Despite Damascus' signing onto the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013 and declaring a 1,300-ton stockpile, prohibited use continued and the size of the program remains unclear. An international taskforce backed by the United States, Germany, Britain, Canada and France, among others, will track down all remaining elements of the program and destroy them under the supervision of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Ibrahim Olabi, said in an interview. As many as 100 sites in Syria need to be inspected to determine what toxic munitions remain and how they should be destroyed, OPCW experts have said.

Syria unveils plan to eliminate Assad's chemical weapons: For decades, Assad ran a large-scale program for chemical weapons, the use of which killed and injured thousands during Syria's long-running civil war. www.reuters.com/world/americ... #Baathism #ChemicalWeapons

Before Operation Epic Fury began on Feb. 28, Iranian officials and regime-aligned analysts leaned heavily into rhetoric that echoed Syria's civil war. The protests, they claimed, were not organic but the crafty work of foreign agents working for enemies - namely the United States and Israel - determined to break Iran up into fragments and plunge it into chaos by ousting its government. Ironically, this narrative conveniently ignores Tehran's own role in Syria for more than a decade before Ahmad al-Sharaa and his Islamist rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, ousted Assad in December 2024. The IRG Quds Force was instrumental in propping up Assad, their top regional ally, enabling numerous massacres of Syrian civilians. Iranian officials, such as the IRC's new commander Ahmad Vahidi and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, seemed to copy and paste Assad-era rhetoric, blaming "terrorists" and the Islamic State group for the deaths inflicted by state security forces - the IRGC and its Basij paramilitary force. The fearmongering by Iranian officials was meant to silence Iranian protesters and those operating in the "gray space" - Iranians who don't want the clerical establishment but worry that protests will fail and leave them in prison. Meanwhile, those already on the streets chanted, "Basij, IRGC, you are our Islamic State."

What distinguishes this latest round is the scale of the killing by security forces. The regime's lackeys wielded knives and machetes alongside military-grade weapons, firing indiscriminately at peaceful protesters and also bystanders running errands. This violence mostly occurred under the cover of a communications shutdown designed to conceal the regime's atrocities and blunt the outrage of the Iranian people, some of whom have been so brutalized that they opted to sing and dance in protest rather than mourn their slain loved ones, suggesting that the fear machine of the Islamic Republic might finally be losing effectiveness. And as fear dwindled, fury rose in response to the Assad-style atrocities. Iranians reported that protesters' corpses were treated like lumps of meat, dumped in piles from ice cream vans and meat trucks, forcing relatives to search for their loved ones in the most dehumanizing way. One father reportedly spent at least 12 minutes looking for his dead son, calling out repeatedly, "My dear Sepehr, where are you, son?" A channel associated with state media took it upon itself to mock the deaths of the protesters by asking a macabre multiple-choice question: "Which refrigerator does the Islamic Republic keep the bodies in?"

Authorities reportedly charged exorbitant sums to families of killed protesters and even forced them to sign paperwork that claimed they were martyred members of the Basij. The Assad regime also used to control public displays of mourning for those killed by its own security (or by IRGC proxy Hezbollah or by Russian airstrikes), forcing grieving families to limit or cancel burial rights and to falsely proclaim that their loved ones were "killed by terrorists," the de facto way of referring to antiregime dissenters, or that they merely died in a random "accident." In Iran, forcing mourners to count their dead among the Basij may help explain the rise in the death toll among Iran's security forces - 207, according to the nongovernmental organization Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI). Reports emerged that families of detained protesters were forced to attend state rallies marking the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian Revolution on Feb. 11 if they wanted their relatives to be released or spared from execution, or to have their sentences reduced. And yet, despite this repressive atmosphere, Iranians continued to defy the regime. In mid-February, they marked 40 days since the deaths of protesters, and in some cases were fired upon by security forces, while there were further protests at numerous prominent universities across Iran at the end of the month - even as the threat of war loomed over the country.

