J. Scott Applewhite/AP

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is trailed by reporters as he arrives to meet with the House Republican Conference at the Capitol in Washington, Oct. 12, 2023. He is still short of the votes needed to win the speakership.

Republicans had a brief window of opportunity this week to regroup from the unprecedented ouster of U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and move forward to address a range of pressing issues with a new House leader and a new sense of resolve.

But already, that window appears to be closing fast.

After Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise won an internal speaker-nominating contest over Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan on Wednesday, the rest of the conference did not immediately move to support Mr. Scalise en masse, and an announced floor vote had to be scuttled. On Thursday night, Mr. Scalise withdrew from the race.

Whoever eventually prevails, the increasingly clear fractures in the party have raised questions about the next speaker’s ability to move legislation or remain in the post longer than their predecessor.

“I think they will face the exact same challenges, maybe more,” says Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and former Hill staffer based in Washington. “Governing is tough, and it’s even tougher when everyone thinks they’re going to get everything their way.”

That said, leadership matters, says Republican political consultant Whit Ayres. 

“Conceivably, there could be a new leader who would provide the sort of leadership that people would be willing to follow,” he says. “Although that leader may be required to get some Democratic support in order to overcome the right-wing bomb-throwers in the caucus.”

If neither Mr. Jordan nor any other candidate gains the needed votes soon, one option under discussion would be to empower the acting speaker, Patrick McHenry, who is understood to have very limited powers, to conduct the House’s business until a new speaker is elected.

Key decisions looming

The stakes are high, with the government due to run out of money Nov. 17 and two allies – Israel and Ukraine – urgently seeking military aid and strong American leadership in the face of emboldened adversaries. Many Republicans expressed frustration with the political impasse, even as they appeared unable to resolve it.

“Most of our voters are tired of seeing the division, dissension, and discombobulation of our conference,” says Rep. Jodey Arrington, a Texas Republican who chairs the Budget Committee. “I think they want to see unity, especially with the backdrop of what’s going on in the Middle East.”

The upheaval is due in part to an ongoing identity crisis within the Republican Party, over policy differences on matters ranging from spending levels to foreign aid, as well as personality clashes. But the dysfunction goes beyond the GOP’s internal dynamics to Congress as a whole, where narrowly divided chambers are finding it difficult to operate under the institution’s traditional rules.

Getting a majority of the House’s 435 members to elect a speaker is extremely difficult when the governing party can only afford to lose four votes for its nominee. While in theory a centrist coalition from both parties could come together to elect a consensus candidate, the reality is that today’s political polarization would almost certainly make such an effort a nonstarter.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy arrives as House Republicans continue to grapple with choosing his successor at the Capitol in Washington, Oct. 12, 2023.

Even if the rules were changed, allowing a speaker to prevail with just a majority of the majority, the party’s hard-liners would have plenty of other opportunities to cause trouble. 

Some Republicans are also regretting rules passed by the GOP majority after Mr. McCarthy became speaker in January, particularly lowering the threshold for the “motion to vacate” – the procedural move to oust the speaker. In the end, that proved to be Mr. McCarthy’s undoing when Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz brought the motion and he, seven other Republicans, and all Democrats voted to vacate the speaker’s chair. 

“We shouldn’t have a one-member threshold to vacate the speakership,” says Mr. Arrington. “No matter how strong of a leader you are, if the incentives encourage dysfunction and irresponsible behavior and bad outcomes, it’s going to be really hard.”

To a certain extent, the disarray is the culmination of a long-building split in the GOP base, with a populist “Make America Great Again” wing diverging from establishment types. But the implosion also has to do with a slow disintegration of Congress.

“We deposed the speaker for the first time in the history of the House,” says Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin. “Something like that doesn’t happen overnight or as a product of any one or small group of people’s ambitions. It’s a product of decades of institutional neglect.”

One area where the dysfunction has been playing out is in appropriations, which is supposed to consist of 12 parallel subcommittees in the House and Senate working on funding bills for the various parts of government. In recent years the process has frequently broken down – under both Democratic and GOP majorities – leading to a big “omnibus” bill hashed out at the last minute behind closed doors. Members have had little time to read it, let alone influence the funding being allocated to different departments or programs. A stated reason for Mr. McCarthy’s ouster was demands from conservative Republicans to avoid an omnibus. 

“Until we fix that [budget] process, there’s going to be continued dysfunction,” says Representative Gallagher. “So I’ve been asking the candidates, what’s your plan for fixing the process?”

The importance of trust

But in addition to a better process, many say, there also needs to be more trust. Mr. McCarthy, an affable Californian known for his ability to work behind the scenes to bring people together, was also criticized for trying to be all things to all people – leading many to doubt that they could take him at his word. Others said he reneged on key promises, including by making a bipartisan debt ceiling deal with President Joe Biden that allowed for higher spending levels than conservatives said he had agreed to. 

“Trust was a factor,” says Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, one of the eight who ousted the speaker, coming out of Wednesday’s internal GOP nomination meeting. 

Mr. Norman had been supporting Mr. Scalise for the speaker's gavel. A Louisiana representative who garnered widespread support when he was shot and badly injured during a congressional baseball practice in 2017, Mr. Scalise had moved steadily up the leadership ladder. He served as whip and currently as majority leader. For some, that gave him the chops to handle the speakership job at a demanding time. For others, it was a reason to look for someone new.

Freshman Max Miller told reporters that despite Mr. Scalise doing “a phenomenal job,” he was backing fellow Ohioan Jim Jordan – and would like to see an entirely new slate of House GOP leaders, from the speakership down. 

“The best way we can continue to move on as a conference and to actually get work done is fresh new faces because trust has been shattered within that room,” Mr. Miller said. 

