just begun systematic documentation of war crimes. Until now, civil society organizations and human rights activists have done most of the research and documentation work themselves.

The Syrian government has created two commissions to address transitional justice. The National Commission for Missing Persons launched a platform called Athar in late August, where families can submit information about disappeared relatives. The National Commission for Transitional Justice was established in May 2025, but so far it has focused only on crimes committed by the Assad regime. It has not investigated crimes committed by militias or the Islamic State. Bischoff called this approach insufficient. "For a comprehensive reckoning and a new beginning in a Syria for all, the war crimes of all warring parties must be included," she said.

For Khayti and others like her, centering victims in the transitional justice process means more than having them testify in court. It means giving them a voice in decisions about compensation, financial support, and public recognition. It means protecting them as they relive their trauma. It means investigating not just the architects of atrocity but the functionaries who enabled it. It means remembering. In Douma, Khayti is working to preserve the memories of the war so that younger generations will know what happened, so the past will not fade into silence. "We will continue to be loud," she said. "And we will continue to demand justice." What that justice will actually look like—whether it will reach beyond the symbolic to the systematic, whether it will hold accountable the thousands of perpetrators beyond Assad and his inner circle, whether it will truly center the voices of survivors—remains an open question as Syria begins the long work of reckoning with itself.