Post-Assad Syria: Frustration with a Long-Awaited Future

By: Nivin Houtary

June 2025

The poster is designed by the cartoonist Amani Al-ali.

“Come quickly; they’ve got into a row and need you to calm things down”

It wasn’t the first time. I hurried towards the training room, rehearsing what I might say on the way. 

The same argument was always lurking in the background. It often surfaced whatever the trainees’ profiles: men or women, former detainees, the displaced, bereaved siblings, or students whose studies had been cut short. No matter the audience, I always found myself saying:

Friends, I feel the depth of your anger and despair, and I recognise your genuine concerns. Your demands are legitimate. But please remember: this training is to prepare us for the period that will follow the revolution, after the regime has fallen, a time that has not yet come. Don’t project our discussion today onto our present reality. We are talking about transitional justice: a hoped-for future in which tyranny has collapsed, and the war has ended; prisoners released, and refugees have returned. That is when transitional justice will begin.

Your frustration is valid. You demand justice before the war has even ended, before trials have begun. Justice cannot come now; it belongs to the future and will be essential. Justice is the cornerstone of civil peace, the path to rebuilding trust and restoring the bonds that bring neighbours and families together again.

Don’t dwell on the past. For fourteen years we have lived through gunfire on peaceful protesters demanding none but an end to dictatorship. We’ve paid heavily: bombardment, siege, mass arrests, detention, torture, displacement, even drowning at sea while fleeing for survival. Do not carry all of that into this training on transitional justice. Do not be constrained by today’s political and military stalemate. Look instead to the future: the day Bashar al-Assad falls, the end of decades of family rule, the moment we take back our lives.

What I once spoke of as a distant future became reality last year, on 8 December 2024, when a TV presenter announced:

It is 06:18 a.m. Damascus time. Syria without Bashar al-Assad. The Army’s General Command has announced to its ranks: the regime has fallen.

It has been six months since that day. In all that time, we have felt the joy of victory and of returning home, and we have also felt the weight of rebuilding it. We lived what had once seemed only a dream. I lived it myself, I who had so often repeated those words of reassurance in training rooms.

I felt it again one afternoon over lunch with people I was meeting for the first time, when I learned that one of them was related to a man responsible for massacres. I tried to convince myself that we had to close the chapter on the past and focus on the present. But when that person mentioned his relative’s name so casually, without the slightest hint of shame in front of people who had suffered so deeply, my body reacted. Nausea surged, heat rose, my heart pounded. I left the table.

My thoughts pulled in opposite directions. On one hand, I knew we had to move forward if we were to live in the present. On the other, I could not ignore the need for accountability.

Perpetrators must face justice, those who defend Assad’s crimes must be discredited, and anyone unwilling to distance themselves from the crimes of their relatives should not continue in public or social life.

 That tension did not leave me. It resurfaced in women’s political meetings and even in the chance remarks I overheard on public transport.

The emotions still grip me: sudden anger, nausea, pounding headaches. I no longer enter a training room with the steadiness I once had, the calm needed to bridge the gap between those who demand full justice and those who prioritise peace.

Now, when I meet the daughter of a detainee who still has no news of her father even after the prisons have opened, I can only stand with her. Her anger and helplessness become my own.

The future I once encouraged women to imagine, a life after the regime’s fall, has not delivered justice. It seems it never will.

In Syria, justice will never be complete. No law, however far-reaching, can undo the harm or restore the lives of millions who have carried the burden of decades of compounded crimes.

By: Nivin Houtary