As Syria navigates its post-Assad transition, three prominent Syrian voices—journalist Malek al-Hafez, rights advocate Fadel Abdul Ghany, and legal scholar Radwan Ziadeh—are calling for urgent transitional justice to prevent revenge, heal social fractures, and rebuild national cohesion. Their warnings converge on a critical truth: justice is not a choice but a precondition for Syria’s recovery.
In the aftermath of Bashar al-Assad’s fall, Syria faces a defining question: will it reckon with its past through institutions of justice and truth, or allow revenge, hatred, and division to dictate its future? This report brings together the perspectives of leading Syrian thinkers and human rights advocates who warn that the country’s post-conflict window for meaningful transitional justice is rapidly closing. From the toxic rise of hate speech online to the urgent need for courts, reparations, and truth commissions, their insights illuminate the moral and political crossroads at which Syria now stands.
In the fragile aftermath of Assad’s fall on December 8, 2024, Syria has entered a critical and volatile transition. The collapse of a half-century-long authoritarian regime has opened a rare window for institutional reconstruction, national healing, and democratic renewal. But it has also unshackled the ghosts of the past—grievances long buried under layers of repression, violence, and fear—and exposed a fractured society teetering between justice and revenge, between inclusive reconciliation and digital civil war.
The unfolding Syrian discourse—online, in transitional government circles, and among rights advocates—reveals a sharp tension between two contending forces. On one hand, there is a growing movement to build a transitional justice framework that can process the trauma of the past and restore faith in the rule of law. On the other, an increasingly toxic digital culture, marked by hate speech, tribalism, and ideological persecution, threatens to derail this effort by fuelling division, fear, and acts of vengeance.
The Digital Battlefield of Hate
Journalist Malek al-Hafez, in his powerful essay “Syrians in the Trap of Hatred”, paints a sobering portrait of Syria’s current digital environment. He draws a disturbing parallel between Syria’s polarised online discourse and the genocidal incitement propagated by Rwanda’s infamous Radio Mille Collines in 1994. In that case, dehumanising rhetoric preceded the massacre of nearly 800,000 people in just 100 days. In Syria, Hafez warns, the language of “traitors,” “cockroaches,” and “loyalists” has become so normalised that it is eroding the last remnants of shared civic identity.
What makes Syria’s situation particularly alarming, he notes, is the rise of self-styled “influencers” on social media platforms, many of whom act as ideological gatekeepers rather than public intellectuals. These digital provocateurs are not professional journalists or scholars, but rather populists whose followings are cultivated through aggression, spectacle, and unwavering loyalty to particular factions or figures. They trade in what Hafez calls “mass mobilisation farms of demagoguery,” where dissent is not debated but criminalised, and where women, in particular, are often targeted with gendered abuse, blackmail, and online shaming.
This moral degradation, he argues, is underpinned by a culture of hero-worship and groupthink—what Ibn Khaldun once described as asabiyyah, or the blind solidarity of the tribe. In today’s Syria, criticism of a charismatic leader—whether political, tribal, or religious—is treated as an existential attack on the collective. “We forgive disasters,” he writes, “and excuse catastrophes, but vilify the one who dares criticise the symbol.” Such a mindset is not only intellectually corrosive but also dangerously anti-democratic. It is incompatible with any meaningful form of transitional justice.
A Nation of Wounds: The Case for Institutional Justice
Against this volatile backdrop, rights advocates like Fadel Abdul Ghany are urgently calling for a structured, principled response. As head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), Abdul Ghany has spent over a decade documenting the atrocities of the Assad era. In his policy paper “Transitional Justice in Syria: A National Imperative to Prevent Revenge and Secure Stability After Conflict”, he outlines a sober, evidence-based vision of what Syria must do to avoid descending into retaliatory chaos.
The numbers he cites are staggering: at least 231,000 civilians killed—202,000 of them by regime forces—over 157,000 enforced disappearances, the systematic use of barrel bombs, chemical weapons, and cluster munitions, and the displacement of nearly 14 million people—half the country’s population. These are not just war crimes, Abdul Ghany notes—they are national traumas etched into Syria’s collective memory.
