Outrage at Syria's Assad Human Rights Abuses Far Too Late

 (Middle East Forum )The liberation of Syria’s notorious Sednaya jail close to Damascus a week ago has resulted in a wave of belated outrage in much western media toward the former dictator and his methods. For Syria watchers, there is something rather surreal about this late discovery of the methods of Assad’s regime.

Some of the precise numbers remain disputed. There is, as yet, no independent verification of the statement by Mouaz Mustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, that the mass grave at al-Qutayfah contains the remains of at least 100,000 people. The task of piecing together the precise dimensions of the Assad regime’s crimes against the Syrian people, and crucially the names and whereabouts of the victims, is only now beginning. And yet, the fact that this regime was a monstrous one, engaged in the mass slaughter of Syrian civilians, was known to both policymakers and publics in the West.

The task of piecing together the precise dimensions of the Assad regime’s crimes against the Syrian people, and crucially the names and whereabouts of the victims, is only now beginning.

The facts were in plain sight. A huge body of research and eyewitness testimony has long been available. But there was no widespread public revulsion against Assad in the West. The dictator was not a welcome guest in western capitals at the time of his toppling, but from 2020 until his fall there was little public concern about his rule over Syria. BBC journalist John Simpson said that Assad was ‘weak, rather than wicked’. The widespread criticism of Simpson may best be attributed to a sort of collective amnesia.