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Assad's Nuremberg Moment: NGO Builds Case for Syrian War Crimes
(Toronto Globe and Mail-Canada) Mark MacKinnon - Over the past seven years, veteran Canadian war-crimes investigator William Wiley and his team at the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), the non-profit organization he established in 2012, have smuggled hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence out of Syria and Iraq - documents that are now being used to build war-crimes cases against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his henchmen, as well as senior figures in the Islamic State. Western governments, including Canada's, collectively provide $8 million in annual funding for the group's 150 investigators. Wiley, 55, is a veteran of the efforts to bring justice to Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. He views the evidence against Assad as "much, much better" than what was presented in court against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. CIJA files prove that Assad himself had knowledge of, and approved, the actions of his subordinates. "It's pretty clear that Assad was not a figurehead. He was in charge, and the senior guys deferred to him." Wiley says his group also has more than enough evidence to help convict ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.