
MELBOURNE, 23 December, 2024: Syria has been hitting the news headlines since the fall from power of the 50 + years Assad family dynasty. Rebels have taken power quickly and Assad has taken asylum in Russia. The human rights abuses, killings, disappearances under the authoritarian dynasty rule lay bare and are coming to fore each day. There is so much information and live reports, that one gets confused with conflicting analysis. There is no dearth of Syria experts.
But one documentary on YouTube, ‘The Lost Souls of Syria’ under Al Jazeera’s ‘Documenting war crimes inside Syrian prisons’ section, stands out well to expose the happenings in Syria, in the context of about 27,000 photos of dead and tortured civilian detainees which were smuggled out of secret Syrian government archives by a military defector codenamed “Caesar” and made public in 2014.
They were presented to the United Nations as evidence of the Bashar al-Assad regime’s killing of 11,000 civilian detainees in a single region from March 2011 to August 2013. After the search for justice failed to produce any prosecutions, victims’ families turned to courts in Europe.
This one hour and 32 minutes documentary film follows two of these cases for more than five years – one in Spain, where a woman identifies her brother as one of the bodies from the “Caesar” photos, and the other in France, where lawyer Clemence Bectarte triggers an investigation into the disappearance of her client’s brother and nephew in a detention centre in Damascus.
The Lost Souls of Syria features testimony from “Caesar”, his accomplice “Sami” and other Syrians, highlighting their harrowing experiences in the pursuit of truth and justice.
‘Ceasor’, an engineer was a photographer for the military police and was photographing and documenting the ever rising tortured corpses from different prisons. He was horrified and fed up and told a friend Sami (activist) he wanted to quit the job. But Sami advised him to continue and he agreed. 27,000 photographs were then smuggled out of Syria from government archives abroad. In the Summer of 2013, Ceasor and Sami fled Syria. The documentary then traces the pursuit for justice with a few disappeared being identified by the victims families.
The stories of detainees come to the fore in Spain, European Parliament, and Germany. A legal case in Spain falls, as the judge says it does not have jurisdiction in the case. One comes to know of torture as it is explained by a former datinee, he cries as he explains. He goes back to Syria in February 2020, and is arrested at the airport. It is said before the Assad regime fell, he was murdered. His body was found on 9 December, 2024 in Sednaya prison.
The, documentary tells us, two officers of the Assad regime accused of torture and killing in the French legal case, entered Germany when 800,000 Syrians were allowed in after the start of the Arab Spring. They were arrested. In a historic verdict, on 13 January 2022 a German court sentenced Anwar Rasian, a former coloneal at Branch 25 ,to life in prison for crimes against humanity.
And, in March 2023, a French court ordered the trial of 3 senior officials of the Assad government to stand trial for crimes against humanity and the deaths of Mazzen and Patrich Dabbagh. Another three Assad officers were tried in absentia and sentenced for life.
Lastly, the documentary reveals, a French court issued a arrest warrant for Bashar al Assad on 15 November, 2023 for complicity in war crimes. What happened to this warrant is not known, and Assad is in Russia with his family. Will he be pursued remains to be seen.
Since 2011, 1,500 families have identified relatives from the 27,000 photographs of the tortured taken by Caesar. “It was my duty to alert the world”, Caesar says.
Well, Caesar and Sami took great risks and did a big service for Syrians and humanity. I am sure the number of those tortured to death under the Assad family authoritarian rule is much more, everyone’s photos are not there. More and more gruesome information is coming out of post Assad Syria. One hopes justice will catch up as we know more about these 50+ dark years.
Al Jazeera, Stephane Materre and Garance Le Caisne made this touching documentary amid the world coming to terms with new facts emerging from Syria each day. In fact, it is not just Syria alone, there are many hot spots of human rights violations across the world. Interestingly, sometimes they take place under this or that garb. The Lost Souls of Syria, is just one episode among the many.
THE DOCUMENTARY – https://youtu.be/-AdsjcD2FJw?si=Of5VIoE5FojEipRY