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On August 2, Wa’el Alzayat, Stephen J. Rapp, and Ben Taub addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. Alzayat is the senior policy advisor on Iraq and Syria to U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations Samantha Power, and a lecturer at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Rapp, the former U.S. ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, currently serves as a Global Prevention Fellow at the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide and a distinguished fellow at The Hague Institute for Global Justice. Taub is a contributing writer with the New Yorker, where he authored the recent articles “The Assad Files” (on documentation tying the regime to mass torture and killings) and “The Shadow Doctors” (on regime targeting of doctors and hospitals). Reporting for The Assad Files” was facilitated by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Andrew Tabler, the Martin J. Gross Fellow in the Institute’s Program on Arab Politics, served as the event’s moderator.

WA’EL ALZAYAT

The focus in Syria is usually on the crimes of the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, and these two groups are undoubtedly committing atrocious crimes. But the overwhelming number of crimes in Syria is being committed daily on behalf of the Syrian regime.

The U.S. government is focused on taking practical steps toward establishing transitional justice in Syria. These efforts include international organizations seeking to prosecute parties on all sides of the conflict, although most such efforts have been directed at the Syrian government. Beyond abuse of detainees and sexual violence against women, such efforts resulted in the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), whose report on chemical weapons (CW) use in Syria is due out in September. Although fewer people have been affected by CW as compared to those displaced, detained, tortured, and so forth, a clear international consensus and UN Security Council resolutions exist to hold all parties in Syria accountable for CW use. Efforts to refer the CW file to the International Criminal Court (ICC) have been blocked on the Security Council by Russia and China. Indeed, Russia will not agree to measures that h...