Bashar al-Assad’s henchmen start to go on trial in Syria

Fifteen years ago Atef Najib, then the security chief of Deraa, a city in southern Syria, epitomised the cruelty of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator who was toppled in 2024. When the parents of children arrested in protests in the city in 2011 came to Mr Najib to beg for mercy, he told them to forget about their sons, go home and make new ones. The brutality in Deraa morphed into nearly 14 years of nationwide repression and bloodshed.

Now Mr Najib sits in a cage in a court in Damascus, the capital, wearing a black-and-white prison uniform. He is on trial for murder, torture and orchestrating massacres. “We have been waiting for this moment since the beginning of the revolution,” says Maram Abazeid, who in 2011 was a teenager in Deraa forced to watch her friends’ arrests. Now she is one of the lawyers representing Mr Najib’s victims in Syria’s first trial of Assad-era officials. As his name was read out alongside those of his victims during a hearing on April 26th, she scrutinised his features. “He knew exactly who he was facing,“ she says. “He knew which children he had arrested.”

On May 10th Mr Najib denied all charges against him and blamed the repression in Deraa on Syria’s other security agencies. A first cousin of Mr Assad, he was captured in a raid in January 2025. He is the most prominent figure in the old regime in the custody of the government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the rebel leader who overthrew Mr Assad and is now Syria’s president.

Mr Najib’s case illustrates the difficulties that the new government and the lawyers sympathetic to it have been having in holding people like him to account. Last year Mr Sharaa announced a transitional-justice commission, to some fanfare. Yet many Syrians feel its performance so far has been lacking. Some had hoped justice would be applied to all sides, including to rebels who perpetrated atrocities.

That would have included holding to account some of Mr Sharaa’s comrades. The government’s approach has been more selective. Apart from not looking too closely at its own ranks, it has on occasion found it expedient to recruit some of those implicated in Mr Assad’s crimes.

As the commission has foundered, the pressure on the government to achieve accountability has grown. Sectarian violence and lethal reprisals have been spreading in rural areas outside Damascus that are home to Mr Assad’s acolytes. “People feel the government has no interest in transitional justice, so they take matters into their own hands,” says a lawyer.

The trial of Mr Najib is an attempt by the government to stem such trends by doling out swift justice. It was brought by the Ministry of Justice, using the pre-existing legal system in Damascus, rather than a new transitional-justice law being prepared by the commission.

Yet it is unclear what sort of justice the trial will bring, if any. Five decades of the Assads’ rule ruined Syria’s justice system. Its statute book has no provision for crimes against humanity, or for assigning command responsibility or indirect responsibility for crimes. Judges say they will be able to draw on treaties that Syria has signed, notably the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture. Even so, convicting the likes of Mr Najib will not be straightforward.

Some lawyers are troubled that the trial has started before the legal framework has been publicly debated and agreed upon. Such haste risks undermining the legitimacy of the trial, says Nousha Kabawat, a specialist in transitional justice who attended the first hearing. Because of the rush to get the process over with, not enough time is spent ensuring that “investigations, prosecutions and eventually these trials must be consistent with due process and meet the standards of a fair trial”.

Given Syria’s recent history, achieving justice was always going to be complicated. For Ms Abazeid, it is important that the trials are happening, regardless of legal imperfections. “These trials represent a historic moment, not just legally but humanly,” she says. “It acknowledges the victims’ suffering and sends a clear message that Syrian blood is not cheap.” ■