The military police photographer known as Caesar was required to document the murder and torture of thousands of Syrian civilians in the custody of the Assad regime. Over the course of two years he used a police computer to copy the photos, and in 2013 he risked his life to smuggle out 53,000 photos and documents that show prisoners tortured, starved and burned to death.
In January 2015, in the American magazine Foreign Affairs, President Bashar al-Assad claimed that this military photographer didn’t exist. ‘Who took the pictures? Who is he? Nobody knows. There is no verification of any of this evidence, so it’s all allegations without evidence.’
Caesar exists. The author of this book has spent dozens of hours with him. His testimony is extraordinary, his photos shocking. The uncovering of the workings of the Syrian death machine that underpins his account is a descent into the unspeakable.
In 2014, Caesar testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and his testimony provided crucial evidence for a bipartisan bill, the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which was presented to Congress in 2016. Caesar’s photos have also been shown in the United Nations Headquarters in New York and at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
For the first time, this book tells Caesar’s story.
Garance Le Caisne is an independent journalist. Having lived in Cairo in the 1990s, she covered the Arab Spring and travels regularly to Syria. Her articles have appeared in publications including Le Journal du Dimanche and L’Obs.
First published in French as Opération César. Au coeur de la machine de mort syrienne © Éditions Stock, 2015
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2814-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2815-8 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Le Caisne, Garance, author.
Title: Operation Caesar : at the heart of the Syrian death machine / Garance Le Caisne.
Other titles: Operation Cesar. English
Description: Cambridge, UK : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048526 (print) | LCCN 2017060772 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509528189 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509528141 | ISBN 9781509528141 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509528158 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Syria--History--Civil War, 2011---Atrocities. | War crimes--Syria--History--21st century. | Torture--Syria--History--21st century. | Prisoners of war--Abuse of--Syria--History--21st century. | Political violence--Syria--History--21st century. | Syria--History--Civil War, 2011---Personal narratives.
Classification: LCC DS98.6 (ebook) | LCC DS98.6 .L413 2018 (print) | DDC 956.9104/23--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048526
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‘We have heard cries like this many times throughout history,
For a long time they rang out in vain,
And it was only later that they produced an echo.’
Gustawa Jarecka
Polish Jew from the Warsaw Ghetto
Member of the group Oyneg Shabes
December 1942
When I looked at these photographs, they spoke to me. Many of the victims in these photos knew they were going to die. They had their finger raised as when you are about to die and you say the shahada.1 They had their mouths open in pain, and you could sense the humiliation they had suffered. Each time I looked at these faces, I could not erase them from my memory.
They cried out in pain so that someone might save them, but no one saved them, no one listened to them. They asked for things, but no one heard.
Every day I heard the cries of victims expressing their suffering, telling us what goes on inside the prisons and detention centres. There was no one there to bear witness, no one replied. These victims have placed on my shoulders the responsibility to bear witness to their families, to humanity as whole and to the free world of the tortures inflicted upon them.
I left Syria with pure and sincere intentions. There are many files on the crimes of the regime: chemical attacks, mass murder, detentions. All these files will be opened and used as evidence against Bashar al-Assad. When and how? I don’t know.
The truth will lead to victory. There’s a proverb that says: ‘No right is lost as long as there is a person demanding it.’
Caesar, military police photographer in the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, April 2015
Locations where the witnesses of this book were detained
Caesar is a former military photographer from Damascus whose job was to photograph the bodies of detainees who had died in detention centres and then archive the pictures in files. Horrified by this macabre routine, he decided to take copies of this evidence of the regime’s brutality and smuggle them out of Syria so that the world could see. Caesar risked his life every day for two years.
Sami is a pseudonym. He is Caesar’s closest friend. He is the person Caesar confided in and who would support him on a daily basis in his secret work until they escaped the country and took refuge in Europe.
Abu al-Leith is a pseudonym. Aged about thirty, this former shopkeeper from Qalamoun spent seven months in detention under the custody of Branch 227 of military intelligence, then in a cell in the civilian prison in Adra, nominally reserved for common-law criminals. He fled Syria for Turkey.
