Syrian Torture, Then and Now
The atrocities committed by the Assad regime were no secret—but they were met with Western inaction.
Newspapers, television stations, and social-media accounts worldwide have been filled with news of Bashar al-Assad’s gulag of torture centres since the dictator fled and his regime collapsed on 8 December. On 14 December, a front-page story in the New York Times announced, “Syria Shudders as Assad’s Prison Atrocities Come into the Light.” The extensively detailed article contains nineteen colour photographs, including some of desperate Syrians looking through now-deserted prisons and crowding into morgues in search of their loved ones. Syria’s people have endured a half-century of misery at the hands of a homicidal father-son dictatorship, and they certainly deserve the world’s attention. But the atrocities of the Assad family are not really news, and they have not just “come into the light.” In fact, Assad’s torture regime has been extraordinarily well-documented for more than a decade.
At least five million Syrians have fled the country since its uprising began in 2011, and more than a million have found asylum or at least refuge in the West. Some of them, especially those who had escaped or been released (often through bribes) from the prisons, have testified to the crimes that were committed on a daily basis in the dungeons. Amnesty International has called Sednaya prison a “human slaughterhouse.” In 2018, the Washington Post ran an article, accompanied by satellite imagery, under the grim headline, “Syria’s Once-Teeming Prison Cells Being Emptied by Mass Murder.”
The most famous witness to this cruelty was probably Mazen al-Hamada, a peaceful anti-government activist who sought asylum in the Netherlands in 2014 and spoke throughout the world, in graphic detail, about the excruciating treatment, including rape, that he had endured while imprisoned. It is almost unbearable to watch and hear interviews with him; the anguish is etched on his gaunt face; the details are revolting; sometimes he cries.
Al-Hamada was lured back to Syria in 2020. Various reasons have been suggested: the regime made false promises to him, or it threatened to kill his whole family, or he despaired of the West’s inaction. Perhaps his ill-fated return was a combination of these factors; friends have since said that the repeated reliving of his trauma led to a kind of breakdown. (One thinks of Jean Amery, a survivor of Auschwitz, who wrote in his book At the Mind’s Limits, “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured.”)
Al-Hamada’s disfigured corpse was discovered in Sednaya soon after 8 December; he was apparently murdered just days before the government fell. Hundreds of sorrowful, enraged compatriots—singing, crying, holding pictures of the disappeared—filled the streets of Damascus at his funeral. Some mourners chanted tributes to him; others demanded Assad’s execution. The word “martyr” is often misused in the Middle East, but al-Hamada truly was one.
But the most dramatic and irrefutable revelations were the so-called Caesar photographs. Caesar is the code name of a Syrian police photographer who, before the war, was tasked with taking relatively anodyne pictures, such as those of car accidents. But with the uprising, and Assad’s ferocious crushing of it, his work changed. After that, he was tasked by the intelligence authorities with photographing the corpses within the prisons: corpses of people who had been starved to death; who had been gruesomely mutilated, stabbed, whipped; whose eyes had been gouged out. (Assad was trained as an opthamologist in England.) These prisoners died in unimaginable humiliation and agony. Some, perhaps, welcomed death, or begged for it.
Caesar’s photographs—which are Assad’s photographs—document what Primo Levi called “useless violence,” which lacks any rational military or political purpose. Its purpose is suffering. What Levi wrote of the Third Reich in The Drowned and the Saved was equally true of Assad’s regime: “The ‘enemy’ must not only die, he must die in torment.” (The link between the Nazi and Syrian regimes was not just ideological; a fascinating piece in New Lines magazine detailed how the torturers of Bashar’s loathsome father, Hafez, were trained by Alois Brunner, a high-ranking Nazi who found refuge in Syria after WWII.) I have written a book about photographs of political violence, and have therefore seen many horrible pictures that I wished I had not. But I have never seen anything worse than the Caesar photographs.
Horrified, terrified, and endangering his life and that of his family, Caesar spent two years downloading the prison images onto memory sticks and transferring some of them to the internet for safekeeping. In 2013, he and his family were smuggled into Jordan by anti-regime activists. They then made their way to Europe, along with a hard drive of 55,000 images.
Once released and authenticated, the photographs received an enormous amount of publicity and attention. News of the photographs could soon be found on the front pages of the major newspapers of the West, as well as on non-Western sites like Al-Jazeera and those of Syrian human-rights groups in exile. Publications that are normally hesitant to show grisly images, including the New York Times, published them in print and on websites, as did human-rights organisations. There was no longer anything secret about these photos; they were quite easy to access, and millions of people probably viewed them. Meanwhile, Syrians within the country circulated them clandestinely, searching for news, however devastating, of relatives and friends.
