Syrian defector who smuggled torture images out of country warns of hundreds of thousands of deaths
The Syrian military defector codenamed Caesar, who smuggled out more than 53,000 haunting images showing tortured, emaciated corpses of Syrian detainees – evidence that led to landmark sanctions – has warned that they are merely a “snapshot” of the full extent of crimes committed under the Assad regime.
Speaking exclusively to The Independent, the photographer also revealed how he managed to get the photographs out of Syria, hiding USB flash drives of evidence in his underwear before he was smuggled out of Syria with the help of rebels via a flour truck to Jordan.
His family reported him kidnapped and murdered by terrorists to provide cover for his escape.
The former military photographer, who has testified anonymously about the evidence of savagery he witnessed to governments around the world, called for global efforts to assist Syria in bringing those responsible for the “worst crimes of the 21st century” to account.
The Independent spoke to Caesar, who has been living in absolute secrecy for a decade, by phone as our correspondent visited Military Hospital 601 in the Mezzah neighbourhood of Damascus, the exact spot where he took many of the horrific images that shocked the world.
Now empty since the stunning overthrow of Bashar al-Assad last weekend, the building stands as a chilling monument to the industrial-scale horrors committed by the former regime.
The images Caesar took, which also included photos of attack sites and the bodies of armed fighters or civilians killed in assaults, provided the first extensive glimpse into the atrocities committed by Assad’s government after the start of the 2011 revolution, which turned into a bloody civil war.
The images which showed emaciated mutilated bodies, some with eyes gouged out and numbers written on their arms or heads, were verified by human rights organisations and the FBI.
“I took photographs from 2011 to 2013. During that time, I personally saw at least 11,000 dead men, women, children, and elderly people,” he told The Independent from exile, in his first interview since the fall of the Assad regime.
“I took almost 55,000 photographs of people who were tortured. And that was just in one place – just in Damascus. It was only a snapshot in time, geography, and place.
“I can tell you this was happening everywhere else. So, in terms of how many people have been literally tortured to death, it’s in the hundreds of thousands.”
He said that during the three years he was taking these photographs and smuggling them out, he lived in “fear and terror”, knowing that if the government found out what he was doing, “I would become one of those bodies.” Despite this, he expressed his willingness to return to help with investigations in Syria and called on the international community to support these efforts.
The Independent spoke to Caesar together with Mouaz Moustafa, the founder of a US-based NGO, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which helped smuggle the photos out of Syria via USB drives and raise awareness globally.
Moustafa, who has missing family members and friends himself, stood in a scrubby courtyard where bodies were once laid out, numbered, documented, and photographed, their faces and bodies mutilated, emaciated from starvation and illness.
