“They did it just like that, knowing that their report could send someone to their execution, to be tortured, that they won’t come back,” says Amina al-Boqai, the wife of a man who disappeared into Assad’s detention system never to return, based on a «security report» by a neighbor. She believes she knows who but has no proof, and struggles to pass the suspected informant’s family in the street in Eastern Ghouta.

Under the Assad regime, «the walls had ears», and countless citizens informed on neighbors, family members and acquaintances, leaving deep scars in the country’s social fabric. Some were coerced into collaboration, some motivated by Baathist ideology, while others used the role for personal gain or to settle scores.

Though low in the regime’s hierarchy, these informants are often considered the immediate cause of victims’ suffering, and victims’ families continue to share their neighborhoods with people suspected of informing on them, threatening the fragile social cohesion with individual acts of revenge in the absence of a comprehensive strategy to address the issue.  

Victims now want the informants’ deeds to be addressed as part of the country’s fledgling transitional justice process. But how to manage such huge numbers of informants, potentially in the tens of thousands? How can the balance be reached between delivering satisfaction to victims, safeguarding civil peace for the future and preventing revenge, in a context of limited resources? 

Transitional justice processes typically prioritize those most responsible for atrocities, recognizing that putting every last perpetrator in the dock is rarely feasible nor necessarily desirable for lasting social cohesion.

After the reunification of Germany, truth-telling and lustration were prioritized over criminal accountability for the almost 200,000 informants who collaborated with the East’s infamous Stasi secret service. Prosecution on such a scale was deemed impossible. Instead, victims were given structured access to their files, including who had informed on them, while informants were barred or demoted from public administration positions. 

In Argentina, informants to the military regime, known as buchones, were initially deprioritized behind higher level perpetrators in the transitional justice process, but in recent years have faced more scrutiny including criminal prosecutions and popular shaming campaigns.

Syria’s Transitional Justice Commission (TJC), established a few months after the fall of the Assad regime, has yet to issue a transitional justice law or strategy, even as high-level trials are already underway. In recent comments, the TJC’s head classified informants as perpetrators of «non-grave» violations and signaled that they could be included in future amnesties, provided conditions are met: recognition and apology for their deeds; sharing information with truth-seeking efforts; undertaking community service, and acceptance by victims. 

“We’re not suggesting an amnesty, but rather conditions that would make their punishment more lenient, including publicly taking responsibility in front of the victims themselves,” says Yasmeen al-Mashaan, a prominent families’ rights advocate and member of the TJC who lost five brothers to disappearance in Syria. In this scenario, cooperation by junior perpetrators would reduce a death sentence to life, life to 15 years, and other custodial sentences by a third.

A case-by-case assessment, sifting out those coerced and threatened versus those who relished the petty power plays and personal gains, would be fairest, but would place a huge burden on Syria's war-damaged institutions and economy.

Financial and technical support from the international community would be needed. Yet Syria’s new rulers appear lukewarm toward such assistance and have been keeping the UN’s transitional justice offers at arms’ length. The recent hasty death sentences handed down to senior Assad regime figures may further complicate matters for international cooperation. 

Jalal al-Hamad, executive director of Justice for Life, a human rights NGO, broadly supports the TJC’s «logical» approach to dealing with informants; but in a context of lawlessness and rumors, insists on a fair judicial process to prove allegations against them, led by the normal judiciary, before they are included in transitional justice pathways. “We can’t weigh down the TJC with every last case when it comes to informants.”

Convincing victim communities of the need to relinquish accountability for at least some low-level perpetrators may be challenging. In current conditions of ongoing economic hardship, weak rule of law, and a traumatized population reckoning with decades of suffering, many ordinary citizens appear strongly opposed to any form of amnesty.

Social media posts suggest many Syrians oppose leniency for informants, with some demanding execution, imprisonment, ostracization or loss of civil rights. “If there’s not enough space in the jails, the graves will fit them all in,” said one commenter.

In eastern Ghouta, al-Boqai, who now runs a women’s centre where she is in daily contact with relatives of the disappeared, emphasizes truth-seeking but says few in her community would accept an amnesty. “The fact that there are many of them is absolutely not a reason for them not to face accountability. Forgetting is no solution. For some victims, just the admission is enough to feel they have got their due. But for others it’s not enough, he should be held accountable. People want the truth. When [the informants] come to apologize, the least they can do is help me understand why, why did you do it? …If I understand why, I can forgive.”

Al-Mashaan argues that truth-seeking, accountability for senior perpetrators and dialogue with victims are prerequisites for any acceptance of apologies or amnesty. 

 “We need clarity on the causes for their actions, and that’s where the role of truth committees comes in. Some people were coerced; the regime created a society where everyone lived in fear of one another… We need dialogue sessions with the victims to explain these results, followed by apologies by the informants and the start of a deeper social reconciliation process.”

For al-Hamad, communication is crucial. “In any justice process, there are priorities. Determining the fate of the missing, justice for the most senior perpetrators, rebuilding our institutions for instance, and that’s where we’re putting our resources…. But all of this demands a national strategy, and the strategy remains absent.”

“In the northeast, we wake up in the morning and find bodies in the streets,” says al-Hamad. “It’s based on accusations by the people, there’s no proof. And why’s this happening? Because there’s no proper strategy for transitional justice. There are reconciliation deals and we don’t know their content, and that’s affecting trust. So, it’s very normal to expect revenge cases, and that’s why we see some suspects fleeing from Deir el Zor to the bigger cities.” Al-Boqai likewise cites the example of the son of a known informant who was recently kidnapped in her town in a misguided attempt to get his father to turn himself in. “It was wrong of them of course, but not surprising.”

Another complicating factor is the authoritarian leanings of Syria’s new rulers, who appear to be enabling new informant networks – though hardly to be compared to Assad’s in scale and consequences – in which ordinary citizens report suspected Assadists to the authorities. “We see new types of surveillance with new names: people who ‘work in research,’ who show up to monitor civil society activities and pass information to the authorities,” says al-Hamad. “Transitional justice is supposed to stop the past repeating.”