When human rights attorney Noura Ghazi received the news in early December that Bashar al-Assad had fled Syria, she was overcome with shock. The regime had dictated the terms of her family’s life for as long as she could remember. When she was just 5 years old, the regime imprisoned her father for his labor activism. Her husband, in turn, was detained during the first years of the Syrian civil war. She would later learn that Assad’s government had executed her husband in prison. Now Assad was gone.

As rebel fighters overtook Damascus last month, they unlatched prison doors, allowing thousands of Syrians to walk free. People freed from Sednaya Prison, notorious as a “human slaughterhouse,” or prisons in cities like Homs rejoiced in the light of day in images circulated widely online. But as misinformation about the missing also swirled online, complicating the good news, Ghazi had little time to celebrate.

Her organization Nophotozone, which she co-founded with her late husband Bassel Khartabil Safadi, represents 3,500 Syrian families whose loved ones were arbitrarily detained by the Assad government. An estimated 150,000 people have gone missing within Syria’s prison system throughout the civil war. With the majority of her clients’ family members remaining unaccounted for, Ghazi and her colleagues have spent the past month, through many sleepless nights, searching for them and providing medical attention to newly released individuals.

At the same time that they work to locate the living, her organization is scrambling to preserve recently unearthed documents, formerly kept under lock and key, that the Assad regime used to record their abuses.

As the country starts to rebuild and shape its new government after more than 50 years of dictatorship, Syrians are grappling with a complex search toward accountability for the war crimes committed by the Assad regime. Throughout Assad’s rule, the government imprisoned, tortured, and executed thousands of people. Its military killed thousands more during the civil war, targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals, with bombs and chemical warfare. Various rebel factions have also been accused of human rights abuses. While the overthrow has brought an end to the fighting, scars of the war threaten the newfound peace.

“In rebuilding Syria, there will be no peace without justice and accountability,” Ghazi told The Intercept.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which led the 10-day offensive against Assad and has announced it will remain in place as the transitional government until March, has indicated it is serious about addressing war crimes of the past. It has announced the formation of a judicial and human rights commission that will help shape its constitution and has said it has a list of senior officials involved in torture, pledging rewards to those who have information that could lead to the capture of others.

Fear about how the country’s new Sunni Islamist rulers will act toward Syria’s various minorities, such as the Kurds and Alawites, is already brewing. Some rights groups and critics have pointed to HTS’s own alleged rights abuses and violent crackdowns during its time ruling the Idlib province as cause for concern.

But other rights groups credit HTS for aiding efforts to preserve evidence of mass atrocities. Along with its prisons, the Syrian government also abandoned its intelligence offices as they fled, where troves of documents and case files are kept, detailing the actions of its military and police forces. Syrian civil society organizations have rushed to enter these facilities to record as many documents that can be used to build cases for future war crimes prosecution as possible.

This approach has yielded results in the past. Earlier in the civil war, the Syrian government abandoned its intelligence facilities in regions overtaken by rebel forces. The Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre was able to collect 500,000 pages of documents from those offices, which it has stored, analyzed, and used in prosecution of cases against the Assad government throughout Europe, in the U.S., and other jurisdictions, said Roger Lu Phillips, the organization’s legal director.

“Some individuals are trying to destroy the documentation, probably remnants of the Assad regime.”

In recent weeks, the........

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