When President Bashar al-Assad fled Syria in December 2024, after a rebel offensive reached Damascus, his departure marked the end of more than 50 years of the Assad family’s rule and brought hope that the conflict that began in 2011 was drawing to a close.
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the war or detained by Assad’s regime, and thousands more remain missing. Shadi Haroun was among those detained and tortured, held for nearly 10 years after organizing protests. In the FRONTLINE documentary Syria’s Detainee Files, Haroun says, “All the decision makers who had a role in oppressing the Syrian people escaped,” and have “left us to deal with what they left behind.”
As Syrians navigate a multitude of uncertainties, including an interim government led by a former jihadist and sporadic outbreaks of violence, they are also left to reckon with the human toll of the war, from disappearances to displacement, and the question of accountability. The figures below underscore the depth of the losses Syrians have endured and the challenges they continue to face.
656,493
While the length of the conflict and lack of access to Syria have made it difficult for human rights groups to establish an exact death toll, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an independent United Kingdom-based organization that monitors the conflict, estimated a death toll of 656,493 from March 2011 to March 2025 — 199,068 of them civilians, including men, women and children. Of those, the group documented the names of 546,150 people. These figures do not include some civilians who died in detention and some rebel fighters.
After pausing its reporting on the death toll for more than five years, the United Nations released a death toll in 2021, identifying at least 350,000 people who had been killed between March 2011 and 2021. The U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights said at the time that the number was “certainly an undercount of the actual number of killings.”
100,000
More than 100,000 people have been “forcibly disappeared” since March 2011, according to human rights groups.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights considers a person “forcibly disappeared” when a month passes without any information about their whereabouts, and the group also counts those who died from torture in this category if their bodies have not been returned to their families.
SNHR said its count of forcibly disappeared people grew after the regime collapsed, with the addition of thousands of new cases as recently released detainees shared information about the disappeared and researchers gained access to previously unseen records.
After being released, Shadi Haroun and his brother, who had also been detained, started working for the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison, an organization that traces the missing. Haroun says about people in his hometown, “There’s the person who’s waiting for his son to be released, like I was, and they don’t know what happened to him.”
130
Human rights investigators say there are around 130 suspected mass graves across parts of Syria that were once controlled by the regime.
One of the organizations working on this issue, the International Commission on Missing Persons, says it has confirmed the existence of at least 71 possible mass grave sites. Kathryne Bomberger, the director-general of the treaty-based international organization which started operating in Syria in 2017, told FRONTLINE, “We started the program by collecting data and working with civil society.”
The ICMP collected information from thousands of Syrian relatives, witnesses, lawyers and doctors and asks people to report possible locations of mass graves through an online tool, which it then cross-references with open source data.
The ICMP plans to share those locations with the Syrian government once a mechanism for verifying the graves is in place. The organization is in touch with two independent institutions recently formed in Syria to help find the missing and compensate victims and their families for their losses.
Verifying the mass graves will be a complex undertaking, with the ICMP helping the Syrian state access resources, such as forensic archaeologists and pathologists to investigate the sites and recover remains and labs to conduct DNA testing.
One mass grave, about 30 miles north of Damascus, that Haroun’s organization visited is estimated to hold at least 100,000 bodies. “These missing people were subjected to a system of forced disappearance,” Haroun says in the film, “Then they’re taken and buried in a mass grave where nobody will know anything about them.”
13.4 Million
In the months since the regime collapsed, 13.4 million Syrians remain displaced, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. More than 7.4 million of them are internally displaced and more than 6 million Syrian refugees live abroad and in neighboring countries — mainly Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.
Millions of Syrians were forced to flee their homes over the course of the conflict due to widespread bombing, sieges, risks of arbitrary detention by the regime, and violence. According to the UNHCR, more than 1 million internally displaced people returned home and some 400,000 returned to Syria from abroad after December 2024, bringing the total number of Syrians who have gone home to over 1.4 million. In recent UN surveys, more than 80% of displaced Syrians say they hope to return one day.
217
As the methods of torture used by the regime — including electrocution, sexual violence, starvation and beatings that lasted hours — came to light, entities around the world amassed evidence with the hope that perpetrators of those crimes would one day be held accountable.
Created by the U.N. General Assembly in 2016, the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism collects and analyzes evidence of crimes against humanity and genocide in Syria and supports jurisdictions that prosecute perpetrators.
According to the group’s most recent report from February, the IIIM has gathered evidence from Syrians, civil society groups, first responders, witnesses and advocates, and has assisted with 217 investigations or prosecutions of violations of international law.
The IIIM cannot publicly share its involvement in many cases, but its reports have noted contributions that led to investigations, arrest warrants, indictments and trials of Syrian officials, members of ISIS, and others involved in the conflict.
In 2022, a German court sentenced former Syrian intelligence officer Anwar Raslan to life in prison for overseeing at least 27 murders in what became the first case to find a senior official in Assad’s regime guilty of crimes against humanity.
The IIIM also played a role in the case of Jamil Hassan, who was indicted by the U.S. for conspiracy to commit war crimes, along with Abdul Salam Mahmoud. A French court convicted both senior officials — and another official, Ali Mamlouk — of crimes against humanity. They remain at large.
With thousands of possible war crimes taking place over nearly a decade and a half, the path toward accountability for Syrians is marred by challenges. Human rights advocates say Syrians themselves must decide what steps would amount to justice for what they suffered.