Mazen al-Hummada was a technician working for a multinational oil firm based in Deir ez-Zor in the northeast of the country. Arrested three times for making videos of demonstrations and posting them online, he spent a year and a half in prison under the custody of Air Force intelligence, where he became a soukhra, the Arabic term for a forced labourer, tasked with helping his jailers in their everyday work, notably transporting bodies of dead detainees. He is currently based in the Netherlands.
Amer al-Homsi, a doctor from Homs, does not wish to be identified. He worked for fifteen years in the government hospital in the town. In 2011 and 2012 he saw the hospital turn into a sort of detention centre where wounded prisoners were tortured.
Munir Abu Muaz is a pseudonym. In two years of incarceration Munir, an engineer, was transferred between four branches of two different security services, then was sent to Saydnaya, thirty kilometres from Damascus, a prison reserved for political detainees and Islamists, a worthy successor to the one at Palmyra. He spent several weeks in the military hospital at Mezzeh. He currently lives in Turkey.
Ahmad al-Riz joined the revolution at the age of twenty-five. He learned how to encrypt messages on the internet and secretly organize mass gatherings. He was arrested and was held by different branches for seven months before being moved to Saydnaya prison. He received treatment twice in Tishreen military hospital. He sought refuge in Germany, where he is learning the language in order to pursue his studies.
Wafa is a pseudonym. Arrested along with her husband in May 2013, she was freed in a prisoner exchange four and a half months later. Her husband died under torture. She found the photo of his body among those that Caesar smuggled out.
Ahmed comes from a family in Daraya, a suburb of the capital, which was in the forefront of the peaceful revolution. He wishes to preserve his family name as he awaits the opportunity to lodge a case against Bashar al-Assad. His brother and his uncle were tortured to death by Air Force intelligence. Their photos appear in Caesar’s files.
Abu Khaled, commander of a katiba in the mountains of Qalamoun. This slightly built, taciturn individual organized Caesar’s escape in summer 2013. He also smuggled out of Syria the hard drive containing the 53,000 original photos.
Hassan al-Shalabi, political activist and founder member of the Syrian National Movement who was forced to flee Syria. He followed Operation Caesar from abroad and brought the files to international attention.
Imad Eddine al-Rachid, former vice-dean of the Faculty of Sharia in Damascus, head of the Syrian National Movement. He tried to convince the United States to send Bashar al-Assad to face trial at the International Criminal Court. In July 2014, Imad accompanied Caesar to Washington, where the former photographer addressed Congress.
Imran is a pseudonym. This young IT specialist in his twenties comes originally from Moadamyeh in the suburbs of Damascus. Pursued by the regime, he sought refuge in Turkey. He worked with Sami to log the thousands of photographs in order to make the files accessible to everyone.
Zakaria is a pseudonym. Formerly a paediatrician in Damascus, he fled Syria for Lebanon before going to Turkey. Using Caesar’s photos, he has drawn up a medical list of all the abuses the victims were subjected to.
This English translation of Garance Le Caisne’s riveting account of Operation Caesar arrives at a critical moment in the history of Syria’s brutal civil war. After almost seven years of conflict, the regime of Bashar al-Assad is on the cusp of crushing the insurgency that emerged in early 2011, initially as a response to the violence it unleashed against millions of Syrians who had taken to the streets demanding freedom, justice and dignity. Over time, the exuberance and optimism of Syria’s revolution morphed into something far darker, twisted in part by the skill with which the Assad regime corrupted the uprising’s original peaceful impulses and the ruthlessness with which it defended its hold on power.
As the regime’s victory draws closer, the world confronts a stark choice: to remember or to forget. To look past the atrocities and crimes committed by the Assad regime, or to insist that Assad and his accomplices be held responsible for the unimaginable horrors they inflicted on the people of Syria.
