Documents produced by the regime of Bashar al-Assad highlighting war crimes have been leaked by the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), an investigative body founded as a result of the Syrian conflict, according to an article in The New Yorker.
In 2011, Canadian war crimes investigator Bill Wiley, the founder of the body, travelled to Istanbul to help train and recruit Syrian activists who opposed the government to collect and organise information. The aim for this was to collect evidence against Assad.
Using infiltrators in the Baath party, the body managed to collect a substantial amount of information, though CIJA staff and their families were targeted by the Syrian army and intelligence forces.
In conjunction with their work, Wiley hired political analysts and lawyers to help contextualise the evidence.
The documents leaked have been described as the strongest evidence against Assad’s regime, with more than 600,000 documents being smuggled out of Syria, many of them from the highest level of secret intelligence facilities.
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