Iranians reported that authorities also pushed for "dafneh dasteh jami," or mass graves, to hide the true death toll from the uprising. Some corpses weren't even given the dignity of a body bag, presumably because authorities ran out. Some protesters who dared to enter a hospital with injuries, knowing they could be arrested afterward, were reportedly shot point-blank in the head; they were discovered at the morgues and forensic centers with catheters and medical devices still attached. Doctors and nurses were also detained for treating protesters. The messages that poured out of Iran in January were always the same: What the media reported was only a sliver of what transpired across all 31 provinces. According to HRAI, at least 6,488 protesters were killed, with another 11,744 cases under review - now delayed by the war - with more than 53,000 arrests. The U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Mai Soto, suggested that the number may exceed 20,000, while anonymous senior officials within the Health Ministry said it may exceed 30,000. By even the most conservative estimates, the regime killed more people in December and January than during the 1979 revolution itself. "You have to go back to Agha Muhammad Khan in the 1790s to witness a similar intensity of violence meted out by the Iranian state against its people," Ali Ansari, director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews, told me.

What the Islamic Republic learned about repression from Syria: Iran helped the Assad regime crush unarmed protests with staggering violence starting 2011. Now, it has turned those same tactics on its own people newlinesmag.com/argument/wha... By @hdagres.bsky.social #Islamism #Baathism

estimates based on a variety of data indicate that between 100,000 and 300,000 people are still missing in Syria. The crime of enforced disappearance constitutes a human rights violation that contravenes international law. Consequently, the new Syrian government is legally bound to search for the missing individuals. Enforced disappearances may constitute a war crime when committed in the context of an armed conflict. When such attacks are carried out as part of a widespread or systematic attack against the civilian population, they can be classified as a crime against humanity. On May 17, 2025, the Syrian authorities established two commissions to deal with past violence. The first was the National Commission for Transitional Justice. The second was the National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared (NCM).

The White Helmets’ search for Syria’s disappeared: One year after Assad’s fall, the new authorities and the Syria Civil Defence are searching for bodies and answers as tens of thousands remain unaccounted for. newlinesmag.com/spotlight/th... By Amelie David #Baathism

After a popular revolt in 2011 spiraled into a civil war, the role of the secret police - long a menacing presence in Mr. al-Assad's Syria — transformed. Legal constraints were tossed aside as security agencies worked to crush the rebellion and break Syrians' resistance. Prisons became overcrowded with detainees. Interrogators administered electric shocks to prisoners' genitals, threw corpses and open gas canisters into their cells and deprived them of sleep, according to eight former interrogators who spoke to The Times. They kept meticulous records of every prisoner. At the start of the war, Russian and Tunisian allies had advised Mr. al-Assad to do so, saying that prisoner confessions and other information could provide the regime legal cover, according to Ismail Keewan, a former senior official in the military's medical branch. Then the records became a liability. In January 2014, images of more than 6,000 bodies from secret prisons, some bearing signs of torture, were smuggled out of the country by a Syrian military photographer, code-named Caesar. The photos were the first detailed evidence of torture and executions by the Assad government since the war began. Months later, France submitted the images to the United Nations Security Council, which lent them greater legitimacy and raised the prospect that the regime would be charged with war crimes. The security apparatus decided to mount a defense. In August 2014, senior military, political and intelligence officials met with Syrian legal scholars to discuss their strategy, according to a memo viewed by The Times that described a meeting of the National Security Bureau, the coordinating hub for Syria's intelligence and security agencies. The Times verified the deliberations laid out in the memo with two former officials who were briefed on the discussions.

The cover-up: Inside the plot to conceal Assad’s crimes: Thousands of documents and interviews with Assad-era officials reveal how the regime worked to conceal evidence of its atrocities during the Syrian civil war. archive.ph/qa5R4 #Baathism #authoritarianism

Like the Stasi of East Germany and Stalin's secret police, It thrived on instilling fear at an almost molecular level in Syrian society, turning neighbors, friends and spouses against one another. Once ensnared by the secret police, many victims vanished for good: More than 160,000 people were forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime since 2011, according to a count by the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Assad's industrialized machinery of death killed many thousands who were then buried in mass graves, according to U.S. and Syrian war crimes investigators, human rights groups, U.N. documentation and the Journal's own investigations.

