Syria: Calls for justice and accountability after Assad's fall

The new authorities have promised justice for crimes under the Assads, but there are huge challenges involved.

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On the edge of Douma, one of the Damascus suburbs most devastated by the war, in a shrouded living room next to a stove, Umm Mazen recounts the 12 years she desperately sought news of two of her sons, who were arrested in the first years of the uprising and civil war, and swallowed up in the Assad-era security system.

For her oldest son, Mazen, she finally received a death certificate, but for Abu Hadi, no trace of him has ever been divulged.

Her third son, Ahmed, spent three years in the security system, including eight months in the red block for political prisoners in that byword for brutality, Saydnaya prison.

His front teeth stoved in by a torturer's hammer, he remembers one moment when he believes he heard his brother Mazen's voice answering a roll call in the same jail, but nothing more.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7r4gxjzyeo

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