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect Mr. Scalise’s withdrawal from the race Thursday night, and to clarify that Mr. Scalise was shot at a baseball practice, not a game. 

Hatem Ali/AP

Palestinians sit outside their home following Israeli airstrikes in the Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been displaced by the intensifying Israel-Hamas fighting.

Over the past few days, Saudi Arabia has experienced a diplomatic whiplash.

Before Saturday morning, the kingdom was riding high on good vibes and good publicity: It was nearing a historic normalization agreement with Israel that would have opened up economic and political ties, given it a formal security arrangement with America, and boosted its civilian nuclear program.

But within hours of Hamas’ bloody assault on Israel, Saudi Arabia found itself condemning massacres, urging restraint, pledging undying support for the Palestinians, and frantically trying to mediate one of the most intractable – and suddenly most volatile – conflicts in the Middle East.

On Thursday, in the first such contact between Saudi leadership and an Iranian leader in a decade, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even spoke with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to “discuss the current military escalation in Gaza and its surroundings,” according to the Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

The contact with Saudi Arabia’s regional rival, an outspoken ally and supporter of Hamas, underscored the kingdom’s commitment to “communicate with all international and regional parties to stop the ongoing escalation” and its “rejection of targeting of civilians in any way,” the state-run SPA said.

In the call, the crown prince “stressed the kingdom’s unwavering stance in standing up for the Palestinian cause and supporting efforts aimed at achieving a just and comprehensive peace that guarantees Palestinians’ legitimate rights,” the agency said.

Diplomatic sources say the Saudis have reached out to Israel but have not received a reply.

Saudi Arabia’s hands-on role in trying to de-escalate war between Israel and Hamas poses a critical test of the crown prince’s newly articulated diplomacy-first philosophy. A wider war would threaten both the kingdom’s economic success story at home as well as its vision of a pragmatic region that puts prosperity ahead of old enmities.  

Amer Hilabi/AP

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman meets with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, June 7, 2023. While the United States had been trying to broker a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel, both Mr. Blinken and the crown prince are now trying to broker a de-escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas.

As intensified shelling on a besieged Gaza and an impending Israeli ground invasion sour the Saudi public’s mood on the prospects of cooperation with Israel, Riyadh hopes it can both achieve peace and keep the normalization deal alive.

Every day, that challenge intensifies. As of Thursday, Palestinian officials say 1,417 people have been killed by Israeli missile strikes in Gaza, including 447 children. Israel puts its own death toll above 1,300, mostly civilians.

Diplomatic flurry

Saudi Arabia had long used its position as custodian of two of Islam’s holiest sites and the world’s largest oil producer to push for concessions for Palestinians and to pitch peace plans, including the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which offered normalized Arab-Israeli ties in exchange for Palestinian statehood.

Yet Riyadh often kept the conflict and day-to-day diplomacy with Palestinians at arm’s length – allowing Egypt and Jordan, states with peace deals with Israel, to do the heavy lifting.

This week, Saudi Arabia too is working the phones.

Last weekend, the crown prince called to discuss developments and coordinate with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Jordan’s King Abdullah. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan al Saud, has been coordinating with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is now in the region, and European and Gulf diplomats.

According to the SPA, the crown prince expressed to the leaders the “kingdom’s unwavering commitment to supporting the Palestinian people in their pursuit of legitimate rights, a dignified life, and the achievement of a just and lasting peace.”

The kingdom has “urged both sides to use restraint” and called on “the need for all parties to respect international humanitarian law,” SPA reported.

The new Saudi diplomacy has also meant a flurry of activity for the kingdom’s fresh nonresident envoy to the Palestinians, Nayef al-Sudairi, who only two weeks ago had traveled to Ramallah to present his credentials, the first official Saudi visit to the West Bank in 56 years.

Majdi Mohammed/Reuters

Nayef al-Sudairi (right), Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the Palestinian Authority, listens to Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh during their meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Sept. 27, 2023.

In an attempt to mediate with all sides, according to Arab diplomatic sources, Saudi Arabia has also sent communications to Israel urging restraint in its response to Hamas’ attacks and to avoid a costly ground invasion in Gaza, which it warns would further inflame the region.

According to Arab diplomats, Saudi Arabia has attempted to use as leverage the danger that a prolonged war would galvanize anti-Israel sentiment and kill the Saudi-Israeli normalization talks. Riyadh has reportedly been frustrated by Israel’s lack of response.

“The crown prince and the kingdom are using their good relations with all parties to prevent military escalations from going further and to prevent more human suffering,” says a Saudi official who was not authorized to speak to the press.

However, Saudi Arabia will not completely abandon normalization as, under “the right conditions,” it remains in Saudi Arabia’s long-term strategic interests, the source adds.

Yet de-escalation and Israeli concessions to the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’ rival, are now viewed as critical to keep the rapprochement agreement alive, the source says.

The conflict has strengthened the position of figures within the Saudi establishment who believe Israeli guarantees of Palestinian statehood – if not statehood itself – must precede any normalization.

“The current events show that Israel cannot ignore the conflict with the Palestinians and that its safety and security depend on solving the conflict with the Palestinians,” says Hesham al-Ghannam, a Saudi analyst and international affairs expert.

“The kingdom can only hope that Israel would realize this. Its position remains the same [as] before these events: Progress on solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a precondition to normalization.”

Public mood sours

Riyadh today feels more distant from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than most Arab capitals.

Footage of missile-struck homes and screaming mothers and bloodied children in Gaza does not blare from TVs at restaurants and cafes; few car radios are tuned in to live updates on the war gripping commuters, as in the Levant and Egypt.

Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

An Israeli artillery team and its self-propelled cannon dig into a firing position near Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, Oct. 12, 2023.

Casual conversations are of business, sports, food, and family, with a rare passing mention of Gaza, if at all.

But this surface-level apathy is misleading. The apparent lack of preoccupation with the conflict masks deep support for the Palestinians among average Saudis – and a simmering outrage over Israel’s deadly military offensive and total siege on Gaza.

“Some of us avoid the news because it hurts too much, not because we don’t care,” says Noura, who works in retail and, like many in the story, gave only one name. “We see ourselves in Palestinians and we feel their losses.”

“Palestinians are an inspiration. They stand up to injustice; they are not afraid to die. Palestinians stand up for all Arabs,” Mohammed, a 30-year-old driver, said in Riyadh Saturday, hours into Hamas’ assault yet before the true extent of its massacre came to light.

Hamas’ killing of Israeli civilians and children is “unacceptable” and “un-Islamic,” says an electrical engineer who simply gave the name Saleh, worried about running afoul of political speech laws. He points out that Saudi Arabia and Israel have never been at war and that Israelis, Jews, and “peoples of all faiths are welcomed in Saudi Arabia.”

He believes normalization and integration with Israel are in Saudi Arabia’s best interests, but that the ongoing war complicates any potential for Saudi Arabia and Israel to have full ties.

“The Israeli government is bombing women and children. They are using white phosphorus. They are cutting off electricity and water and starving Gazans,” he says.

“Is this a partner for peace? Can this be a partner for normalization?”

Make progress, not war

The war threatens to upend more than just a normalization deal, but also a two-year trend of regional cooperation and rapprochement that Saudi Arabia has helped foster and is fighting to keep alive.

As part of the kingdom’s and crown prince’s rehabilitation on the world stage, the country has pursued reconciliation and rapprochement with various rivals and states from Qatar and Turkey to Iran and Yemen’s Houthis, as well as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

At the same time, it has preached cooperation as a way forward to address global challenges such as the pandemic and climate change.

Riyadh is host to a constant cycle of upbeat regional and international conferences tackling issues from health to artificial intelligence to climate, boosting innovation and a concept of “togetherness” to take on global challenges.

“We are progressing and growing and leading. We all should be innovating and growing together to face the immense challenges such as climate change and food and water scarcity, not getting dragged down in war,” says a second official Saudi source. “It is such a waste. And it threatens all the good momentum we have.”

Despite the stakes, Saudi Arabia is finding its leverage, and its room to maneuver, limited.

The kingdom has limited sway over the Islamist militant Hamas, whose ideology is at odds with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies, save for Qatar.

Saudi Arabia recently made inroads with the Hamas leadership-in-exile when it invited a delegation led by political leader Ismail Haniyeh to perform the Umrah pilgrimage in Mecca in April, part of a failed attempt to reconcile Hamas and Fatah.

There are concerns in Riyadh, meanwhile, that Iran may be attempting to exacerbate the crisis to expand its influence among Palestinians, and that the timing of the operation was aimed at sabotaging Saudi Arabia’s normalization with Israel – a view shared by some citizens.

“We are worried that Hamas and Iran are trying to kill peace and the vision of the crown prince,” says Amjad, who runs an agricultural company in Riyadh.

“But with wisdom and hard work, we hope Saudi Arabia can keep the vision of peace alive in spite of them.”

Syrian doctor Alaa M. entered the courtroom in Frankfurt in a hooded parka that kept the judging eyes of observers at bay. Once seated, he kept his hood on until five judges swept into the wooden chambers in a flurry of black robes. Then a different Dr. M. emerged – one sporting a crisp blue suit with tired, agitated eyes that missed nothing and thin lips that battled to stay shut.

That Aug. 8 session opened with documents in Arabic projected onto a drop-down screen. One showed that the witness testifying that day was fired for not showing up to work for two weeks – the period he was in detention. Another revealed a prison visitors log. All to establish that the witness had been at the scene where Dr. M., prosecutors say, tortured people. Dr. M. and the defense team zeroed in on numbers and names, and challenged translations to cast doubt.

“We have the duty to ask critical questions. Please do not take it personally,” the presiding judge told the witness.

The accused worked as a resident in military hospitals in Homs and Damascus, both notorious for the brutal treatment of detainees undergoing interrogations by various security branches, and in a prison run by Syria’s military intelligence. Dr. M. allegedly severely beat patients with batons and a plastic tube, gave a lethal injection to one person, and set fire to a teenage boy’s genitals. Prosecutors accuse him of 18 cases of torture, killing one person, and contributing to the death of another. The doctor denies the charges.

Syria has been a brutal police state for decades. The brutality of the Bashar al-Assad regime escalated when the Arab Spring swept into the country in 2011 and Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom and dignity. Regime forces shot at demonstrators and then pounded towns and homes with shelling and airstrikes, plunging the country into a civil war between various rebel factions and the government. 

Rami Zayat/Reuters/File

A boy carries his belongings in a part of Aleppo, Syria, allegedly hit by a barrel bomb dropped by President Bashar al-Assad’s loyalists, April 2, 2015.

The war directly involved Western nations, Gulf states, Iran, Turkey, and Russia. Today President Assad’s grip on power appears secure, thanks to Moscow’s steadfast support, waning Western interest, and Syria’s reintroduction into the Arab League. By March 2021, the conflict had killed over 350,000 people, according to the United Nations, and displaced more than half of the prewar population of about 21 million. At least 100,000 people are missing, their statuses unknown. But the real figures for those killed and missing are probably much higher. 