Displaying victor’s arrogance, the Assad regime and its allies in Russia and Iran consider amnesia and accommodation their due. They appeal both to pragmatism and to greed, dangling the promise of rewards in the form of reconstruction contracts to supplicants, while threatening retribution to those who continue to press for accountability. Such efforts, they argue, are pointless. Assad’s fate, after all, is secure. Normalization of the Assad regime is inevitable. Accept it and move on.
The narrative that Le Caisne presents in the following pages is a compelling and powerful rebuttal of these claims. The extraordinary story of Caesar, an unwitting archivist of the systematic torture and murder of thousands of Syrians, demands that we reckon with the price of pragmatism and the cost of forgetting. To confront the searing, first-hand account of his experiences as a military photographer charged with recording victims of regime brutality, alongside those of his associates and the scarred survivors of detention in regime torture chambers, brings us face-to-face with the cruelty that lies at the core of Assad’s regime. The violence recorded in these pages was not an unfortunate byproduct of war. It was systematic and intentional, a matter of bureaucratic protocols and standard operating procedures. To accommodate the regime’s demand for amnesia is not merely to condone its routinization of torture, but to consign its current and future victims to a similar fate.
Worse, perhaps, is that we knew and did not act. Even Caesar’s testimony before the US Congress, and public displays of his photographs of brutalized victims at the United Nations and the UK House of Commons, were not sufficient to induce governments to act. Now, with the approaching defeat of Syria’s uprising, governments that lent half-hearted support to the opposition are anxious to justify their policies of non-intervention, their willingness to hollow out and render facile their commitment to ‘never again’. To forget, however, will compound the crimes of the Assad regime and deepen the wounds of its victims in their hundreds of thousands. If the publication of Operation Caesar in English makes it that much more difficult, that much less comfortable, for those complicit in inaction to become complicit in forgetting, it will have achieved a great deal.
Caesar has helped restore dignity to those whom the regime mutilated and murdered. Through Le Caisne’s painstakingly researched account, they are recovered from anonymity and made visible to us as human beings. The photographs that Caesar smuggled out of Syria, and the personal stories that he learned from relatives and loved ones of the regime’s victims, are as important as the individual narratives to emerge from other experiences of mass killing, from the Holocaust to Cambodia to Rwanda. Like the perpetrators of previous mass atrocities, the Assad regime carries a stain that can never be erased. The legacies of the pain and trauma it inflicted have not diminished. They remain alive with survivors, and with the families of those who did not survive. They will become the inheritance of their children and their children’s children. We may wish to avert our gaze. Operation Caesar requires us to look, to pay attention, to remember.
Steven Heydemann
Janet W. Ketcham Chair in Middle East Studies
Smith College
In spring 2014, when an editor suggested I should track down Caesar, the reasons were self-evident. This man, a former Syrian military photographer, had smuggled out evidence of crimes against humanity in a way in which no one else had dared do. At that time everyone in the media had heard of this individual who had copied thousands of documents and photos of dead detainees in the regime’s jails from a military police computer in Damascus.
For two years, this anonymous hero copied images of tortured, starved, burned bodies with numbers marked on their flesh. Pictures that his superiors had asked him to take, to document and record the death of prisoners, and that he had transferred onto memory sticks in order to smuggle them out, hidden inside his shoe or his belt.
The terrorists of Islamic State flaunted their barbarity all over social media. The Syrian state hid theirs in the silence of their prison cells. Before this there had been no eye-witness accounts from the inside of the Syrian death machine in action. These photographs and documents were devastating.
The group that had been helping Caesar and trying to alert Western governments and the international media had recently visited Paris. One of their leaders had given me an interview for Le Journal du Dimanche on ‘the archivist of horror’.
Around this time, the photographer Laurence Geai and I were preparing a news story in Aleppo, which would be published in the summer of 2014 in Le Nouvel Observateur. In parts of the city held by the opposition we had witnessed the willingness of the regime to crush a section of its own people and to bury their memory. One Wednesday morning, in the space of two hours, three bombs fell less than 200 metres away from us. We witnessed the death of a young man with whom we had been laughing the night before and whom we were going to follow that day as part of our story. We saw flesh ripped to shreds. Barrel bombs of TNT dropped by helicopters from the army of Bashar al-Assad, the rushed burial of body parts. And especially the graves dug by the men from the morgue to bury the bodies that hadn’t been claimed.
