Since Syria's President Assad fell from power, the full horror of his regime has begun to be revealed. Mass graves have been discovered around the country. And a vast amount of documentation confirming many of the crimes is emerging. We hear from Canadian lawyer Bill Wiley who has been gathering evidence of atrocities by the Assad regime for years. He believes many of the perpetrators could now be brought to justice. Also on the programme: how a novella by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky has become a TikTok sensation; the Russians say they've detained the man who carried out the assassination of a senior general in Moscow; and the polar bears bearing down on a town in northern Canada. Photo by BILAL AL HAMMOUD/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock (15014794bq)
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Hello and welcome to NewsHour.
It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London.
I'm Tim Franks and we're beginning in Syria, and we're looking in two directions.
Later in the program, we'll be looking ahead as more voices are expressing concern, serious concern about where the country may be heading.
We have an interview with the UN's top envoy in 30 minutes.
First, though, we're going to look back, look back at the crimes perpetrated by the Assad regime at their astonishing scale, and about the attempts to catalog them in an effort to achieve some sort of retrospective justice.
We heard on the program yesterday about the intensifying efforts to identify and secure the sites of suspected mass graves around the country.
One person who's been involved for years in gathering evidence of the alleged atrocities is Bill Wylie, a Canadian lawyer and war crimes investigator.
What has the last two weeks meant for that project?
Well, I've been trying to put my own finger on that.
There's, there's a number of different feelings, if I, if I might put it that way.
The first is a great sense of joy for for my colleagues, my Syrian colleagues who've been been at this since 2011, many of them alongside myself, of course, and the great joy and relief that they feel personally with the end of the Assad regime, which is now fully disclosed to the world in its true evilness, with all the visual images that have been brought out by journalists around the world.
The second issue, though, is I didn't celebrate as many of my colleagues did when the news came that Assad was on the run, because I saw it, to paraphrase or quote Churchill, your great wartime leader, that this is really the end of the beginning.
So the first 13 years that we've been engaged with, this is in many respects preparatory to what starts.
We simply thought that the preparatory phase would have ended in 2014, maybe 2015.