Families, neighbors informed on each other in Assad’s #Syria, with deadly consequences: Intelligence files found in Damascus prison complex reveal details of cases that led to brutal detentions; a wife records a husband
archive.ph/biox7 #Baathism #authoritarianism

Though medical institutions throughout regime-controlled areas were involved in the killing and disposal of prisoners during the Assad era, the military hospitals of Tishreen and Harasta appear forefront in the regime's operations to process the bodies of the thousands of detainees killed in detention facilities around Damascus - including the infamous Sednaya prison, dubbed the "Human Slaughterhouse". These two hospitals served vital functions in the killing system. Firstly, they were staging posts for the transfer of corpses, places where dead prisoners were stored before being taken on to mass grave sites for secret burial. Second, they provided a bureaucratic "laundering" service, where falsified death certificates were issued by a medical apparatus obsessed not only with the bureaucracy of mass murder but with hiding it too. "Harasta and Tishreen were used to warehouse the bodies of prisoners who died under torture, the last stop before their corpses were moved out to mass graves," explained Diab Serrih, chief executive of the Association of Detainees and Missing of Sednaya Prison (ADMSP) and himself a Sednaya survivor. "The real purpose of the hospitals was to falsify death certificates," Serrih added, "to wash away the culpability of the regime in the torture and abuse by hiding it behind phrases like 'renal failure' or 'cardiac arrest'."

Assad’s doctors: torturers-in-chief and the cogs in his killing machine.
Since the dictator’s fall, horrifying new details have emerged of the brutal murders of detainees whose cause of death were ‘laundered’ with the stroke of a pen www.thetimes.com/article/a224... #Syria #Baathism

The Damascus Dossier photographs are a harrowing sequel to a cache of images depicting prisoners killed between 2011 and 2013, which were smuggled out of Syria more than a decade ago by a military defector codenamed Caesar. The Caesar photos set off a series of international prosecutions and sanctions against the Syrian government, serving as evidence in the first-ever torture trial against the Assad regime, in Germany, in 2020. That case resulted in the life imprisonment of Anwar Raslan, a former Syrian colonel, who was linked to at least 4,000 cases of state-led torture, and the 4½/2-year prison sentence of Eyad al-Gharib, a former officer, for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. The photos also inspired a U.S. law known as the Caesar Act, which levied sanctions against Assad and the Syrian government and authorized the State Department to collect evidence on and prosecute perpetrators of war crimes in Syria. In 2014, Caesar, who earlier this year revealed himself as Farid al-Madhan, the former head of the forensic evidence department with the military police in Damascus, offered background on the photos to a team of international prosecutors. He told them that military officers were tasked with photographing bodies to prove that orders of murder had been carried out. The photos were also used to produce death certificates, without the families having to see their loved ones bodies, he said. In most cases, those government-issued death certificates falsely listed the inmates causes of death as "cardiac arrest" or "cardiorespiratory arrest." Despite all the evidence, Assad's government denied the validity of the Caesar photos.

Assad’s archive of death: Photographs of more than 10,000 regime victims capture a campaign of torture and mass murder in haunting, meticulous detail. www.icij.org/investigatio... By Nicole Sadek and @karriekehoe.bsky.social #Baathism #TheDamascusDossier

This is no ordinary security company. During Syria's civil war, the United Nations paid Shorouk at least $11 million to provide security services to protect U.N. offices, from its de facto headquarters at the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus to regional hubs. Now, internal Shorouk documents reveal that the company was secretly owned by the intelligence services of former President Bashar Assad's regime. Even as the United Nations poured money into the firm, those intelligence services were engaged in a violent campaign to crush any opposition to Assad.

