Ghost towns emerge like bleached reefs flanking each side of the long road north out of Damascus. Mile after mile of destruction flickers by as if on a loop: such a widespread level of devastation that it is almost unfathomable.
Empty, bombed-out cities, towns, and villages – once bustling hubs of life – form the scars of 13 years of brutal and bloody civil war. Thirteen years of a leader, Bashar al-Assad, trying his hardest to bomb his population into submission.
This is matched only by the industrial scale of killing that went alongside it, in his prisons, intelligence branches, and torture rooms. The full extent of this horror is only now beginning to emerge, as dozens of mass graves are unearthed, as the missing are counted as the dead, and as the chilling bureaucracy of a state that meticulously recorded almost everything is prised out of filing cabinets across the country.
It is a scale of state murder and torture of its people perhaps unprecedented in our lifetime.
“The whole world should remember that the Syrian people suffered the worst crimes of the 21st century,” a Syrian military photographer and defector – codenamed Caesar – told me in a rare interview from secretive exile just after the stunning overthrow of Assad.
The man, who has never revealed his true identity, spent two years in the early part of the conflict smuggling tens of thousands of photos out of the country. His job required him to document the corpses of emaciated, tortured, disease-riddled detainees. These images became vital and harrowing evidence of regime crimes that triggered some of the toughest sanctions against Assad.
His claim that Syria has experienced some of the worst crimes of the 21st century might at first sound hyperbolic – until you too enter the morgues lined with mutilated remains of men and women, some of their hollow faces twisted in horror like The Scream. Until you, too, stand at the foot of mass graves, with dogs sniffing out bones that reach out from the ground. Until you, too, stand in sewage-soaked underground dungeons, reading the desperate scrawls on the walls of those swallowed for years inside windowless solitary confinement cells just big enough to crouch in.
“I took almost 55,000 photographs of people who were tortured. And that was just in one place, in Damascus. It was just a snapshot in time, in geography, in place. But I can tell you this was going on everywhere else,” Caesar added. “And so, in terms of how many people have been literally tortured to death, it is in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands.”
The gravity of his words is reflected by some of the world’s most prominent international war crimes prosecutors, like Stephen J Rapp – a top international war crimes prosecutor and former US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, who is working with different organisations to document the mass graves and identify officials implicated in war crimes.
The murder and torture of the Syrian population was something “we really haven’t seen since the Nazis,” Rapp said during a visit to Damascus this week. Speaking to me after visiting two newly discovered mass graves, he adds that Assad deployed a “machinery of death and state terror” over his own people for decades and, crucially, documented it.
“It’s a regime that is document-mad,” he continued, baffled himself. Rapp has identified nearly 100 centres, from military intelligence branches to regular prisons, containing substantial amounts of evidence of these crimes – a bureaucracy so detailed and damning it was almost “stupid”.
And that, he assures me, is the light at the end of the tunnel. There is a good chance for some kind of justice – if the evidence, which right now isn’t secured, can be preserved, and if the world helps Syria act quickly. But how did we get here?
Before this December, Syria had largely been forgotten by the world. Initially, the 2011 revolution, which quickly morphed into a bloody civil war, grabbed headlines – first through revolt, then bloodshed, and later through an unmatched refugee crisis that stretched across Europe, followed by the arrival of Isis.
International superpowers scavenged over the chess pieces that emerged in the conflict-torn country. Russia and Iran backed Assad politically and militarily, Turkey carved out a corner of influence in the northwest and the US bet on its chosen forces – the Kurdish-led factions in the northeast – against its chosen enemy: Isis.
