Exclusive: Zaman Alwasl reveals new documents of Assad war crimes

Zaman Alwasl newspaper has exclusively obtained new documents and photos showing evidence of war crimes against dissidents.

24 days ago, the Turkish Anadolu News Agency exclusively published a report about Syria  war crime evidence, where a person who served for Syrian army for 13 years as a military policeman together with his colleagues took for two years 55,000 photographs of 11,000 people who were systematically tortured to death by Assad regime.

Zaman Alwasl Arabic has interviewed Dr. Hassan al-Shalabi, secretary-general of Syriqn National Movement, the man who stood behind revealing Assad’s war crime evidences and who coordinated with “Caesar" to deliver the tragic memos of torture to the world.

“Caesar" had worked at military police unit in the Syrian army for 13 years. Originally his job had involved the taking of photographs related to ordinary criminal matters and sending them to “the judiciary”.  

Al-Shalabi said torture documentation has been starting since September 2011, under patronage of Qatar that  funded the international investigation team.

The New York Times newspaper said that Obama’s administration first learned last November about a harrowing trove of photographs that were said to document widespread torture and executions in Syrian prisons when a State Department official viewed some of the images on a laptop belonging to an antigovernment activist.

The United States did not act on the photos for the past two months, officials said, because it did not have possession of the digital files and could not establish their authenticity. Nevertheless, they said, the administration believes the photos are genuine, basing that assessment in part on the meticulous way in which the bodies in the photos were numbered.

The photographs, some of which were released on January 20 on the eve of an international peace conference on Syria, have helped prompt the administration to heighten its demand that President Bashar al-Assad release political prisoners and allow Red Cross inspectors access to the prisons, NYtimes said.

The bodies brought to the hospital, fully consisted of detained-Syrian opposition members, which showed signs of starvation, brutal beatings, strangulation and other forms of torture and killing. It became routine for the military service to take photographs of the bodies and faces of people in detention after designating those with a 'numbering system', who had been brought to the hospital after being tortured and killed, according to AA.

These images of bodies and faces of the dead with handwritten codes on each, have been accepted as 'documents' of a systematic torture and killing of people under the 'execution-orders' within the Syrian army. The military police, having photographed 55,000 photos within two years, who was fed up with the killing policies by torture, has built confidential contact with Syrian oppositions, AA said.

According to the report, the procedure was that when detainees were killed at their places of detention their bodies would be taken to a military hospital to which he would be sent with a doctor and a member of the judiciary, “Caesar’s” function being to photograph the corpses.

Each murdered detainee was given two numbers with only the intelligence service knowing the identities of the corpses.

The report says the procedure for documentation was that when a detainee was killed each body was given a reference number which related to that branch of the security service responsible for his detention and death.

When the corpse was taken to the military hospital it was given a further number so as to document, falsely, that death had occurred in the hospital.

The purpose of documenting the corpses was to ensure that none had been released by the security services and to inform the families of murdered detainees in due course that the cause of death in each case was either a “heart attack” or “breathing problems” and to satisfy the authorities that executions had been performed.

Syria's nearly three-year conflict began as popular protests against four decades of Assad family rule but changed into armed insurgency under a security force crackdown. 

Now the major Arab state is in a full-scale civil war that has killed more than 136,000 people and forced over 6 million - more than a quarter of the population - to flee their homes.