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State Dept. Cuts Funding to Investigate Assad War Crimes

Bashar al-Assad / AP
November 6, 2014

The State Department will cut its $500,000 annual funding dedicated to investigating the war crimes of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Foreign Policy's the Cable reports.

According to the report, the money went to "sneaking into abandoned Syrian military bases, prisons, and government facilities to collect documents and other evidence linking Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its proxies to war crimes and other mass atrocities during the country’s brutal civil war."

At the same time, the Obama administration is stepping up its efforts to collect evidence of war crimes committed by the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq.

Human rights activists are concerned that the funding shift could mean Assad is not held accountable for his atrocities.

For the past two years, the U.S. State Department has channeled a total of $1 million in funds to the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a group of international war crimes prosecutors that sends local researchers, lawyers, and law students into Syrian battle zones to collect and extract files and other evidence that can help map the Syrian command structure and identify the military orders authorizing illegal activities, including barrel bomb campaigns, the starvation of besieged towns, and a spate of mass murders that have pushed the conflict's death toll past 190,000 since March 2011.

The materials are part of a growing storehouse of evidence being collected inside Syria and then transported outside the country for safekeeping in the event that a court is set up at some time in the future for war crimes trials for senior regime officials. The commission has served as a critical plank of an American strategy aimed at assembling enough evidence to hold some of Syria's worst violators of human rights accountable for their crimes at some point in the future.