United Nations paid $11M to Syrian security firm owned by Assad intelligence services, documents show: For over a decade, U.N. aid agencies poured millions into the company despite warnings from human rights advocates. www.icij.org/investigatio... #UN #Baathism #Shorouk

Only 25 people can solve Syria’s darkest puzzle. They’re dentists Tens of thousands of people were tortured and murdered by the Assad regime. Now an unlikely alliance has begun the monumental task of identifying them

Only 25 people can solve #Syria’s darkest puzzle. They’re dentists: Tens of thousands of people were tortured and murdered by the Assad regime. Now an unlikely alliance has begun the monumental task of identifying them www.thetimes.com/article/99ad... #Baathism

The 40-year-old, identified only as Alaa M. in accordance with German privacy laws, was found guilty of killing two people and torturing another eight during his time working in Syria as a doctor at a military hospital and detention centre in Homs in 2011 and 2012.

A Syrian doctor who had practised in Germany was sentenced to life in prison by a German court on Monday for crimes against humanity and war crimes after he was found guilty of torturing dissidents in Syria. www.reuters.com/world/middle... #Baathism #Syria

#CatchOfTheDay
#OpenAccess on
#MENAdoc:

"Debating Islam in post-Baathist Iraq" by Nathan J. Brown

[Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005]

dx.doi.org/10.25673/106...

#postbaathistiraq #islam #baathism #iraq

Three months after Assad’s fall, doors hiding the shallow graves have been flung open. In the Damascus district of Sbeina last week, the bones in one basement were so incinerated that it was hard for civil defense workers to identify how many bodies were in the ash. At first, as Washington Post journalists observed, the men tried counting the pelvises; in the end, they found themselves guessing. Were there 20 here? Or more? One of the skulls seemed tiny, they noted, and there were bullet casings in the detritus. They wondered whether this was a family that had been killed together. None of the neighbors watching seemed to know.

Syrians unearth horrors of the Assad years in their basements: Syrians had remained silent about the bodies dumped in countless basements by Assad’s forces. Rescue teams now are moving from home to home excavating remains. archive.is/2025.03.04-1... #Baathism

While HTS is, so far, not as bad as the Alawites feared, the more radical groups terrify them. As city after city fell in the surprise offensive, HTS rushed forces to Damascus. This left a security vacuum in Alawite territory. Other rebels, some backed by Turkey, have filled the gap, taking revenge with looting and kidnappings. Dozens of men, among them students with no ties to the old regime, have been arrested by such groups, which are indisciplined and rarely identify themselves. Locals report that HTS officials, while sympathetic, say they too have no ideas who the perpetrators are. HTS—a group once seen by Alawites as an existential threat—is now viewed as the only force capable of protecting them from extremists. Yet it is preoccupied with running Damascus. “If HTS is to be the government, they must run all of Syria, including security for us,” said a resident of Khirbet al-Mezzeh whose brother was killed last week by one of the other groups. “Everyone here can see that they fall into two categories. Some are very respectful; others are bad, like the devil,” adds the villager. Governing Syria is a different game to running Idlib, the tiny province where Ahmad al-Sharaa, HTS’s leader, began his transformation from jihadist to Syria’s de facto leader. Will his government allow an entire community to be held responsible for the sins of the Assad regime? Many Alawites were euphoric at the toppling of the Assads. Now they are vulnerable to radicals exploiting the limits of HTS’s power. Once a favoured minority, Alawites wonder if this new country has a place for them.

Alawites formed Syria’s elite. Now they are terrified: Fear of reprisal stalks the heartlands of the Assad regime archive.ph/Tgs0O #Syria #Baathism #HTS #Islamism

Secret Assad files show Stasi of Syria put children on trial: Analysis of intelligence documents reveals that family members spied on each other, teachers betrayed pupils — and ‘traitors’ were tortured and killed www.thetimes.com/article/1820... By Louise Callaghan #Baathism #totalitarianism

WATCH: A Look Inside Assad’s Mass Grave Sites Exclusive footage reveals the scale of atrocities under Syria’s brutal regime.