Today European courts are central to the quest for justice for crimes committed in Syria. Germany, by virtue of taking in a million refugees from 2015 to 2016, has both Syrian perpetrators and victims on its soil. Germany also has an expansive view of universal jurisdiction, a principle that scraps territorial restraints on prosecutions for particularly grave atrocities, such as genocide and war crimes. Last year, a court in Koblenz, Germany, became the first to convict an Assad government official for crimes against humanity in Syria. Spain, Austria, Sweden, and France are pursuing similar cases. 

In 2015, Dr. M. arrived in Germany on a skilled worker visa and continued to practice medicine. He was arrested five years later over alleged complicity in offenses of sexual violence, torture, and killing of Syrian civilians. His trial opened on Jan. 19, 2022, at the Regional Court of Frankfurt and will continue into 2024. 

“I want the people who committed these crimes to be convicted,” says Dania Habaal, who traveled from Marburg to Frankfurt to witness history at the court. “I am really rooting for the victims, and I believe in the justice system here. Even if this is a little part of justice, it is very meaningful.”

A psychology student with Syrian roots, Ms. Habaal sees herself eventually providing expert testimony and supporting witnesses in such difficult trials. This August session ran from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., the climax being a deliberation over whether the witness’s phone could be confiscated to rule out that he was being coached by a Syrian human rights lawyer on what to say. The judges ruled no.

Dominique Soguel

“I am really rooting for the victims, and I believe in the justice system here. Even if this is a little part of justice, it is very meaningful.” – Dania Habaal, a student with Syrian roots living in Germany, who traveled to Frankfurt to witness Alaa M.’s trial

“All the events that I have mentioned in prison, I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears,” the male witness stressed at the end of the hearing. “I am a survivor of torture. I lost my work. I lost my land. I lost relatives. My homeland humiliated me.”

Arab countries this May moved to normalize relations with the Assad regime after a dozen years of opposing it. They resumed diplomatic and economic ties in a bid to rival Iranian influence in Damascus, facilitate reconstruction, encourage a return of refugees, and provide an incentive for Syria to crack down on the flow of illegal narcotics into their countries. But Western nations have sought to keep the issue of accountability on the international agenda. The Netherlands and Canada have filed against Syria at the International Court of Justice at The Hague over allegations of torture. In the eyes of some Syrians, such efforts are comforting – essential even. To others, they are better than nothing but still disappointing, given the scale of the crimes committed in their country.

Syrian human rights defenders argue their country deserves no less than an international criminal tribunal like the ones set up for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Others want transitional justice after a political solution is reached in the country. Many worry that putting lower-ranking officials on trial in Europe will deter higher-ups in Syria from defecting since they’d risk being tried. Geopolitical developments suggesting Mr. Assad will remain in power, enjoying complete impunity, add to the malaise confronting even the most ardent justice-seekers.

“This is not justice,” says Mazen Darwish, a France-based Syrian human rights defender who is building cases related to a barrel bomb attack on a school in Daraa and the 2013 chemical weapon attacks in eastern Ghouta. “This is the alternative choice. Because we can’t reach justice, we try to use universal jurisdiction and extraterritorial jurisdiction. This is only a tool to keep the file of justice on the table because the regime and the other lords of war, their regional and international supporters, want to go to a political agreement without taking into consideration accountability or victims’ rights.”

Monika Skolimowska/picture-alliance/dpa/AP/File

“If there is no guarantee that those people who arrested me, tortured me, are held accountable, then there is no guarantee that this will not happen ... again. It’s like asking me to give the killer a second chance.” – Mazen Darwish, a France-based Syrian lawyer and human rights defender

Accountability is key. “This is the only way that we can guarantee that those who are refugees, like me now, have a possibility to go back,” adds Mr. Darwish, president of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression and of the Violations Documentation Center in Syria. “If there is no guarantee that those people who arrested me, tortured me, are held accountable, then there is no guarantee that this will not happen to me and my family again. It’s like asking me to give the killer a second chance.”

“Internationally, the whole conversation should be about holding Assad to account,” says Nuran al-Ghamian, who found asylum in Switzerland and testified in the Koblenz trial about her prison ordeals. “Now, even places in Europe are thinking about returning Syrians to Syria. What security guarantees can there be? There is a very long history that paints a very clear picture of who this person is that is still in power.”

The last time Dr. Redwan Burhan’s family saw him alive was on June 20, 2013. His wife, Thawra Kerdia, sat in the passenger seat of their golden Nissan, their youngest daughter, Ola, or “Lulu,” in the back seat. The soldier at the Zabadani checkpoint took his mobile phone first. Then the car keys. Finally, he dragged the doctor out of the car, pulling his T-shirt over his head. Lulu cried and tried to hang on to her father, fearful that she would never see him again.

“I felt that if I let him go, he will not return,” says Lulu, who now lives with the rest of her family in the Austrian capital, Vienna.

Her premonition proved accurate.

Dominique Soguel

Thawra Kerdia in Vienna, Sept. 6, 2023, holds up a photo on her phone of her late husband, Redwan Burhan, who was detained, tortured, and killed by Syrian regime forces.

Courtesy of Thawra Kerdia

An archive photo shows the family of Thawra Kerdia and Redwan Burhan taken at their home in Syria in 2007.

Dr. Burhan was a pediatrician. He was among the first demonstrators in March 2011 in Souk al-Hamidiya, a covered market in the old city of Damascus. For that act of defiance, he endured two weeks in detention. Still, the first question he asked when released was, “Are the demonstrations still going on?” They were. He opened his clinic to protesters wounded in the terrible military crackdown that pushed Syria into war. For that he was accused of “treating the children of terrorists” and detained again. 