And the risk now is clear: without a credible, institutional pathway for justice, acts of revenge will continue to rise. Abdul Ghany reports that in cities like Homs, Aleppo, and parts of the Syrian coast, there are growing signs of extrajudicial reprisals against former regime affiliates. This trend, if left unchecked, threatens to unravel any prospect of long-term peace.
His solution is the rapid creation of a National Transitional Justice Commission, built around four pillars:
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Criminal accountability, through mixed national and international courts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity;
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Truth-telling and reconciliation, through national hearings and public documentation of past abuses;
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Reparations, including both material compensation and symbolic recognition of suffering;
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Institutional reform, especially of Syria’s notoriously abusive security and judicial systems.
Abdul Ghany’s approach draws heavily on international precedents—from South Africa to Argentina—but is carefully tailored to Syria’s specific historical, sectarian, and geopolitical complexities.
From Legal Blueprint to Political Action
If Abdul Ghany lays out the architecture of transitional justice, legal scholar and activist Radwan Ziadeh pushes for its immediate implementation. In his article “The Urgent Need to Establish a Transitional Justice Commission in Syria Today”, Ziadeh argues that Syria is now in its “critical window”—a brief post-conflict moment when transitional institutions can be established with both popular legitimacy and international support.
He points to recent commitments made by Syria’s transitional president Ahmad al-Sharaa and the constitutional declaration’s Article 49, which mandates the formation of a justice body “based on effective, consultative, victim-centred mechanisms.” This legal groundwork, Ziadeh argues, must now be transformed into functioning institutions, starting with a commission that can interact credibly with existing international accountability bodies such as the UN’s International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) and the Commission of Inquiry on Syria.
For Ziadeh, the commission is not merely about justice—it is about narrative control. Public truth commissions, local hearings, and symbolic memorialisation can serve as tools to break the mythologies of sectarian grievance and re-establish a shared Syrian memory. This is particularly critical, he notes, as some former war criminals—including figures like Fadi Saqr and Mohammed Hamsho—remain active in Syrian society without facing legal consequences. Without accountability, such figures may continue to shape Syria’s future as they shaped its collapse.
The Moral Core: Justice as Reconciliation
A fourth voice in the current debate—activist and legal observer Moatasem Alkilani—underscores the moral dimension of Syria’s transition. In a widely shared Facebook statement, Alkilani offers a citizen’s manifesto for how a transitional justice commission must be formed: it must be independent, diverse, gender-inclusive, and composed entirely of individuals untainted by prior involvement in human rights abuses.
“Justice is not optional,” he writes, “but the foundation of peace.” He warns that no lasting reconciliation is possible without confronting the past directly—and without placing the needs and dignity of victims at the heart of the process.
Between Memory and Amnesia, Justice or Ruin
What unites Hafez, Abdul Ghany, Ziadeh, and Alkilani is a refusal to accept two false binaries: that Syria must choose between justice and stability, or between truth and amnesia. All four argue, in different registers, that transitional justice is not a luxury—it is a national necessity. The alternative is a repetition of past violence under new banners.
Syria today is not just recovering from authoritarianism—it is recovering from a psychological, moral, and social catastrophe. As Hafez warns, digital tribalism and unchecked hate speech threaten to infect a generation raised in the ruins. As Abdul Ghany insists, without accountability, victims will turn to the only justice available to them—revenge. And as Ziadeh and Alkilani emphasise, unless justice is institutionalised, it will be privatised, politicised, or forgotten.
The stakes are stark. Transitional justice is not merely about prosecuting perpetrators or compensating victims. It is about rebuilding a social contract in a land where that contract was shattered. It is about constructing a state not just of law, but of memory and dignity.
It is Syria’s bridge from tragedy to possibility.
And it must begin now—before the bridge burns.
