A UN-backed team investigating years of crimes in war-torn Syria says it has reached out to its new government and hopes to deploy to help gather and preserve evidence on the ground -- in hopes of bringing torturers, killers and other war criminals to justice one day.
Robert Petit, head of the international, impartial and independent mechanism on Syria, said its team has reason to believe that mass graves exist across Syria, but exhumation, DNA collection and tests for cause of death require “a lot of resources.”
He provided no further details about any such mass graves.
Petit said the government of former President Bashar Assad, who fled Syria on Dec. 8, didn’t cooperate with his team, and the change of authority offers a chance to establish the fates of “tens of thousands of people” who died and suffered under his rule.
“We are awaiting a response,” from the rebels who now control Syria, he said. “And as soon as that response is forthcoming, we will deploy.”
A “monitoring cell” on the UN-backed team has collected recent images from social media, he said, while its sources on the ground have been able to collect new evidence and testimonies in the wake of Assad’s ouster.
The mechanism was created in 2016 by the UN General Assembly to collect, preserve, consolidate and analyze evidence of “serious crimes” committed in Syria since the civil war erupted in March 2011, Petit said. A UN-backed Commission of Inquiry is doing similar work.