The image of his tortured corpse appeared among some 55,000 photographs known as the Caesar photos. Exfiltrated from Syria by a military defector, the images represent one of the most compelling bodies of evidence of the scale and systemic nature of the torture in Syrian prisons and detention centers, which have been crucial to propping up the regime of Mr. Assad and his father, Hafez, before him. The corpses were numbered, a triggering reminder of the Jewish Holocaust.

“I don’t know who killed my husband, but I know Assad is responsible,” says Ms. Kerdia.

“When a person is detained and killed, it is not just that person who suffers,” adds her middle daughter, Hind, who looked at the image of her tortured father to confirm his identity. “It is the whole family that suffers. This is why these trials [in Europe] matter. For them [the regime], he was a number. Not a person. Not a member of the family. We are not the only family who suffered this in Syria. There are many families like us.”

Ms. Kerdia and her three daughters walked across countries and braved the Mediterranean to reach Europe, capsizing three times. They succeeded on the fourth attempt by using their shoes to tip out water from their dinghy. “You have to be strong,” says Ms. Kerdia, who continues her activism in Austria. “You have to carry on.”

Rodrigo Abd/AP/File

People in Syria protest against the Assad regime, Feb 24, 2012.

Syrians have put themselves and their families at risk to build current and future cases against the Assad regime. Many have a long and painful history of challenging the regime. Among them is Mohammad Al Abdallah. Twice a political prisoner, he knows just how harsh Syrian prisons are.

Today he is the founding director of the Washington-based Syria Justice and Accountability Center, which collects and analyzes information and evidence relating to human rights and humanitarian law violations. One area of focus now is the use of barrel bombs by the regime against opposition areas. The other is disseminating best practices for authorities to debrief victims of torture so that they are not re-traumatized. 

“The biggest leads come from the victims themselves,” he stresses. “Everyone kept an eye on their perpetrators. ... What Alaa [M.] allegedly did, including with other military officials, speaks to a widespread practice that Syrians have known about but have not seen [anyone] held publicly accountable [for]. Sitting and talking about torture in Syria is not easy.” 

While Syrians in Europe and North America build cases, others across the Middle East, including in Syria, are quietly doing their part, collecting digital evidence for potential future trials. They upload videos and photos of war crimes and killings of relatives, friends, and neighbors from their phones and social media accounts to activists via a Telegram channel, the Syrian Revolution Archives. Such crimes may no longer make headlines, but they continue. 

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hears testimony from an anonymous Syrian military defector called Caesar, who wears a hood to protect his identity, March 11, 2020, in Washington.

Syrians involved in this work want the world to understand the systematic nature of the regime’s crimes and the cold calculus that came from the top. “It is very important to prove that all these violations and all these crimes have been committed systematically,” says Joumana Seif, who works on Syrian cases at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin. “This proves the responsibility of Assad himself as the head of state.”

But no one is optimistic about seeing Mr. Assad in the dock soon.

The United Nations International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), headed by Catherine Marchi-Uhel, was born out of frustration in 2016. Its mission is to assist in the investigation and prosecution of crimes committed in Syria after March 2011. This was deemed the best way forward after efforts to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court were scuppered by Russia and China’s 2014 vetoes at the U.N. Security Council. 

Ms. Marchi-Uhel says her team has two key challenges: lack of access to Syria and the sheer volume of data that has been preserved – no less than 246 terabytes. One terabyte is roughly equivalent to about 472 broadcast-quality videos or 130,000 digital photos.

“The big difficulty is to treat them in a forensic way that is going to facilitate admissibility in court,” she says in a Zoom interview. “These investigations are very different in focus. They concern different times of the Syrian situation. They concern different directorates within Syria. They concern different perpetrator groups and victim communities.”

In addition to its direct assistance to competent jurisdictions, the IIIM is running three lines of investigation. Two lines focus on the crimes committed in detention centers and unlawful attacks against civilians, including with chemical weapons. That covers many of the core international crimes that have been attributed to Syrian state actors. The third line concerns crimes by the Islamic State, still operating in Syria. Currently, the IIIM supports 15 competent jurisdictions on Syria-related cases. It has received over 298 requests for assistance for 219 distinct investigations.

SANA/AP/File

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad speaks in Damascus, Syria, in November 2019.

“When you look at the current number of cases that have led to judgments and, [in] a number of instances, convictions, the reality is that the level of perpetrators who have been apprehended and found guilty is not the highest level,” Ms. Marchi-Uhel says. “But these cases are anyway extremely important because they are the foundation for a broader picture, more comprehensive forms of justice.”

4,712. A number is all that Abu Yasser has left of his brother, Mohammed, who was detained by regime forces in 2012 for suspected protest activity in their hometown of Daraa.

Abu Yasser, who wishes to remain anonymous fearing government reprisals, sits in a bare apartment in the border town of Ramtha, Jordan, where he fled with his mother and sister 11 years ago, a few miles away from their hometown. 

The former schoolteacher bears scars on his stomach from his own imprisonment and torture by government forces. He has buried three brothers, a sister, and his father. But to him the scar due to his missing brother is the freshest and deepest. If alive, he would be Abu Yasser’s only male relative to survive the conflict.

He opened a file with the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2014, hoping to find his brother. For years, the committee called with the latest tip or rumor of his whereabouts: a prisoner fitting his description seen in the notorious Sednaya prison, a recently released detainee who believes he spotted him in a Damascus jail. But the calls stopped and leads dried up three years ago.

“The missing are taken from us, yet they are always with us,” Abu Yasser says, gazing at a photo of Mohammed, who would now be 36. “We constantly worry, not knowing. Are they alive? Are they dead? Are they suffering? Can we save them? Can we mourn them?

