Syrien: Das Archiv des Todes

Das International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) berichtet über das grauenhafte "Archiv des Todes", jene Bilder von über 10.000 vom Regime getöteter Gegner, die von Farid Al-Madhan, der lange nur unter dem Decknamen Caesar bekannt war, aus Syrien geschmuggelt wurden. Jahrelang dokumentierten die Folterknechte Assads ihre Untaten und archivierten die Bilder:

Captured by Syrian military photographers, the images are part of the Damascus Dossier, an investigation based on a cache of more than 134,000 records obtained by German broadcaster NDR and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 24 media partners. The Damascus Dossier sheds new light on the inner workings of the former Syrian government’s security and intelligence agencies. The leaked photographs are the largest single collection of images of murdered Syrian prisoners ever obtained by a news outlet. More than 10,200 individual prisoners were photographed, with up to 177 photos taken in a single day.

The photos were sent to military courts, where a judge would sign off on the deaths, essentially granting members of the Assad regime judicial immunity for their crimes, according to a former military officer. The officer served as the head of the Evidence Preservation Unit of the military police in Damascus between 2020 and 2024. He provided the images to a source who then shared them with NDR. “There are things people need to know,” he said in an interview with NDR. “There are people whose families need to know where they are and what happened to them.”

Until now the Syrian public did not know about the existence of these photos.(…)

A team of reporters from ICIJ, NDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung conducted an in-depth analysis of a sample of hundreds of the photographs. The analysis showed that the majority of victims bore signs of starvation and physical harm. Many of them were naked. The Damascus Dossier images show that as each prisoner died, he was transported, photographed and catalogued. In almost all cases his detainee number was written on a white card placed on his body, written in marker on his arm, leg, torso or forehead, or superimposed on the photo. A military photographer, wearing rubber boots or surgical covers on his feet, snapped photos of the body from multiple angles and then filed the images in meticulously organized digital folders.

The images are carefully titled to include information on the inmate’s number, the first name of the photographer, the date the photo was taken and, in many cases, the security branch that arrested the prisoner, including Military Police, the Air Force Intelligence Directorate and the General Intelligence Directorate.

Based on evidence from additional records in the Damascus Dossier and on reporter visits to Syria, the photos were likely taken in military hospitals to which the detainees were transferred.