Exclusive: How Syria's rebels turned against an activist – DW – 07/17/2021

By the summer of 2013, documenting human rights abuses had become taboo even in rebel-held territories in Syria. But Razan Zaitouneh was steadfast.The prominent human rights lawyer had just fled the capital, Damascus, due to the immense pressure placed on her work by the regime —and she wasn't prepared to stop it at the behest of armed men in rebel-held Douma, a small town on the outskirts of the capital.That tenacity, however, would prove fateful.Although the leaders of armed opposition groups had widely supported documenting atrocities committed by President Bashar Assad's forces, they viewed efforts to chronicle their own war crimes with open hostility.Eventually, unknown assailants would kidnap Zaitouneh, her husband and two colleagues.The number of possible witnesses has diminished in the eight years since. Some are threatened into silence, others have been killed, and even more are subject to routine intimidation. As a result, the abduction has remained one of the greatest unsolv...