"On December 8, 2024, as the regime of Bashar al-Assad collapsed, Mukhtar was at his home in Idlib Governorate, in northwestern Syria. (For safety reasons, he asked to use a pseudonym.) A researcher with the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC), he watched videos of rebel forces rolling into the Syrian capital, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, whose precursor had been affiliated with Al Qaeda."
"He was overwhelmed by the ebullient scenes of prisoners emerging, bewildered, from their cells at the Mezzeh military airbase and the notorious Sednaya prison. Less thrilling were the crowds of people rummaging through documents, searching for any mention of missing loved ones, scattering potentially valuable evidence of the regime's crimes over the floors. The next day, Mukhtar felt a sinking feeling as he watched videos of crowds of people stomping over those documents."
"He pictured thousands of records, some offering insights into the fates of what the Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates to be more than 170,000 still missing, going up in flames. "A big chaos will come," he thought as he picked up his mobile phone to call his bosses at SJAC and tell them they should send him to the capital."
Mukhtar, a researcher with the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC), observed rebel forces enter Damascus as the Assad regime collapsed and prisoners emerged from Mezzeh and Sednaya. Crowds rifled through security records looking for names of missing loved ones, scattering and trampling potential evidence. Israeli airstrikes struck the Kafr Sousa security complex, raising fears that archives held by multiple security branches would be destroyed. Mukhtar contacted SJAC to mobilize efforts to gather and authenticate documents for future war-crimes prosecutions. Activists and lawyers had earlier established documentation centers such as the Violations Documentation Centre (VDC) to collect and preserve such records.
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