When news broke about the fall of President Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria this week, photojournalist Paul Conroy found himself thinking about a former colleague, Marie Colvin.
An American journalist, Colvin was killed in February 2012 in the city of Homs when the Syrian military shelled the media center she was in. French photographer Remi Ochlik was also killed, and Conroy and two other journalists were injured.
In 2019, a U.S. court determined that the Syrian military had tracked the broadcasts of the journalists covering the siege of Homs, then deliberately targeted the makeshift media center.
“That was a good moral victory,” Conroy said about the ruling. But now that Assad’s government has collapsed, Conroy hopes more justice will come.
“I think there’s a lot more to come out now that Syria has opened up,” he told VOA from Odesa, where he has been covering the war in Ukraine. Conroy said that access to government records might provide more evidence about the crimes committed by Assad and his government.
“The aim is twofold — primarily the justice and accountability for Syrian citizens, but also the press,” he said.
Conroy joins a chorus of press freedom and rights groups, as well as U.S. President Joe Biden, calling for accountability for actions taken by the Assad government.
Syria has long been one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, has documented 141 journalists killed between 2011, when the civil war began, and 2024.
Of those, CPJ said that at least 23 were classified as murders, including the cases of Colvin and Ochlik, and six deaths occurred in government custody. The New York-based press freedom group ranks Syria fourth in the world in terms of impunity in journalist killings.
Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders, known as RSF, determined that as of Monday, 23 journalists were jailed in Syria, and 10 others were missing.
“We’re very concerned about their well-being,” Jonathan Dagher, the head of RSF’s Middle East desk, told VOA from Paris.
The press freedom group is investigating “where they have been, if they’re still alive, which is a very grim thing to say, but for many, we haven’t had the sign of life in years,” Dagher said.
Rebels led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, took control of the major cities of Aleppo, Hama and then the capital, Damascus, over the past week. In those cities, thousands of prisoners have been released.
Among them, according to RSF, are Hanin Gebran, a journalist with Syria Media Monitor who had been detained since June 2024, and Tal al-Mallouhi, a blogger who had been detained since 2009.
The fact that there was no sign for years that al-Mallouhi was alive is cause for hope that other jailed journalists may be alive, too, Dagher said.
Among the journalists still missing is American reporter Austin Tice, who has been detained in Syria since 2012. His family announced last week that they have received information vetted by the U.S. government that confirms Tice is alive and detained in Damascus.
Following Assad’s ousting, Biden said the U.S. remained committed to securing Tice’s release. But his exact whereabouts are unclear.
That the whereabouts of so many journalists in Syria remain unknown highlights how the Assad government long targeted reporters to prevent details being made public about crimes it was perpetrating against its own people, according to Alessandro Accorsi, a conflict analyst at International Crisis Group.
“It was a regime that was built largely on fear and largely on keeping people disconnected,” Accorsi told VOA from Brussels.
Details surrounding how accountability will be achieved — for instance, at an international court or in Syria — remain unclear, experts told VOA.
“But what’s for sure is we want a trial by an independent and competent court that can result in clear and transparent accountability for all the victims,” Dagher said.
Complicating matters is that Assad has fled to Russia, where the Kremlin has given him and his family asylum.
But even charges in absentia would be worthwhile, Conroy said. “There needs to be some deterrence that you cannot just kill journalists and run off into the sunset,” he said.
Alongside calls for accountability are efforts to foster improved press freedom in Syria.
Establishing an environment in which free speech and press freedom are respected is crucial, said Fadel Abdulghany, executive director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
“That’s what we are fighting for. This is essential for the democratic state,” Abdulghany told VOA from Doha in Qatar.
HTS also has a concerning press freedom record. The militant group stands accused of killing six journalists between 2012 and 2019, according to RSF. HTS has also abducted, detained and mistreated journalists in detention.
The United States, Turkey, the United Nations and several other countries designate HTS as a terrorist organization.
Dagher said the only way to establish respect for press freedom is to ensure that perpetrators of previous crimes are held accountable.
Speaking with VOA in between sporadic blackouts in Ukraine, Conroy said he plans to return to Syria in January.
But if Colvin were still alive, Conroy said, they would already be back there, together.
“I know for a fact, as soon as that started happening,” Conroy said, “my phone would be ringing off the hook, and it would have been, ‘Get onto the picture desk and get moving. I’ll see you in Beirut.’” He chuckled at the thought.