It had become a matter of some urgency to track down Caesar. The spectacular gains made by Islamic State (Daesh) and the increase in terrorist attacks by those affiliated with them were drowning out the revelations of atrocities on the part of the Syrian regime. The conflict had already claimed more than 220,000 deaths. Half the civilian population had been made homeless. Others were being shelled and put under siege by the loyalist army.
Caesar could bring the abuses of the Damascus regime back to centre stage. He had to be found. The former Syrian military photographer was being sought by journalists around the world. I knew it would be difficult, and it was. Twice I had almost given up. Twice I took up the quest again, because it was simply unconscionable that this man shouldn’t talk. His testimony was crucial for understanding the horror of this regime. It was essential that his account should complement the publication of the photos. I constantly had the memory of Aleppo before me, its nameless graves, and other photos, these ones discovered in the morgue set up in a former girls’ school.
In a classroom, dozens of pictures of Aleppans killed in shelling by the regime were stuck to the walls. As you entered this room and saw this before your eyes, the portraits of Cambodians exterminated by the Khmer Rouge and displayed in a former school in Phnom Penh suddenly superimposed themselves. Between 1975 and 1979 more than 17,000 people died in S21, the largest centre of torture of Pol Pot’s regime. Today, photos of the victims are displayed in the location, which has now been turned into a museum.
The members of the group who were protecting Caesar and who belonged to the Syrian National Movement, a moderate Islamist opposition party, understood that this book would not be merely a media scoop but rather a descent into the unspeakable. That it would give a voice to Syrians and leave a trace for future generations.
We met on several occasions. In Paris, France, in Istanbul, Turkey, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. They opened their files, their documents, and told their own stories. But when it came to meeting up with Caesar I always hit a brick wall. I didn’t know why, I just knew that the man was afraid. Disappointed at the inertia of the international community, he wasn’t seeing eye to eye with the leaders of the group. He had been hiding, indeed was still in hiding, fearing for his safety.
However, this book couldn’t happen without his testimony. And then a member of the group allowed a preliminary interview with Sami. Unbeknown to the media who had followed the ‘Caesar affair’, Sami was the one who knew the most about the former military photographer. He had accompanied him and supported him during the two years of the operation. He was the key to getting access to Caesar.
We spoke on four different occasions, each time for several hours. Accompanied by Saoussen Ben Cheikh, who translated for me, we spent time with him and his wife and got along well. Surprisingly, movingly at times, a relationship of trust blossomed between us. One evening Sami had to reassure Caesar. Thanks to the internet, Skype had been the tool of communication between Syrian activists since the start of the Revolution and the war. It was secure and free. Sami and I were in the habit of talking to each other without connecting our webcams.
‘Caesar is worried, he’s afraid,’ Sami explained. ‘Some lawyers are pressuring him to give testimony before the public prosecutors. Can they force him to?’ I knew nothing about the ins and outs of international justice but I could reassure them on a couple of things at least: there would be no policeman coming to arrest him and drag him in front of a judge. Caesar and Sami were no longer living under the Syrian dictatorship but in a democracy in northern Europe where they had sought refuge. Nevertheless, they should not forget the reason why they had risked their lives and those of their families. Why they had fled their country to go to another one where they didn’t speak the language.
This is how I put it: ‘One day, it will be necessary for Caesar to give testimony on the crimes of the regime, on what he has witnessed, on what he was forced to do. For the Syrian people, for justice. Maybe not today, if he is too afraid, but tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in six months’ time, a year from now, he will have to do it. Do you understand, Sami?’ Silence. Then, all of a sudden, an unfamiliar voice. Someone I didn’t know, whom I couldn’t see, seemed to be sitting next to Sami: ‘Hello. Thank you for your advice. I am Caesar. You can see me whenever you like.’
