The comprehensive and horrific documentation of torture and murder committed by Bashar al-Assad’s regime is just a sample of what the hereditary dictatorship that subjugated Syria from 1971 until its fall a year ago was able to do. The files reviewed by El Pais newspaper show that the tyranny of Damascus, especially as a result of the civil war that broke out in 2011, practiced a systematic policy of physical liquidation against any opposition. These are crimes that cannot go unpunished, and their horrific record should add to the processes already underway to establish and purge the responsibilities of the dictator – who is currently turning to Russia, his traditional ally – and his accomplices.
The so-called Damascus dossier – which German public television NDR, which was the first to receive it, shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and 25 media outlets in 20 countries, including this newspaper – includes more than 64,000 official documents of the regime and its secret services, as well as more than 33,000 photographs of detainees taken by the military themselves. A veritable catalog of atrocities comprising a total of 10,212 detainees murdered in what has already become the largest database of prisoners of Assad’s tyranny ever published.
As in other cases in which photographs have emerged of the bodies of tortured and murdered prisoners, documentation exists because Syrian officials took these photographs to prove to their superiors that dissidents were dead, and at the same time, they issued death certificates, often with general causes of death. The symptoms of starvation and neck and head wounds found on many of the corpses depicted indicate a very different reality.
Before this revelation, human rights organizations had already documented the killing of at least 157,000 people at the hands of the Assad regime during the civil war, making his dictatorship – which he inherited in 2000 from his father Hafez – one of the bloodiest dictatorships of the 21st century. Although the war that broke out as a result of the Arab Spring has ended, we cannot forget that thousands of Syrian citizens are still searching for their loved ones. They and their murdered relatives deserve to know the truth. May justice be achieved. It is the duty of the new government in Damascus, international organizations, and sanctions regimes that recognize universal jurisdiction over crimes against humanity to investigate what happened and prosecute the perpetrators of these atrocities. First, to address the past in a way that preserves the dignity of the victims; Later, so that those who continue to commit similar crimes receive an unambiguous message that they will not escape punishment.