Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is under investigations by the Police in the UK. The investigations are based on the allegations which state that Asma al-Assad had incited and encouraged terrorist acts in Syria.

If convicted of the crime, Asma could get stripped of her citizenship in UK. The Metropolitan police stated that it had received a referral in July last year relating to the Syrian conflict. A statement from the Metropolitan police said, “the referral is in process of being assessed by officers from the War Crimes Unit.”

Guernica 37, which is a conflict-focused international justice law firm, that also deals with ‘transnational litigation involving enforcement of fundamental human rights protection, had brought the case against Asma. The firm also stated that Syrian government is guilty of a systemic approach to the torture and murder of civilians which includes use of chemical weapons.

In a statement, the firm said, “This is an important step in holding senior political officials accountable for their acts and ensuring that a state, through an independent and impartial legal process, takes responsibility for the acts of its own nationals.”

It had been found that Asma al-Assad’s speeches had glorified the Syrian army and had in turn incited the army to use chemical weapons.

Syria had admitted that it had produced certain chemical weapons which are not in the original declaration of the Chemical Weapons Convention of the Organization of Prohibition of Chemicals, like Soman, Ricin & Nitrogen mustard. In August 2013, in opposition-controlled Ghouta, a Sarin-attack was carried out by Syria, which was the deadliest chemical weapons’ attack since the Iran-Iraq war.   In 2017, Syrian government had carried out an airstrike in Khan Shaykhun in Idlib governorate, which released chemical weapons which included Sarin, that had caused the death of around 89-100 people. The joint investigative mechanism of the OPCW (OPCW-JIM) had found out that the Sarin, or Isopropyl Methylphosphonofluoridate used in Khan Shaykhun was produced from the stockpiles of DF or Methylphosphonyl difluoride in Syria.

The case of Asma al-Assad is crucial in the context of the Syrian civil war which has dragged on into its eleventh year with the associated refugee problem reaching a gargantuan size. As of now, about 5.6 million Syrians are refugees and about 6.1 million are displaced within Syria and around 11.1 million people need humanitarian assistance. Another point of concern about the civil war is that about half of the people in the Syrian refugee crisis are children.