“We may achieve some cases of accountability, but I personally do not believe justice can be achieved for the Syrian people,” he continues. “Can you bring back my father, my brothers, my sister?” 

A court cannot restore lost childhoods or reunite destroyed families, Abu Yasser says. 

“In order for anything resembling justice to take place, we need, [at] the very least, to know the fate of our missing,” he adds.

Not knowing about the life or death of those missing is a crisis that affects Syrians across geography, class, ideology, and lines of pro- and anti-regime. Nearly every Syrian family frets over a missing relative who has disappeared in regime- or militia-run jails. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a United Kingdom-based watchdog organization, 112,713 Syrians remain forcibly disappeared as of August 2023.

Dominique Soguel

“Internationally, the whole conversation should be about holding Assad to account. ... There is a very long history that paints a very clear picture of who this person is that is still in power.” – Nuran al-Ghamian, who testified in the Koblenz trial about her prison ordeals

The vast majority, 96,100, disappeared at the hands of Syrian government forces. “We know that they are ending up in mass graves,” says Diab Serriya, head of the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison. “But who is responsible? Where is the grave? Who is writing the reports? There was a full system. Nothing was left to chance.”

Although Arab states made transparency regarding missing people a condition for resuming full ties with the Assad regime, the Syrian government has provided no answers, dashing the hopes of hundreds of thousands and leaving many lives on hold.

Um Amjad presumes her husband is dead; he has not been heard from since he was arrested and disappeared in Homs in 2012. She and her three daughters live in an apartment complex for Syrian widows and orphaned children in Ramtha, one of dozens of such housing areas provided by charitable associations and wealthy individuals in the Persian Gulf.

But without proof of what happened to her husband and a death certificate, she, like many Syrian widows, cannot obtain full legal custody of her children, creating obstacles for traveling, resettling, or even receiving health services. Most Syrian widows and wives of those missing are left vulnerable to losing their children to their husband’s male relatives – whom Jordanian and Syrian laws recognize as rightful guardians.

“We move on with our lives, but we are also stuck, as if waiting for him to walk through that door at any moment. Every day we are reminded he is gone,” Um Amjad says. “There cannot be accountability until we have truth.”

Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters/File

Fadwa Mahmoud holds portraits of her son and husband, who disappeared in 2012. She is surrounded by about 300 phones at the Bebelplatz in Berlin as a call to nations to seek information about detainees in Syria, Aug. 28, 2021.

Syrians in Europe pushing for justice may have to play an outsize role and speak for millions of Syrians who cannot.

Most Syrian refugees in the Middle East, some 5.6 million in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt, are unable to publicly speak out against the Syrian government. Host governments normalizing ties with the Assad regime do not wish refugee political activity to hurt their diplomatic rapprochements. Syrian refugees who give evidence or speak to the media risk being deported to Syria, as has already occurred in Turkey and Lebanon. That can be a death sentence.

Refugees with relatives in Syria also fear regime or militia retribution against their family should they speak out. Then there are the 6.8 million Syrians displaced within Syria, many of whom (along with millions who never left their homes) are living in regime-held territory. They know any effort to provide evidence could end with their being arrested or assassinated.

“We are not part of the movement for justice and court cases in Europe, because we can’t,” says Abu Yasser, the former schoolteacher. “Syrians in Europe and Canada are free to talk. Although we all oppose the regime and want to see justice, we are too vulnerable to take part.”

He walks over to his fourth-floor apartment window and points down to the bustling street of carpenter workshops and grocery stores.

“Every day, I see a former regime officer who killed my neighbors walking freely in the streets in my neighborhood here in Jordan,” he says, wincing as he peers out from behind a curtain, his face only half showing.

“Can I say anything to him? Can I come forward with this information?” he asks before immediately answering, “I can’t, unless I want to be sent back.”

Many Syrian refugees in Jordan are unaware of Europe’s court cases.

Zaineb Isra has been busy “acting as mother and father” to her five children since her husband, Abdulmanim Alowayed, a grocery clerk and handyman, was killed by shelling in their village of Sayyida Zaynab, outside Damascus in 2013. She welcomes the court proceedings as “good news.”

Taylor Luck

Zaineb Isra (center), whose husband was killed by shelling in their village outside Damascus in 2013, shows his photo on her phone as she sits with two of her daughters, Salm (left) and Salsabel, at their apartment in Amman, Jordan, Sept. 6, 2023.

“We have seen so much injustice,” she says from her apartment in Amman, showing a photograph of her husband on her phone. “Everyone involved in the war deserves to be held accountable. Justice for one is justice for all.”

And as for her husband, “God will bring me justice on Judgment Day.”

Ms. Kerdia, whose husband’s death was revealed by a gruesome photo, waved the flag of the Syrian revolution in defiance as tanks shelled Zabadani in 2012. She waves it still on a regular basis in Vienna – sometimes on her own, sometimes with crowds. Hundreds gathered for a recent demonstration at the foot of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, a mobilization she credits to the revival of the spirit of the Syrian revolution as defiant protests once again sweep her homeland with slogans affirming the unity of the Syrian people.

“A people who rose once will rise again,” Ms. Kerdia says. “After all that has happened, I did not lose hope. And I will not lose hope. If we do not see this regime fall, our children will.”

The world’s food exporters are producing enough grain to avoid the shortages predicted last year with the outbreak of war between major farming nations Russia and Ukraine.

That’s welcome news to consumers globally at a time of high inflation, including for food prices.

Global supply and demand for corn and soybeans are in balance, by and large. In place of last year’s panic over rising prices, global wheat prices are falling.

“So far, things have worked much, much better than I think people projected,” says Allen Featherstone, head of agricultural economics at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. But “there’s still a lot of instability there.”

