Chain of command
CIJA files prove Assad’s role in crimes

Bashar Assad doesn’t know what a barrel bomb is. “I haven't heard of the army using barrels, or maybe, cooking pots,” he said to a BBC interviewer in February 2015. Lame joke aside, it’s no laughing matter. Despite overwhelming evidence of crimes committed, Assad’s spin doctors have meticulously crafted the image of a calm and reasonable statesman resolutely standing up to foreign-sponsored extremists and winning. Nasty things done during the course of the war was the work of “terrorists”, they would say; and where evidence points to regime culpability, the fault surely lies with overzealous apparatchiks acting without the knowledge of the President. Many have come to believe this “strategic ambiguity” take, or at least pretend to. Assad can feign ignorance because court-ready evidence proving direct culpability is rare in totalitarian states. The regime has systematically perpetrated crimes against humanity. There can be no doubt about that. Less clear is the how: who issued the orders? Who carried them out? Who reported back, and to whom? 

Based on the Assad regime’s own documents, corroborated by eyewitness testimonies, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), an investigative INGO, has meticulously reconstructed the exact chain of command at the time and place of major atrocities. CIJA has amassed over 1.5 million pages of internal communications in original paper form that had previously been held in the archives of several security bases overrun by rebels in the early years of the war. The documents were taken out of the country, examined, digitised, and are now stored at a secure location in Europe. They show that the regime conducted a campaign of terror and mass murder, directed by Assad and executed by army, security, and Ba’ath Party officers working within a strict hierarchy.  

The richness of detail in the documents is striking. Internal communications reveal orders from the highest leadership levels to show no mercy to demonstrators and to disperse public protests regardless of consequences. The documents reveal how military commanders received written instructions to threaten communities with destruction in case of resistance, to strike mosques and schools, and to mobilise loyalist paramilitaries to commit massacres. They describe systematic torture and murder in regime prisons; and demonstrate how high-ranking officers watched these crimes unfold in real time through cameras installed in interrogation rooms. Some even participated personally in the rape of detainees. 

These crimes were ordered and micromanaged by the Central Crisis Management Cell (CCMC), a body established by Assad in March 2011 to coordinate the response to street protests. Intelligence reports from that month took note of the demonstrators’ calls for “democracy, freedoms and reforms aimed at creating job opportunities.” These calls, however, were regarded as evidence of a foreign conspiracy. In his 16 April 2011 speech, Assad struck a tone considered by Western media to be relatively conciliatory. Privately, he was signing off on CCMC clampdown orders, noting that “the time for tolerance and meeting demands is over.”

Riot police and mukhabarat agents led the initial wave, but as matters escalated the response became whole-of-state. In the early months the CCMC ordered daily pro-regime counter-rallies and firearms training for Ba’ath Party members designated to confront and disperse protestors. The regime’s resort to state employees and loyalist student and labour unions to generate displays of support, and to the Ba’ath Party for a ready supply of street thugs, was part of a ‘broad front’ strategy designed to deny the protests a narrow target – Assad and his family – and to dissipate their energy by confronting a wide spectrum of state and state-affiliated bodies and interests. Curiously, the CCMC’s orders also included a requirement that detainees should not be released but instead should be referred to the courts for quick trials. This might sound reasonable: Syrian law allows suspects to be detained for up to 60 days before seeing a judge; but in practice this time limit was routinely ignored. The CCMC’s order was less about maintaining the rule of law than about embroiling the judiciary in the violent crackdown. 

The internal communications also reveal the complexities and challenges of fully mobilising the state’s repressive potential. On multiple occasions, for example, judges ordered the release of detainees against the will of the security forces – which mainly reflected a judicial bureaucracy still in a pre-2011 routine repression mode that had not adjusted to the regime’s sudden turn to maximum repression. Moreover, as noted by Reinoud Leenders, Syria had a history in which “carrying responsibility for extra-judicial violence made officers over-confident or insistent to be rewarded. When these rewards did not come as expected, (aborted) coup attempts followed.” In this light, the CCMC’s order to refer suspects to courts can also be understood as a strategy by Assad to limit the influence of security and military actors by denying them full authority over extra-judicial violence. Despite the CCMC being a body that centralised power, divide and rule of state institutions continued to be routine. 

CIJA’s painstaking work reveals Assad as the pinnacle of all chains of command. He can no longer claim ignorance of the atrocities: detailed CCMC reports were delivered to him daily, and he gave written instructions that went down the various chains of command and were executed. The case against Assad rests principally on the records compiled by his own bureaucracy of death.  

CIJA’s report, Behind the Curtain: Unravelling the Bureaucracy of Syria’s Killing Machine, is available at www.cija-syria-regime.org