The search for secret prisoners in the dungeons of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is now the top priority of the Syrian civil defense group known as the White Helmets, which has been working throughout the civil war to rescue victims of bombing raids on civilian areas.
Since the fall of Assad's government earlier this month, the group has also been documenting the former regime’s alleged war crimes and helping millions of displaced Syrians to return home.
In an interview with VOA’s Ukrainian Service, White Helmets co-founder Abdulrahman Almawwas discussed what the group’s volunteers have found in the liberated areas, how they are gathering evidence to bring Assad regime elements to justice, and whether Syria faces a threat from radical Islamist forces.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
VOA: What have White Helmets volunteers found in the newly liberated areas of Syria?
Abdulrahman Almawwas, White Helmets co-founder: After the [rebel] military operation started, we started to receive a lot of calls related to unidentified bodies. … We found more than 400 unidentified bodies, most of them [Syrian government] soldiers. Moreover, we found a lot of documents in the military facilities [that] had geolocations for potential targets, mostly in civilian areas. We also found some lists of detainees with the names and dates of their arrest, and execution orders with the names of the dead.
When we moved to Damascus, we also found prisons. We weren’t there from the beginning, so we didn't meet the prisoners in Sednaya, but we were in touch with other prisoners. We were there to find if there were any underground cells.
After that, we started receiving a lot of calls about secret prisons, and that is what we are working on now — to find any secret prisoners. That is our top priority. ...
We are also working on the unexploded ordnance. A lot of civilians, including our volunteers … , come home and their houses were mined or have unexploded ordnance. And our UXO — exploded ordinance teams — are trying to deal with this.
VOA: Photos of Sednaya prison shocked the world. Can you talk a little bit more about your work helping to free the prisoners and also how you documented crimes against people held there?
Almawwas: We don't work on freeing prisoners, but we come after that, trying to connect them with their families, trying to provide first aid. And in this case, we brought some prisoners to hospitals in Damascus and transported them from the hospitals to their families if needed.
VOA: According to the human rights organizations, around 137,000 Syrians were missing from the Assad regime’s war on its own people. Only a small percentage of those people have been found. What are you doing to find those people, alive or not?
Almawwas: We are collaborating with other organizations because we cannot do all this work ourselves. Our vision for the future is to document and preserve all these facts to use for transitional justice and share it with the families. This is exactly what we aim to do — to make this reconciliation and then to have a peaceful country. Therefore we are focusing more on documenting the witnesses' testimonies and identifying the bodies.
Later, we will reach the families to interview them, collect the DNA, do the matching and simply find an answer to their questions about their loved ones’ fate.
VOA: In the Oscar-winning documentary about your organization, one of your volunteers, Muhammad Farah, said that justice will prevail one day. Do you believe that Syria’s liberation from the Assad regime is the justice you've been waiting for?
Almawwas: No, I don't believe this is justice, yet I believe this is … a victory for these families, for these detainees.
In the videos from Sednaya, I saw a woman who was arrested when she was 19 years old — she was a virgin. And now she is released with four kids; she doesn't know who the fathers of these kids are.
[Ending the regime's] arrests, torture and detentions — this is a victory. This is something we can be proud of. But justice hasn't started, because the perpetrators, the criminals, are still free. There is no court now, national or international. And that's what we are asking other states, other governments — we call them the friends of the Syrian people — to take real steps towards reconstructing Syria and bringing reconciliation and transitional justice. And without these three things, we will not have a country.
VOA: You worked closely with your Ukrainian counterparts on documenting Russian war crimes in Syria and in Ukraine. Can you tell a little bit more about that collaboration?
Almawwas: We worked on many cases. One of the most important ones was about the double tap airstrikes and attacks against humanitarian workers. We believe that this collaboration must continue. Russian perpetrators committed war crimes in Syria, and then they moved to Ukraine. And this collaboration is aimed to stop it from spreading. … We also need to share what we have to bring criminals to justice.
VOA: The Assad family regime ruled Syria for 53 years and it collapsed in 11 days. Very unexpectedly. In that context, do you have any message for the Ukrainian people?
Almawwas: Yes. We were suffering a lot, but we believed that this day would come. Despite a lot of disappointment with many countries and the international community — they let us down many times — in the end it happened.
So my message to Ukrainians, on behalf of the White Helmets and the Syrian people: We are standing with them against war crimes and their perpetrators. They should have confidence that justice will happen one day. No perpetrator or criminal will live forever.
VOA: Following the liberation of Syria, Russian propaganda has expressed concern about the rise of Islamist forces in the country, which is also a concern of some Western experts. What do you have to say about those concerns?
Almawwas: This was the [Assad] regime’s narrative since 2011. It was trying to export this image about Syria: You have Bashar al-Assad, or you will have ISIS, you will have Islamic groups. …
If you look at Syria, you will find a lot of civil society organizations. You will find that a lot of Syrians are not to the right or to the left — they are in the middle, they are just normal people, like in any country. …
We have Muslims, Christians, other groups, and we used to live together. And the only one who divided these groups was the regime. So we hope that the next government will be a serious transitional government … and it will lead us to a new Syria that all Syrians dream of.