Surprisingly, the change is largely due to Russia’s excellent wheat harvest and Ukrainian pluck. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated Thursday the Russian wheat harvest at a record 92 million metric tons, up more than 20% from last year. Even more surprising is Ukraine, where despite the ravages of war and missile attacks, farmers have still managed to match last year’s production, the agency estimates. And their combined exports will reach record highs this year and remain nearly as high next year, forecasts AgResource Co.

“The upshot is that Black Sea wheat exports will be near record large in 2023/24,” Dan Basse, president of the Chicago-based agricultural research firm, writes in an email. By next year, the war in Ukraine will have “virtually no impact with wheat prices at a three-year low.”

The generally rosy scenario has been helped by strong harvests of corn and soybeans elsewhere in the world.

Problems remain, however. 

In July, India banned exports of its biggest category of rice, sending world rice prices spiraling up. The appearance of an El Niño weather pattern could portend dry conditions for Southern Hemisphere farmers planting their new crops. And the war in Ukraine could cause new problems if it drags on.

One of the ironies is that despite the relatively positive global crop situation, the world’s push to reduce food insecurity has stalled. As of August, nearly 238 million people in 48 nations faced high levels of acute food insecurity, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission reported. That amounts to almost 1 in 5 people in those nations, which was similar to 2022.

One reason is that crop prices are still too high for some poor nations to afford.

Sunday Alamba/AP

A man sells grain at Dawanau International Market in Kano, Nigeria. Nigeria introduced programs before and during Russia's war in Ukraine to make Africa's largest economy self-reliant in wheat production. But weather and insecurity in the northern part of the country have hindered the effort.

“Globally, there are no shortages,” says Monika Tothova, a Rome-based economist with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. “The problem is that the price is high and the countries in need might be having difficult times accessing it.”

Another driver is conflict. East Africa’s food crisis, the world’s worst, intensified this year with civil war in Sudan pushing 8 million more people into high levels of acute food insecurity. The new Hamas-Israeli conflict is also likely to intensify an already difficult situation in Palestinian Gaza. Israel has cut off food shipments to the enclave, where nearly two-thirds of the population was food-insecure even before the latest outbreak of violence, according to the U.N. World Food Program.

And the war in Ukraine could once again darken the food outlook, unless Ukrainian farmers can find ways to boost revenues and cut costs. For example: A major exporter of wheat, Ukraine in normal times is also a big corn producer and the world’s biggest exporter of sunflower oil (used for cooking) and meal (used to feed livestock). Now the nation often doesn’t have the electric power to dry its corn or crush its sunflowers into meal and oil, points out Antonina Broyaka, a Ukrainian agricultural economist who fled the country with her children early in the war and now works at Kansas State University. So many have shifted out of corn into sunflowers, a lower-value crop.

Rising transportation costs pose another huge challenge. In July, Russia pulled out of a deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain via the Black Sea, forcing Kyiv to find new, costlier ways to move its grain abroad, which has cut into farmers’ profits.

“The production is not profitable at all, and it’s getting harder and harder for farmers to keep the agriculture moving ... because they don’t have enough money for inputs, for seeds, for fertilizers,” says Ms. Broyaka. If the situation doesn’t change, planted acreage could dwindle over the next several years, she adds.

Time and again, the global agricultural system has adjusted to shocks. “It’s kind of like a kid. You stumble on the sidewalk and you skin your knee,” says Stephen Nicholson, a global strategist for grains and oilseeds at Rabobank, an agribusiness bank. “But you pick yourself back up and you move on.”

A good courtroom drama must always be about more than what occurs in the courtroom. The human drama of the protagonists, what brought them to trial in the first place, should constitute the essence of the action.

In this sense, “Anatomy of a Fall” – the winner of the 2023 Palme d’Or at Cannes, that festival’s highest honor – is exemplary. The outcome of the trial is, in a way, the movie’s least riveting aspect.

As presented to us, the circumstances of the trial are deliberately ambiguous. Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), an acclaimed German novelist known for drawing on her own life experiences in her fiction, is living with her author husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis), and their 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), in a remote village in the French Alps.

It’s clear from the discordant opening scene that the couple is not exactly in a state of domestic bliss. A reporter has come to interview Sandra, and from upstairs, Samuel, whom we never see, is blaring deafening music, as if to drown out the session. Sometime later, Daniel, who is partially sighted, comes upon his father splayed in the snow, apparently dead from a fall from atop their chalet. His head wound may or may not have been a result of the fall. Did he jump or was he pushed?

At first, the focus is almost entirely on Sandra, who immediately becomes a prime suspect. As is standard in these types of scenarios, we are placed in the position of judging her. Sandra maintains her innocence, based not only on partial information and conflicting testimony but also on a deeper level, by examining her every facial flicker for clues. Director Justine Triet, who co-wrote the script with her partner, Arthur Harari, chose the lead actress well: Hüller is expressively inscrutable.

Not once did I detect her signaling an “aha!” moment to the audience. Hüller gives nothing away, and yet the interiority of her performance – the way she can communicate the deepest feelings with the barest of nuances – is uncanny.

Her performance is matched, though smaller in scope, by Machado Graner as Sandra’s son. Daniel is an industrious kid who is never presented as a victim of infirmity. In the process of rooting out the truths from the half-truths and the unknowables, Daniel becomes the trial’s unwitting centerpiece. But what really resonates in the film is how, in responding to recorded tapes of a vicious marital spat, he must cope with the dissection of his parents’ marriage at an age when most children cannot comprehend the pain that two people can inflict on each other.