After six months of searching, he had agreed to show himself. As was the case with Sami, our first encounter was a little tense. Them on the defensive, me afraid of ‘losing’ them if I put my questions the wrong way, if I asked for too many details too quickly, too soon. Caesar confided in me on several occasions. Put end to end, our exchanges lasted more than forty hours.
The testimony he offered me is unique. In simple words, without ever claiming to have done or seen anything he hadn’t done or seen, Caesar described his work in painstaking detail. He made sketches to explain himself more clearly. On a satellite map he showed me the journey he made every day; he showed me the hangars at one of the military hospitals where he had to photograph the corpses. As these interviews went on he opened up more, but quite often he would become reticent and keep his emotions to himself. His safety had been an overriding concern to him from the beginning. The pages he wrote on stayed in his possession: it was out of the question that his writing should be revealed. He left me just one drawing. To reassure him, we decided between us to reveal nothing about his private life. We have even altered a few details.
The photographers of the Syrian military police are just one link in the chain of death. They take pictures of corpses for the records. To complete my understanding of Caesar’s confession it was necessary to meet some of the survivors of torture at the detention centres, prisons and military hospitals. Those who had witnessed the deaths of cellmates or patients in adjacent beds. Those who had had to carry the bodies. Those who saw the numbers marked onto the corpses. They bear witness here, their faces covered or under pseudonyms.
The collection of evidence of crimes committed in Syria, begun by a handful of people seven years ago, is still in its early stages. In its own way, this book is a first attempt to tell the truth. The inquest will continue.
Despite Caesar’s revelations, the International Criminal Court is unable to pursue the regime for its crimes, hamstrung as it is by the opposition of Russia, an ally of the Syrian regime. As the international system is stymied, national jurisdictions have to take on the mantle of seeking justice.
Since this book was first published in French in 2015, several complaints have been lodged in Europe against leading players in the regime, with the Caesar file at the centre of these investigations. This involves long, delicate but essential work on the part of lawyers. They have to persuade surviving detainees to testify, smuggle the families of the plaintiffs out of Syria to protect them from reprisals, convince national legal authorities to accept politically sensitive litigation …
In Germany a number of Syrian refugees, supported by the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), have taken action in the German courts against members of the regime for war crimes and crimes against humanity. On 20 September 2017, high-resolution files of the original 53,000 photos were sent by Sami to the German Public Prosecutor General in Karlsruhe. They will now be thoroughly analysed to confirm the facts.
In France, on the advice of the human rights organization Fédération internationale des droits de l’homme (FIDH), a Franco-Syrian engineer went to court in October 2016 over the arbitrary arrest and forced disappearance of his brother and his nephew in Damascus.
In Spain the law firm Guernica 37 lodged a case with the public prosecutor in February 2017 concerning the death of a delivery driver in one of the regime’s detention centres. Their client, the man’s sister, now a naturalized Spanish citizen, recognized his body among Caesar’s photos. The prosecutor declined jurisdiction, but Guernica 37 have appealed. ‘Because it must not be forgotten that, even before the outbreak of the armed conflict, the regime was killing its citizens like rats and is still doing do,’ states the pugnacious Almudena Bernabeu, the Guernica 37 lawyer.
Memory and justice. Justice and memory.
Numbers, photos. Emaciated corpses. It is something we have seen before. The revelations of Caesar’s photos remind me of the extermination of the Jews in the Shoah, even if it is history and justice that will qualify the crimes of the Syrian regime.
Many of the images are simply too horrifying to print. Readers might be unable or unwilling to read the testimonies of the survivors after viewing them. In consultation with the publisher of this English edition, we have decided to include a small number of carefully selected photos to give some idea of the brutality that Caesar witnessed. Further images can be viewed in the report commissioned by Human Rights Watch, available at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/12/16/syria-stories-behind-photos-killed-detainees
This book is an account of the everyday barbarity of the regime Bashar al-Assad has imposed on the Syrian people. This is their story.