WARNING: Some of the graphic images of torture and killing documented by the Syrian military police photographer known as “Caesar” are included at the bottom of this post.
When Mouaz Moustafa first began to receive photos documenting the torture and killing of civilians by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad, he couldn’t sleep. The nightmarish realities he saw in frame after frame kept him awake. Moustafa, who works with the Syrian Emergency Task Force and United for a Free Syria to promote stability and democracy in Syria, hopes the gruesome images will have a similar impact on members of Congress when they walk by the images this week — and that their unease will translate into action for the Syrian people.
This week, dozens of photos will be displayed first in the U.S. Capitol building and then in the Rayburn Building where House Representatives have offices. They’re just a very small fraction of the 55,000 some photos smuggled out by a military police forensic photographer who has been identified only by the pseudonym, Caesar. The images depict horrific abuses. Some of the corpses photographed have had their genitalia cut off; others have had their eyes gouged out. Many appear to have been starved to death, their skin stretched thin over jutting ribs.
“So if you look here, you’ll see some of the methods of torture,” Moustafa told ThinkProgress as he scrolled through some of Caesar’s photos stored on his phone in the way that many look through photos of elaborate dinners or household cats.
“This guy has a chain that’s tied very, very tightly around him,” he said opening up one image. “There are electrodes that were used against people. Here, you can see this guy has a huge wound where a hot knife was put into his side and then they put salt into it which creates inflammation and makes the wound wider.”
Moustafa first began to receive the images at the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, after he and a small group of people working in Syria were asked by Caesar’s brother-in-law to help the photographer escape the country — and his horrifying job to document those killed at the hands of the Syrian Ministry of Defense. Instead, Moustafa and his team asked Caesar if he would be willing to stay in Damascus to smuggle out the images he captured and archived.
Caesar agreed and, until doing so became too unsafe he transferred tens of thousands of photos to Moustafa and his team.
Those photos have been deemed to provide evidence of systematic killing that could amount to war crimes for the Assad regime, according to a report by a group of experts released on the topic last January.
“In the view of the inquiry team the need to photograph those who were killed is a strong pointer to the fact that the killings were systematic, ordered, and directed from above,” the experts, who prosecuted human rights abuses in Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, wrote.
To Naomi Kikoler of the United States Holocaust Museum which first displayed some of Caesar’s images in October, the photos provide evidence of another grave reality — that of impunity.
Referring to similar documentation of atrocities carried out by Nazis during the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, she said, “These regimes believe that they’re operating in an environment of complete impunity.”
Too often people want to look the other way and don’t want to confront the horrors of what people can do to others, or what governments can do to their own people.
She hopes displaying the photos will initiate conversations about protecting civilians in Syria and prevent ongoing mass atrocities such as the ones taking place there.
“These images are ones that we think need to be seen,” Kikoler told ThinkProgress at the Museum as a video about the Syrian civil war played. “Too often people want to look the other way and don’t want to confront the horrors of what people can do to others, or what governments can do to their own people.”
Kikoler is hopeful that the bipartisan support for the display might also mean bipartisan support for efforts to protect Syrian civilians.
“I think that shows a real resolve on the part of those on the Hill to raise awareness for the ongoing atrocities and to try to do so at a time when there is so much discussion about how to tackle ISIS.”
The photos, which are also on display in the Holocaust Museum and were shown at the United Nations headquarters in March, have yet to spark the sort of action Caesar hoped they would ignite. That’s despite the fact that the ever-increasing civilian death toll in Syria.
A United Nations report from last year documented nearly 200,000 conflict-related deaths, but Syrian advocacy groups believe that number is much higher. An estimated 11,000 deaths were tallied in the photos Caesar smuggled out from only two military hospitals. With an unknown number of photographers documenting killing across the country, the number of those killed not in conflict, but by Assad’s forces, could be exponentially higher.
When asked why he risked his life to smuggle out the images, Caesar told members of the House Foreign Relations Committee in August, “My work ethic, my morals, my religion would not allow me to be quiet.”
Now living in an undisclosed European country, he hopes the United States will no longer remain quiet about Assad’s abuses.
“He really believed that the United States would do something to stop genocide,” Mouaz Moustafa said about Caesar. “[After that,] he would say, ‘No one cares about Syrians.”
WARNING: The images that follow are graphic depictions of torture and death.
