By Kathryn Maureen Ryan
Impunity Watch, Middle East
DAMASCUS, Syria – A report prepared by a group of world renowned war crimes prosecutors and forensic experts documents photographs smuggled out of Syria that provide ‘clear evidence’ of the systematic killing of 11,000 individual detainees by the Syrian regime.
The authors of the report include Sir Desmond de Silva QC, former Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, the former lead Prosecutor of Former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic, and Syracuse University Professor David Crane, the Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, who indicted President Charles Taylor of Liberia and is the founder of Impunity Watch.
The United Nations and independent human rights groups have documented abuses by both the regime of Bashar al-Assad and armed rebel groups. However, experts say the evidence presented in this report is the most detained documentation of widespread and systematic abuses by either side of the conflict which has raged on for more than 34 months.
Their report is based on thousands of photographs of the bodies of detainees alleged to have been killed by the Syrian regime while in the custody of the state. These photographs provide evidence that would stand up in an international criminal tribunal, according to the report.
Professor Crane called the evidence “a smoking gun.” He added that “any prosecutor would like this kind of evidence — the photos and the process. This is direct evidence of the regime’s killing machine.”
The source, named in the report only as “Caesar” for security reasons, was a military policeman who worked with a Syrian opposition group in secret and later defected and fled the country. In a series of three sessions over the past ten days, they concluded that he was a credible and truthful source and that his account and the evidence he provided was “most compelling.” Caesar worked for the regime as a photographer in the military police. During the civil war, his main job was the documenting “killed detainees” by photographing the corpses of detainees who had been killed while in custody before a death certificate was issued.
Caesar claimed that throughout the conflict he had to photograph about 50 bodies per day. He provided nearly 27,000 photographs for the report. In total about 55,000 such images were smuggled out of Syria.
The report’s authors argue that the fact that these bodies were photographed at the state’s request strongly suggests that “the killings were systematic, ordered, and directed from above,” providing strong, documented evidence of atrocities committed by the Assad Regime. Professor Crane described the images as evidence of a “callous, industrial machine grinding its citizens,” adding that these images depict an “industrial age mass killing.”
The state may have wanted such strong documented evidence of the killing of thousands of individuals by the regime as a means of proving the death of each individual person without allowing the families and loved ones of the deceased to properly bury or even see their bodies, a violation of Islamic law. The report suggest that the documentation of these killings may have also been carried out in order to prove that the state’s “orders to execute individuals had been carried out.”
For the full report please see: Into the Credibility of Certain Evidence with Regard to Torture
For more information please see:
CNN International – EXCLUSIVE: Gruesome Syria Photos May Prove Torture by Assad Regime – 21 January 2014
The Guardian – Systematic Killing Evidence in Syria Just Tip of Iceberg – Aid Agencies – 21 January 2014
The Guardian – US Condemns ‘Horror’ of Syrian War Crimes Evidence – 21 January 2014
The Guardian – Syrian Regime Document Trove Shows Evidence of ‘Industrial Scale’ Killing of Detainees – 20 January 2014