The strongest scene in the movie is the enactment, in flashback, of that fight. It’s a scene that rivals anything in Ingmar Bergman’s television miniseries “Scenes From a Marriage.” Sandra and Samuel go at each other in a way that only two people who are intimately bound by love and hate and blame can achieve. The scene, among much else, is also a furious depiction of how two artists, joined together, can both support and prey on each other’s creativity.

The film is very good at laying out the forensics of the case, but Triet is after something larger. I’m not sure she altogether succeeds: She wants to show how Sandra is being judged not just for the murder but, in effect, for everything – for her failures as a mother, a lover, an artist. We are being asked to judge the society that judges her. We are also nudged to contemplate that old philosophical chestnut: What is truth?

This is all a bit too much baggage. Perhaps Triet felt she needed to enlarge the film’s scope in order to distinguish it from the countless courtroom dramas that flood our screens. If so, she needn’t have worried. What she has otherwise given us is a superbly acted and directed procedural with powerful psychological grounding. That’s plenty.

Peter Rainer is the Monitor’s film critic. “Anatomy of a Fall” is rated R for some language, sexual references, and violent images. 

As the winter snow melts, Yazidi herders lead sheep and cattle to Armenia’s highest pastures. Shepherds and their families spend spring, summer, and early autumn in tents and mobile homes atop the Aragats and Gegham mountains. The journey is one of the last vestiges of a nomadic past.  

The largely Kurdish-speaking Yazidi people are Armenia’s largest minority. They have been persecuted in countries such as Iran and Iraq, including a 2014 Islamic State attack that killed thousands.

In Armenia, however, the Yazidi community has parliamentary representation, their own schools, and the freedom to practice their religion, which draws from ancient Iranian traditions and shares elements with Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The country has also become a haven in recent weeks for ethnic Armenian refugees fleeing instability in the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in neighboring Azerbaijan. 

The shepherds begin each day with prayer, a tribute to the rising sun. As they guide their animals across the volcanic landscape, a subtle hierarchy emerges: wandering goats in the lead, followed by sheep, with Armenian Gampr dogs and a watchful shepherd bringing up the rear. Birds of prey, including golden eagles, scan the procession from distant rocks for a potential meal, though such opportunities are rare. 

Avedis Hadjian

Ararat Mouratyan and his 4-year-old grandson, Ruslan, are part of a community of seminomadic Yazidi herding families that camp in the high mountain pastures.

At day’s end, the animals are corralled, and a table is set with simple but plentiful dishes: cheese, yogurt, vegetables, and often meat. The shepherds will rise again at dawn, repeating the cycle until the first snows of fall. 

Avedis Hadjian

A shepherd brings his animals back to the corral as a storm gathers atop Mount Aragats, the highest peak in Armenia.

Avedis Hadjian

A mother and daughter milk ewes to prepare cheese, yogurt, and other dairy products.

Avedis Hadjian

A Yazidi woman sets the table for the Armenian truck driver who has brought supplies to the "yaylas," or mountain pastures.

Avedis Hadjian

With the animals safely enclosed, families move into tents for supper and early sleep, as they will rise with the first light of dawn.

Reuters

Israeli forces drive in southern Israel as rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip, Oct. 7.

It is impossible not to feel the world’s deep anguish over yet another war with a heavy toll for civilians. After deadly cross-border attacks by Palestinian Hamas fighters last weekend, Israel is preparing a military operation into the Gaza Strip. The crisis comes at a moment when the Middle East appeared to be moving into a new era of warmer relations between Israel and many Arab states.

Yet even as the war escalates, it is also triggering widespread calls for the protection of the innocent, one of the principles in international humanitarian law and a value that strengthens the possibility of peace.

“It should be possible to stand with the residents” of the villages in southern Israel struck by Hamas “while still remembering that living on the other side are human beings just like them,” wrote Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist, in Haaretz. “It should be possible, even in the current atmosphere, to speak about Gaza in human terms.”

The crisis has elevated concern for civilians for obvious reasons. Hamas has killed Israeli citizens and taken many as hostages. Israel has shut off supplies of water, food, fuel, and electricity to Gaza, an urban strip along the Mediterranean Sea. A military operation to hunt down militants risks a steep civilian toll. “Separating Hamas from Gaza is an almost impossible task,” Daniel Byman, a Georgetown University international studies professor, told The Economist.

U.S. President Joe Biden warned of the potential humanitarian cost of a large-scale military response. “It is really important that Israel, with all the anger and frustration ... that exists, is that they operate by the rules of war,” he said at the White House last night. Those concerns are shared. The United Arab Emirates Foreign Ministry stressed the need to “preserve the lives of civilians, and offered its sincere condolences to all the victims who fell as a result of the recent fighting.”

One effect of the current crisis may be a rediscovery of the global norm to protect the innocent. Under humanitarian law enshrined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions, a person has inherent innocence. Every Muslim nation is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, which encodes the principle of protecting civilians. That support reflects a coincidence between Islamic law and humanitarian law. “A Muslim is conscious of God during war and armed conflict and strictly adheres to the norms of warfare, respecting human dignity,” wrote Zuhdija Hasanović, dean of the Faculty of Islamic Studies at the University of Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in a 2020 book. “And if he has this consciousness during war, how can he not have so during peace?”

That view, wrote Daniel Reisel, co-founder of the London-based Jewish organization Yachad, is consistent with Jewish law based on “Abraham’s imperative not to harm the innocent among the enemy.”

In a speech at the Austrian Center for Peace in July, Robert Mardini, director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, argued that the “single most effective way to reduce suffering in war is to uphold the fundamental principle of humanity.” At a time when more than a hundred conflicts worldwide threaten the safety of civilians, that principle is already getting a fresh look in Gaza and Israel.