Premieres Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS app
Six months after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, more than 100,000 of the 1 million people detained by Assad’s regime during the Syrian war are still unaccounted for. What happened to them? And what is known about the brutal system of detention, torture and killing under which they disappeared?
"Syria’s Detainee Files," documents the search for answers and accountability — shedding new light on atrocities under Assad through stunning testimony of former regime insiders and officers who carried them out, alongside the accounts of people who survived them.
“I lost 10 years of my life because of someone's decision. Simply, 'Erase ten years of his life, from the smallest moments to the most important ones,'” says Shadi Haroun, who along with his brother survived almost a decade of imprisonment and torture. "Syria’s Detainee Files" follows Haroun’s efforts, with a human rights organization, to gather evidence of crimes committed by the Assad regime. It is also full of firsthand testimony from people who worked inside the Assad prison and intelligence systems.
“Tens of thousands of detainees were buried, and no one knows anything about them,” says a Syrian army nurse who worked in a hospital morgue until the regime’s final days, and who describes living detainees being forced to unload the bodies of dead ones.
From a team that includes BAFTA and Emmy award-winning journalist and filmmaker Sara Obeidat, BAFTA, Emmy and duPont award-winning filmmaker Sasha Joelle Achilli, Emmy award-winning journalist and filmmaker Amel Guettatfi and Saad Al Nassife, "Syria’s Detainee Files" exposes the scale and the tactics of a system designed to crush opposition.
“Anyone against the regime is a terrorist,” says a former colonel who was a high-ranking Syrian Air Force intelligence officer when the uprising began. “We, as the security officers, had the right to kill as we wished and we would not be made accountable or face any legal investigation. We could do as we pleased.”
The former intelligence officer is one of 40 former regime insiders and officers of various ranks the film team tracked down across a dozen countries. The former officials describe hiding the identities of detainees from their families and the public, participating in widespread and systemic torture and killing, and burying the dead in mass graves —and one of the former officials provides the filmmakers with coordinates for a previously unknown suspected mass grave.
As "Syria’s Detainee Files" explores, many of the former officials — some of whom defected, and some of whom stayed loyal to the regime until the end — rationalize their actions, saying they were following the orders of a government that would have killed them otherwise. Haroun and fellow 1survivors express skepticism: “They are just like anyone else who contributed to the survival of this regime.”
Bashar al-Assad has been granted asylum in Russia, and a French court is seeking his arrest for complicity in crimes against humanity. But now that the regime has fallen and there are calls for accountability, the film raises questions about who, in a vast system of people following orders, should be held responsible for the atrocities.
“All the decision makers who had a role in oppressing the Syrian people escaped, and they’re now hiding,” Haroun says in the film. “They’ve left everyone else to pick up the pieces. They’ve left us to deal with what they’ve left behind.”
Watch On Your Schedule: "Syria’s Detainee Files" will be available to Stream at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS app starting June 10, 2025, at 7/6c. View it on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel that night at 10/9c and will also be available on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel.
Credits: The film is commissioned by BBC Current Affairs for the award winning This World strand and is a co-production with FRONTLINE. It is co-directed and produced by BAFTA, Emmy and duPont-winning filmmaker Sasha Joelle Achilli (Italy’s FRONTLINE "A Doctor’s Diary," "Shadow Commander: Iran’s Military Mastermind") with co-director and co-producer, Sara Obeidat, an Emmy and BAFTA Award-winning filmmaker ("Yemen’s Covid Cover-Up," "The Shamima Begum Story"). The producers are Amel Guettatfi, Saad Al Nassife. BBC Studios secured the co-production deal with GBH/FRONTLINE and is selling "Syria's Detainee Files globally." The senior producer is Dan Edge. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
