The Damascus Dossier photographs are a harrowing sequel to a cache of images depicting prisoners killed between 2011 and 2013, which were smuggled out of Syria more than a decade ago by a military defector codenamed Caesar. The Caesar photos set off a series of international prosecutions and sanctions against the Syrian government, serving as evidence in the first-ever torture trial against the Assad regime, in Germany, in 2020. That case resulted in the life imprisonment of Anwar Raslan, a former Syrian colonel, who was linked to at least 4,000 cases of state-led torture, and the 4½/2-year prison sentence of Eyad al-Gharib, a former officer, for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. The photos also inspired a U.S. law known as the Caesar Act, which levied sanctions against Assad and the Syrian government and authorized the State Department to collect evidence on and prosecute perpetrators of war crimes in Syria. In 2014, Caesar, who earlier this year revealed himself as Farid al-Madhan, the former head of the forensic evidence department with the military police in Damascus, offered background on the photos to a team of international prosecutors. He told them that military officers were tasked with photographing bodies to prove that orders of murder had been carried out. The photos were also used to produce death certificates, without the families having to see their loved ones bodies, he said. In most cases, those government-issued death certificates falsely listed the inmates causes of death as "cardiac arrest" or "cardiorespiratory arrest." Despite all the evidence, Assad's government denied the validity of the Caesar photos.

Assad’s archive of death: Photographs of more than 10,000 regime victims capture a campaign of torture and mass murder in haunting, meticulous detail. www.icij.org/investigatio... By Nicole Sadek and @karriekehoe.bsky.social #Baathism #TheDamascusDossier