Rebels and NGOs keen to prosecute over war crimes but lawyers warn challenges await

The rebel leader now running much of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has offered rewards for senior army and intelligence officers involved in war crimes, as the Assad regime's sudden fall brought hopes of justice for the many atrocities of one of the world's most brutal dictatorships.

- Julian Borger Harry Davies

"We will not hesitate to hold accountable the criminals, murderers, security and army officers involved in torturing the Syrian people," Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, said in a statement on Telegram yesterday.

He added that Syria's new authorities would seek the return of Assad regime officials who have fled abroad.

However, legal experts who have been compiling evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria cautioned that the country was a long way from having a legal system capable of conducting the trials. The regime was the worst abuser by far, and was detaining more than 135,000 people - including nearly 4,000 children - at the time of its fall. But there were other perpetrators too, including Sharaa's Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, which is thought responsible for the detention or forcible disappearance of 2,514 Syrians, including 46 children.

"In the euphoria and the thrill of the moment, we should not lose sight [of these problems]," said Alan Haji, who is working on war crimes cases in The Hague for the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC), a Syrian-led human rights organisation. "In the Syrian penal code, there is no such thing as a war crime or crimes against humanity or genocide, and there's no prescribed punishment for such crimes."

If a path to justice has been opened up by the regime collapse, it is likely to be long and strewn with obstacles.

The Assad family have fled to Russia, but the intelligence agency officers who were the levers and cogs of the Syrian torture and killing machine have mostly been left to fend for themselves. Many are expected to try to use human smuggling networks to reach Europe, and efforts are under way to track them.

The abrupt implosion of the infrastructure of state terror has made available a huge volume of evidence.