Who were the main executors of the Assad regime in Syria?

Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad was the face of the regime, but he was far from alone. During his two decades in power – and over the course of a 13-year civil war that left half a million dead – al-Assad’s numerous enforcers oversaw the torture of political prisoners. They developed and deployed chemical weapons. They directed the trafficking of illicit drugs to finance the dictatorship.

When the Assad regime fell in December 2024, many of those executors disappeared without a trace. Some are believed to have fled to Libya, Russia or the United Arab Emirates. The outlook is murky. Rumors swirl. The trails get cold. One thing is clear: these are not people who want to be found or held accountable for the regime’s brutality.

The internal structures of dictatorships are opaque by design. Many of these men had limited public profiles and even finding photographs of some of them is a challenge.

The goal of the draft report is to reveal the most critical high-level officials who fueled al-Assad’s violent reign, uncover evidence of their alleged crimes and discover where they may be now.

To focus on a core group of enforcers, The Times compiled the names of every individual who had been sanctioned by the United States or the European Union for their connection to the Assad regime. That extensive list was narrowed down by cross-checking it with Syrian and international human rights researchers, internal regime documents, and other open-source evidence collected on the Internet.

The Times then selected nine of the deadliest or most revealing flashpoints of the war and was able to link specific officials at the highest levels to those events.

The end result is a list of 55 Assad enforcers who carried out the regime’s orders and disappeared when it was overthrown.