Joshua Muravchik
Christiane Amanpour interviewed Caesar on CNN, his face pixelated and his voice disguised. The photographs were shown at the United Nations, to the parliaments of the European Union and the UK, and at numerous universities here and abroad. Perhaps more important, they were aired in a special screening before various world leaders, including John Kerry, then Secretary of State, and France’s foreign minister. Caesar testified with a hood over his head before the US Congress. While in Washington, he spoke with Samantha Power, then the US’s UN envoy, and with Senator John McCain (who knew a thing or two about torture), though President Obama declined to meet with him. A book titled Operation Caesar: At the Heart of the Syrian Death Machine by the French journalist Garance Le Caisne was published in 2015 and translated into at least six languages, including English.
Time and again, the photographs elicited comparisons to the stacked bodies found in the Nazi death camps and the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda. Geoffrey Nice, lead prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, described the photographs as “like getting the keys to the Nazi archive.” But this time, the photographs weren’t historical—images retrieved largely after the fact. They were documents of an ongoing nightmare. They signalled to the future, not the past. Caesar himself toured the world incognito, warning that the Syrian prisons still held 150,000 people.
As astonishing as these photographs were, the reaction to them was more astonishing. Which is to say that, aside from shock and condemnation: nothing happened. As a front page article in the New York Times in October 2014 put it, “Syrian Photos Spur Outrage, but Not Action.” The political needle did not move; the sound and the fury signified nothing.
There were, of course, many reasons why the West (which means the US) did not intervene in Syria. The opposition—which began as a peaceful movement demanding “Dignity!”—was soon hijacked by a variety of jihadist groups (one of which now rules the country, at least as I write). The American public was adamantly opposed to any action that might morph into another “forever war,” and Barack Obama was most adamant of all. Indeed, when his red line forbidding the use of chemical weapons was brazenly violated by Assad in August 2013, it turned out that the line was not red at all.
Obama later told Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic that he was “very proud” of this moment, a sentiment he would later confirm. (I doubt that many Syrians are thinking about Obama right now, but if they do, it is probably not with great affection.) Historians will continue to debate the US’s actions and inactions in the Syrian war. But it seems clear, at least to me, that Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah possessed the passionate intensity that we lacked.
Of course, a photograph cannot and should not dictate military or political choices. Nevertheless, a trove of 55,000 torture images should, one would think, have some effect. The photography scholar Fred Ritchin was puzzled by the images’ absence of impact:
An older social contract that surrounded the making and distribution of documentary photographs assumed the willingness of the viewer to accept the photograph’s reality as well as its invitation to our response, both personal and societal. But in an ongoing war of images, where every photograph proffered may be suspect, this social contract becomes frayed. ... While the existence of 55,000 photographs showing such barbarity would have previously been more than enough to strike a profound chord in the public conversation, perhaps viewers and governments alike are becoming habituated to such horror on a mass scale.
Unsurprisingly, Assad questioned, indeed mocked, the authenticity of the images during a 2015 interview with Foreign Affairs. It seems that in the age of the image, the power of images has been diminished. In the age of information, information has become increasingly irrelevant.
Now it is (hopefully) up to Syrians to decide their fate. The country has been plagued by coups, instability, and sadistic repression since it declared independence from France in 1946 (decolonisation doesn’t always work out well). It is hard for a brutalised, immiserated people with no memory of self-rule to create a democratic polity and, even more, a democratic culture (a daunting task, we are discovering, even for those of us in the developed West).
Perhaps Syrians will be lucky enough to avoid the fate of their neighbours in Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt, who have found neither peace nor democracy since their dictators were ejected. Perhaps, as Syrians embark on the grievous search for the missing in prisons, morgues, hospitals, and mass graves, they will be wise enough to distinguish justice from vengeance (though I don’t know if I could). The Caesar photographs will help in this search, and it is expected that they will be used in war-crimes trials—if there are any. Caesar, who has never revealed his identity or location, told Britain’s Independent that he would be willing to return to Syria to help collect evidence of what he called “the worst crimes of the 21st century.”
There were good reasons and bad reasons that the West refused any kind of saving action in Syria. But the stubborn fact—of which Syrians are no doubt aware—remains: the prosperous West, which often boasts of its commitment to human rights, abandoned Syrians to their amply documented torment. What they will make of that remains to be seen.
