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The atrocity investigator

We talk to Yasmine Nahlawi, head of the Syrian British Consortium’s investigations team.

10 SEPTEMBER 2024
    




Before setting up the Syrian British Consortium’s investigations team in 2020, Yasmine Nahlawi worked for several years’ on advocacy for the Syrian cause. She joined us on a call to talk about her current role, as well as her past experience with the world of UK politics.

“We focus on in-depth investigations,” Yasmine says. They spend an extended time investigating a specific crime scene in a limited time frame, building a complete picture of what occurred there, who was involved, and what the patterns were. The team’s first major investigation was into a major massacre carried out by Assad regime forces in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, over several days in August 2012. Their most recent investigation to be published is their report into crimes committed by the National Union of Syrian Students at the University of Damascus in the years 2011 to 2013. (Some members of Syria Notes’ staff have also worked for the SBC team on these reports.)

The Syrian British Consortium’s investigations team is primarily funded by the Center for Justice and Accountability, an American organisation. They are currently waiting for a response to an application for UK funding.

“We’re a victim-centred team, so we like to focus on the communities that we’re working with,” Yasmine tells us. “That means involving them in defining the type of justice that they want to see, and in the planning and the execution of whatever we’re doing. We work on legal and non-legal routes to accountability, because we recognize that sometimes justice can be found outside the courtroom.”

The aim is to ensure these crimes are not forgotten. “This also ties into the need to push against normalisation of the Assad regime, so there is a political role here,” Yasmine says. “And on the legal track, we make sure that this evidence can potentially be inserted into legal proceedings. That is more difficult, because there aren’t legal avenues for all of these crimes at this point.”

So why is this work not being done by police investigators? “Even if these war crimes units and the police were significantly resourced, I think there would always be a need for partnerships with Syrian civil society,” Yasmine says. “We know the context, and the individuals. We know what happened. We have the connections, and we have the trust of communities. So there’s always an advantage that Syrians will have in terms of identifying, locating and amassing evidence.”

War crimes units are neeeded to carry on where Syrian civil society stops, Yasmine affirms, and she would like to see more investment in them. “A lot of times these war crimes units are under-resourced, with a handful of employees juggling Syrian cases and non-Syrian cases,” Yasmine says. “So this is definitely something to push for, providing more resources for war crimes units as well as for civil society.”

One of the reasons her team does targeted investigations is the sheer scale of crimes committed in Syria since 2011, with thousands of survivors in the UK and millions elsewhere. “If we just wanted to document all the crimes, it would be an endless amount of information,” Yasmine says. “And it wouldn’t allow us to focus and to explore the patterns.”

How does Yasmine’s team fit in with the Syrian British Consortium’s wider work? SBC’s purpose is advocacy, Yasmine explains, to advocate for civilian protection and justice, to the UK government and beyond. The investigations team operates independently with its own budget and staff. “But there’s a lot of interplay between the team and the wider organisation,” Yasmine says. “So for advocacy with UK policymakers, that channel is always open through SBC, and for us as an investigations team, we would fill in where we have a particular recommendation following an investigation or even during an investigation if there’s a specific need that we have.”

The election was called just as the team’s latest report on the NUSS was launched. “And so we couldn’t really engage with MPs because Parliament had been dissolved,” Yasmine explains. “We did speak to the FCDO about the report.”

The Foreign Office was very interested in the team’s findings, and when it emerged that a former NUSS member, Omar Aroub, was potentially going to be at the Olympics, FCDO officials reached out to their French counterparts to make inquiries. “That’s one way that the UK government can help, to coordinate with other countries,” Yasmine says.


Targeting a War Criminal

In the case of Omar Aroub, the team had to make a judgement on whether to quietly try and bring about an arrest, or to go public. The worst possibility was if Aroub came to Paris and didn’t get arrested, and was able to use the Olympics to normalise the regime’s presence on an international stage. The best scenario was for him to come to Paris and be arrested and prosecuted, so victims would be able to testify, and that could offer some closure. And the third option was to prevent him from coming through a public campaign.

Yasmine explains the difficulties they found in trying to get Omar Aroub arrested. In French law, for crimes committed outside of France, not by a French national, with no connection to France, there are two possible charges, torture or crimes against humanity. With crimes against humanity, in order for someone to be arrested, they must either be a French resident or to have to have entered France with the intention of establishing residence. And this would not apply to Aroub if he came on a visit for the Olympics.

“For a torture charge, there is no residence requirement, but you have to wait until the person enters France to start the process,” Yasmine says. “We spoke to the French authorities, and they were very clear that they would have capacity constraints.” The whole world was coming to Paris for the Olympics, and they were expecting complaints from all over, not only from Syria.

