HARI SREENIVASAN:

Five years of war have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Syria in this many-sided and brutal conflict. But there's now a project under way that's trying to document the principal role of the Bashar al-Assad regime in the killing and its systematic campaign of detention, torture and murder.

The story of this remarkable forensic effort and the appalling acts it catalogs is told in this week's "New Yorker" by reporter Ben Taub in his piece called "The Assad Files."

Ben Taub joins me now.

So, what is this organization? It's not the United Nations. It's not the International Criminal Court. But it seems almost more effective in the amount of evidence that it's gathered on what's happening in Syria.