A look inside Assad’s mass grave sites: Exclusive footage reveals the scale of atrocities under Syria’s brutal regime. www.thefp.com/p/watch-a-lo... By Tanya Lukyanova #Baathism #totalitarianism

Families seek closure at a Damascus morgue: Syrians are combing through bodies to identify loved ones executed in Assad regime prisons newlinesmag.com/spotlight/fa... #Baathism #totalitarianism

Revenge attacks in post-Assad Syria fuel fear and mistrust: Across Syria, the country’s rebel leaders are struggling to contain revenge attacks, as vigilantes seize on the chaos of the moment to settle personal scores. archive.ph/SaZUp #syriancivilwar #Baathism #Islamism

An international war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in #Syria has exposed a state-run “machinery of death” under Assad in which he estimated more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013. www.arabnews.com/node/2583455... #Baathism

Assad dispatched $250mn of Syria’s cash to Moscow Central bank sent planeloads of dollars in 2018 and 2019 when dictator was indebted to the Kremlin

Bashar al-Assad’s central bank airlifted around $250mn of Syria’s cash in a two-year period to Moscow when the then-Syrian dictator was indebted to the Kremlin for military support & his relatives were secretly buying assets in Russia. www.ft.com/content/84ef... #Baathism #putinism

Assad dispatched $250mn of Syria’s cash to Moscow Central bank sent planeloads of dollars in 2018 and 2019 when dictator was indebted to the Kremlin

Bashar al-Assad’s central bank airlifted around $250mn of Syria’s cash in a two-year period to Moscow when the then-Syrian dictator was indebted to the Kremlin for military support & his relatives were secretly buying assets in Russia. www.ft.com/content/84ef... #Baathism #putinism

Hezbollah loses supply route through Syria, in blow to it and Iran: The militant group’s leader admits that the toppling of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, cut off an important land route from Iran. archive.ph/JODJB #Islamism #Baathism #IranianImperialism

Russian soldiers at Syrian base scramble for the next flight home Troops unsettled by the victory of the same Islamists they had been bombing are keen to leave, but Moscow hopes to hang on to its strategic presence

Russian soldiers at Syrian base scramble for the next flight home: Troops unsettled by the victory of the same Islamists they had been bombing are keen to leave, but Moscow hopes to hang on to its strategic presence www.thetimes.com/article/aa82... #Baathism #putinism

‘Their bodies had turned to black’: Syrian chlorine victims can finally speak out A chemical attack on the town of Douma killed 43 people in 2018. Now Assad has fallen, the enforced silence of those who witnessed it is over

‘Their bodies had turned to black’: Syrian chlorine victims can finally speak out
A chemical attack on the town of Douma killed 43 people in 2018. Now Assad has fallen, the enforced silence of those who witnessed it is over www.theguardian.com/world/2024/d... By Bethan McKernan #Baathism

An anti-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper reported that the terror group helped hundreds of Syrian intelligence officers flee to #Lebanon in the days before forces opposed to Syria’s strongman Bashar al-Assad captured Damascus on Sunday. www.timesofisrael.com/hezbollah-sa... #Islamism #Baathism

Die Era des #Baathismus ist endlich vorbei. #Tankies haben ihre Fahnen heute auf Halbmast.

#Baathism #Syrien #Syria

Russia persuaded Assad that he would lose the fight against armed groups led by the former al-Qaeda offshoot HTS and offered him and his family safe passage if he left immediately… archive.ph/IjDB2 #putinism #Baathism

From a palace to a dacha: the Assads in Moscow: The Syrian dictator has fled to Russia with his family. Their life in the suburbs will be as semi-guests, semi-prisoners of Putin, says Simon Sebag Montefiore archive.ph/m8xoW #putinism #Baathism

From Putin to Assad's army – and then to Hezbollah: These are the Russian weapons found in Lebanon:
An analysis of weapons captured in Lebanon shows that Hezbollah received advanced arms from Russia via the Syrian military archive.ph/HMPSH #putinism #Islamism #Baathism

Lebanon must not be refuge for Syrian officials, Lebanese party warns Lebanon must not become a safe haven for Syrian officials who are responsible for crimes, a leading Lebanese political party warned on Tuesday, citing reports that leading figures in Bashar al-Assad's ousted regime had fled to neighbouring Lebanon.

#Lebanon must not become a safe haven for Syrian officials who are responsible for crimes, a leading Lebanese political party warned on Tuesday, citing reports that leading figures in Bashar al-Assad's ousted regime had fled to neighbouring Lebanon. www.reuters.com/world/middle... #Baathism