The Edward Snowden of Syria exposed Bashar’s regime two years ago by releasing 53,275 photographs of more than 6,000 dead prisoners with signs of torture and starvation all over their cruelly damaged bodies. Like America’s Edward Snowden, Caesar, as he has been codenamed to protect his real identity, was a low-level technical operative who could not accept to stay silent about his regime’s abuses of human rights. However, unlike the revelations brought by Edward Snowden, Caesar’s revelations had no impact on the world’s democracies. In fact, the world looked away from Bashar’s crimes against humanity and towards the ISIS puppet show, which was presenting carefully prepared videos of strange executions in historical sites of world heritage to distract attention. Furthermore, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad said in January 2015, “You can bring photographs from anyone and say this is torture. There is no verification of any of this evidence, so it’s all allegations without evidence,” and with such words the world’s democracies maintained their conspiracies of silence in order to help him attack their common enemy, which is composed of all the sincere groups that are fighting to remove Bashar’s regime without betraying al-Sham to the subjugation of western hegemony.

Now, a new report has been released on the 16th of December, 2015, by a highly reputed human rights organization, Human Rights Watch (HRW), which performed a very careful six-month investigation proving the truth of the Caesar photographs: “If the Dead Could Speak – Mass Deaths and Torture in Syria’s Detention Facilities”. The report provides documentary proof of ugly crimes against humanity committed by Bashar against the people of Syria. Caesar was a forensic photographer for government security forces, and his job was to carefully and systematically record by photographs the deaths of detainees in two of Bashar’s military hospitals in Damascus over a period of 27 months from May 2011 until he slipped out of the country in August 2013.

The HRW report demonstrates the authenticity of the photographs by corroborating them through interviews with “dozens of interviews with former prisoners, defectors who had worked in Syrian military hospitals or intelligence agencies, forensic experts and families of the disappeared.” There were three categories of photographs, which also recorded the deaths of Bashar’s security people. The HRW report explained that “the largest category of photographs, 28,707 images, are photographs of people Human Rights Watch understands to have died in government custody, either in one of several detention facilities or after being transferred to a military hospital. What distinguishes this batch of photographs is that all the bodies in them have identification numbers, typically three separate numbers, either written directly on the body or on a paper that is placed on the body or held in the photograph frame. There are multiple photographs of each body, typically four to five but ranging between three to more than twenty. SAFMCD, which reviewed the entire collection and logged the photographs by individual body, found that these 28,707 photographs correspond to at least 6,786 separate dead individuals each with their own unique identification numbers.”

The report confirms the location where the bodies were photographed and shows how the US were fully briefed about this: “photographs of the bodies of those Human Rights Watch understands died in detention – were taken inside what appear to be rooms in morgues, or in a courtyard that Caesar identified as a garage of one of the military hospitals. Caesar told both an international team of lawyers investigating the photographs and the U.S. Congress that they were taken at Syrian government military hospitals. “What you see here is the garage of the military hospital,” he told Congress. “We used to use the morgue, but they were bringing way more bodies, so we decided to start using the garage.” Using satellite imagery and geolocation techniques, as well as the evidence of a defector from Military Hospital 601, Human Rights Watch confirmed that the courtyard photographs were taken in the courtyard of Military Hospital 601 in Mezze, Damascus. Folder names in the photograph collection, as well as photographs of medical reports and military judicial system orders included in the collection, indicate that Syrian military police photographers, in coordination with the military’s forensic medical officers, took the photographs at Military Hospital 601 and Tishreen Military Hospital, also in Damascus.”

In order to understand the three sets of numbers on each of the bodies HRW interviewed “two defectors from Damascus security branches as well as a former conscript from the 601 Military Hospital and a former nurse from the Tishreen military hospital. Former detainees reported seeing numbers written on the bodies of dead detainees or on cards, before guards removed the bodies from security branches. Finally, Human Rights Watch reviewed leaked documents ordering the photographing and transfer of bodies, both from the Caesar collection and documents passed directly to Human Rights Watch by defectors” in order to produce the following table showing the detention centers from where the bodies had been taken for photographing.

Number of Caesar Victims Identified with Branch Security Branch 3532 215: Military Intelligence 2043 227: Military Intelligence 352 ج : Air Force Intelligence

(marked with Arabic initial for the name of Air Force) 293 216 “Patrols”: Military Intelligence 127 235 “Palestine”: Military Intelligence

The report explains that these are only a fraction of those who died in custody: “The Caesar photographs do not represent a comprehensive record of deaths in detention in the Damascus area in the period during which the photographs were taken and collected. While many detention facilities sent their dead to Tishreen and 601 Military Hospital, a defector from Syria’s State Security Services who worked as a guard at the al-Khatib branch of State Security told Human Rights Watch that those who died in detention at the facility where he worked were transferred to Harasta Military Hospital in the northeastern suburbs of Damascus and not to Tishreen and 601 Military Hospitals where Caesar had taken the photographs. Moreover, the photographs are not a random sampling, but represent the photographs Caesar had access to and copied when he felt he could do so with relative safety. Therefore, the number of bodies from detention facilities that appear in the Caesar photographs represent only a part of those who died in detention in Damascus, or even in these particular facilities, during the 27-month period in which the military police and forensic medical authorities produced these photographs.”

The report by Human Rights Watch also sought to identify victims and interview the families of the victims. This was difficult because those families who were at risk from Bashar’s shabiha were fearful of reprisals and the bodies were so distorted from torture and starvation that they looked very different from how the families remembered them. Nevertheless, 27 bodies, including that of a 14-year old boy whose only offence was that his mobile phone contained a song that mocked Bashar, were positively identified and their families, friends and other detainees who saw them alive or dead in custody were interviewed and their testimonies recorded in the report.

Notwithstanding its great accuracy and truthfulness, this report, which is available in 3 languages including Arabic, is itself part of a greater conspiracy of western hegemony in the name of democracy that seeks to control the fate of the lands mapped out be Sykes-Picot a century earlier to thwart the reunion of the Arabs as the nucleus of a new Caliphate. The Caesar photographs were ignored by the democratic governments who gave fear-mongering speeches about the great threat from ISIS to distract attention away from Bashar until a satisfactory replacement could be announced. It is no coincidence that this report coincides with the resolution of the Riyadh Conference that made progress for the west towards an alternative coalition of puppets who could replace Bashar. Now that Bashar has opened Syria to all America’s dogs, including Russia, this report will set the stage for replacing Bashar with a new regime that can continue the job of standing against the sincere efforts of the noble sons of this Ummah in their quest for victory. May Allah destroy the power of those who plot against Islam and the Muslims and grant patience and victory to those who are sincere.

Dr. Abdullah Robin

Written for Ar-Rayah Newspaper Issue 59