The French authorities would only prioritise cases that were airtight, because before making an arrest, they would have to carry out their own investigation, something that usually takes a few months. “For that reason, we decided to pursue the advocacy route,” Yasmine concludes.

For the next step, the SBC team joined up with two other organisations, The Syria Campaign and Action For Sama, both of them very experienced in public campaigning. The Syria Campaign was established a decade ago to call for action to protect civilians in Syria, while Action For Sama began as an impact campaign for the release of the documentary feature film For Sama, co-directed by Waad al-Kateab and featuring her doctor husband Hamza and their infant daughter Sama as they lived through the 2016 siege of Aleppo.

“With The Syria Campaign, we’re an investigations team, and we know they are better at public advocacy, so by merging our strengths maybe we can come up with something that neither could do on our own,” Yasmine says. “And Action For Sama, because of Waad’s previous film on the refugee Olympics team, that was a natural partnership.”

They launched a joint campaign to call on the International Olympics Committee to ban Omar Aroub from the Olympics. “There was a petition with over 8,000 signatures, and one of the victims of the NUSS crimes was going to hand-deliver it,” Yasmine says. “But before the meeting, the Committee responded to our email and said that no one by the name of Omar Aroub has accreditation to attend the Olympics.”

It remains unclear whether Aroub decided himself not to come, or whether the International Olympics Committee denied him accreditation. “We asked for clarification,” Yasmine tells us. “But they said they didn’t have anything further to add.”

Yasmine Nahlawi calling for action to protect civilians, Channel 4 News, 3rd of November 2015.


Fighting for a Cause

The first time that we were in contact with Yasmine was back in 2015, we remind her. Back then she was doing advocacy with Rethink Rebuild Society, a Syrian community organisation in Manchester. That year they published a report, Syria Between Dictatorship and ISIS, which involved Yasmine getting buy-in from several different Syrian community organisations in the UK.

“Advocacy is something that I’m very drawn to,” she says. “After I finished my master’s degree, I had a specific skill set and Syria was a very natural context to apply it to because of my Syrian heritage. When you’re fighting for a cause, you don’t think about what you have to do — you just do it. It’s not like, ‘oh, I have to do media interviews,’ or ‘I have to speak in Parliament,’ it’s ‘what doors can I knock on,’ or ‘what avenues can we try that we haven’t explored yet?’”

Yasmine sees herself as a tool for a much wider issue, she says. “And so, even if it gets tough, it’s not something directed at you personally, it’s directed at the cause that you’re working for. For me, I’m very blessed that I’m not a survivor of the Syrian conflict. I’m blessed that I don’t have security concerns to speak about Syria. I don’t have language barriers, either in English or in Arabic. And so I’m very privileged to have the capacity to do this work.”

The work takes its toll. “It’s really important to point out the fatigue that comes with working on Syria, which is a result of the government’s failure to centre a civilian protection approach in their work,” Yasmine believes. “We will continue to fight, but I think Syrians are looking to see who they can rely on for support, and sadly, that hasn’t been the UK government.”

In the new Parliament, how should MPs approach Syria? What should they raise with government, or with civil servants when they appear in front of parliamentary committees?

“I would say listen to Syrians,” Yasmine replies. “Engage with Syrian organisations and communities, because that will inform every other policy aspect — how you deal with refugees, how to respond to the conflict, and who are trusted partners to work with. Support them obviously in terms of funding, but also make sure that these organisations are engaged with and listened to.”

The need for a human-rights-centred approach is fundamental, Yasmine says. “Syrian civil society argued from day one for the UK to take a civilian protection approach, but that is not what we saw,” she says. The UK government spoke the right language, but in practice its efforts were limited. “So the UK contributed aid. They took in refugees, although fewer than other European nations. They supported the White Helmets, the Syrian Civil Defence. And of course, we are happy that they did that,” Yasmine says — but the missing part was action to stop the crimes happening.

“These crimes are not all in the past. We’re still talking about an active conflict situation, and so the missing step, missing back then and missing now, is a civilian protection approach. What are we doing to make sure that these crimes no longer happen, and to make sure that there are no new refugees created, no new people who require humanitarian aid?”

This failure to protect is not just in the UK’s Syria policy, Yasmine believes. “Gaza is another context where the UK government approach has even been more deplorable,” she says.

“It’s not just something we would advocate for Syria. If the UK generally pursued a civilian protection approach, it would not just make the world a better place, but also make the world a better place for the UK, bring it more allies, increase the trust factor, and increase its standing around the world.”


Links

Syrian British Consortium: https://www.syrianbritish.org/