3 hours ago
2
A former Assad regime military officer who defected with a trove of evidence exposing the torture and killing of thousands has called on the US to repeal a raft of sanctions imposed on Syria, in an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday.
The military officer, known only by the codename “Caesar” until now, also revealed his identity as Farid Nada al-Madhan, the head of the judicial department for the military police in Damascus.
Even in exile, Madhan had previously only used the pseudonym to protect his identity and those of his relatives, appearing in public only in an iconic blue hoodie that obscured his face, fearful of reprisals.
Madhan was a military photographer responsible for documenting the bodies of Syrians killed by the Assad regime, many brutally tortured to death. For two years, he smuggled USB drives filled with photographs out of Assad’s security branches, documenting the deaths of at least 6,786 people in detention.
To do so, Madhan risked arrest by regime and opposition forces.
“I was hiding images in my clothes, bread bags and on my person, for fear of being searched at checkpoints,” Madhan said on Thursday. Because he worked for the security services but lived in an area controlled by the Syrian Free Army, a rebel group, he created a fake civilian ID for himself in order to pass through opposition checkpoints.
At one point, he said he was recognised by an opposition soldier at a checkpoint. The soldier, who he had hired before as a handyman in his house, did not stop Madhan despite his status as a regime officer. The incident left him shaken nonetheless.
In 2013, Madhan decided he had collected enough evidence and endured enough risk, and took the decision to defect. He fled to Jordan and then flew to Qatar, where he worked with a law firm to use the smuggled photos to create accountability for the Assad regime’s crimes.
The photos, first revealed in 2014, were the first wide-spread documentation of the Assad regime’s brutal detention system, put into overdrive to quash the country’s 2011 revolution. According to Human Rights Watch, the 6,786 victims documented by Madhan came from just five intelligence branches in Damascus.
According to Madhan, at the beginning of the Syrian revolution, about 10 to 15 bodies would be brought into the security branches where he worked. By 2013, the number had increased to about 50 bodies a day. Most had “cardiac arrest” listed as the cause of death, which came to be known throughout the course of the war as a euphemism for death by torture.
Rights groups estimate the total number of detainees by the Assad regime at about 136,000. After rebels opened Assad’s prisons during their lightning offensive that culminated in the fall of the regime on 8 December, about 100,000 prisoners remained missing.
The revelations of the photographs led to the US “Caesar Act” in 2019, which imposed sanctions on Syrian officials and any other person who engaged in “significant transactions” with the Assad regime. Though the US government said the sanctions were targeted in nature, experts have long said that they have had a chilling effect on the Syrian economy, largely affecting ordinary civilians.
The new authorities in Damascus, led by the Syrian president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, previously known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, have called for the lifting of US sanctions. The US has eased sanctions with a six-month waiver on certain humanitarian sectors, while the EU said it is waiting to see if Syria’s new rulers will protect minorities and create an inclusive government.
In addition to calling for the lifting of sanctions on Syria, Madhan said that he hoped that the new government in Damascus would open “national courts that will prosecute and hold perpetrators of war crimes accountable”.
