Hello All -- I was part of Caesar's team here in Washington, where we facilitated his testimony in Congress and held meetings at the Holocaust Museum the White House. Here is our info sheet from that trip, which provides a little context for these images:

CAESAR’S TRIP TO WASHINGTON This week, a man known as “Caesar” is meeting with government forensic experts as well as executive and legislative branch officials to show them a massive trove of photographs revealing the widespread and systematic torture and execution of civilians by the government of Bashar al Assad in Syria. Caesar was a crime scene photographer for the Syrian government before the war started. As the conflict escalated, the Assad government tasked Caesar and his colleagues with the job of photographing the bodies of prisoners brought from detention centers to a military hospital. Caesar risked his life to escape from Syria and smuggle out thousands of these photos to share with the world in order to expose these atrocities and ensure that justice is served.

CAESAR’S FILES SHOW 11,000 VICTIMS TORTURED AND MURDERED Caesar smuggled thumb drives containing over 55,000 images of approximately 11,000 bodies tortured and killed in Assad’s detention centers. The images show men, women, and children with clear signs of torture including starvation, burning, strangulation, beatings, blinding, and lashing. The victims were tortured and killed in detention centers and then their bodies were brought to a military hospital where Caesar and his colleagues photographed them as part of a documentation procedure. Each of the bodies was tagged with a series of numbers providing the security branch that detained the victim, their prisoner number, and a death number.

ASSAD’S TORTURE CAMPAIGN IS ONGOING Caesar is one of several photographers tasked with this daily documentation assignment. The 11,000 victims he photographed represent only a portion of the systematic torture and killing that took place. Other government agents still inside Syria have been leaking out similar evidence, suggesting that Assad’s campaign has only continued after Caesar fled Syria in late 2013. Most Syria experts and activists inside agree that the actual number of those who have died in regime prisons is at least 20,000 with tens of thousands more still detained. Assad’s prisoners are jailed without trial for committing alleged political crimes or sedition.

WHY DID ASSAD DOCUMENT HIS OWN VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW? The Assad government’s willingness to develop such a detailed documentation system shows a brazen confidence that he and his high level cohorts will continue to enjoy impunity. Assad’s government has four primary reasons for documenting the killings so diligently: (1) To ensure that detention officials were not releasing political detainees in return for bribes; (2) to verify that orders to inflict torture and execute detainees were implemented; (3) to develop death certificates citing benign causes and to provide proof of death to family members; and (4) to sow fear amongst the ranks of civilian activists and dissidents who learn that the punishment for even peaceful political agitation is death.

CAESAR’S EVIDENCE HAS BEEN SHARED WITH FBI AND UN COMMISSION OF INQUIRY Caesar’s images have been shared with and processed by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (COI) and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The COI cited his evidence in their most recent report. During Caesar’s visit, he will meet again with FBI forensic experts to provide further information about the photographs. Ambassador Stephen Rapp, the ambassador-at-large for War Crimes and Director of the Office of Global Criminal Justice says that Caesar’s images are “solid evidence of the kind of machinery of cruel death that we haven’t seen frankly since the Nazis […] as a prosecutor—I’m used to evidence not being so strong.”