An edited version of this piece was published atthe National.
Zabadani, a mountain town northwest of Damascus near the Lebanese border, was one of the first Syrian towns to be liberated from the Assad regime (in January 2012) and one of the first to establish a revolutionary council. (The martyredanarchist revolutionary Omar Azizwas involved in setting up this council, as well as the council in Barzeh). Zabadani has been besieged and intermittently shelled since its liberation. And since July 3rdthis year it has been subjected to a a full-scale assault by (the Iranian-backed) Lebanese Hizbullah, alongside continuous barrel bombing. Apparently the town’s 800-year-old al-Jisr mosque has been pulverised. Human losses are in the hundreds, and beyond the numbers, incalculable.
In other news, Daesh (or ISIS) has bulldozed the 1500-year-old monastery of Mar Elian in al-Qaryatain and blown up the beautiful 2000-year-old temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra. The temple once mixed Roman, Egyptian and Mesopotamian styles. Today its rubble is further evidence that there will be no resumption of Syrian normality. The people, monuments, even landscapes that Syrians once took for granted, that they assumed their grandchildren would enjoy, are disappearing for ever.
Palmyra – Queen Zenobia’s desert city – is a world heritage site and perhaps Syria’s most precious cultural jewel. Remarkably intact until recently, it provided a tangible link to antiquity and a breathtaking proof of the region’s civilisational wealth. Nationalist Syrians, whether secular or Islamist, feel the importance of such sites for communal pride and identity. Rational Syrians can at least understand their utilitarian benefit to any future tourism industry.
Neither Bashaar al-Assad nor (Daesh ‘caliph’) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi are nationalists. Al-Baghdadi is explicit about it: “Syria is not for the Syrians,” he says, “and Iraq is not for the Iraqis.” Al-Assad’s rhetoric is still nationalist (and sectarian), but his war effort is managed by a foreign power now pushing towards the nation’s partition. Though not nationalists, both are certainly fascists obsessed with reinforcing their respective totalitarian states and eliminating any independent intellectual influence. Thus, in a flesh-and-blood echo of its slaughter of Palmyran history, Daesh tortured and publically beheaded Palmyra’s head of antiquities, 81-year-old Khaled al-Assa‘ad, perhaps because he’d refused to reveal the location of hidden treasures.
The news out of Europe grows ever more horrifying.
This week a refrigerated truck filled with the bodies of 71 migrants who likely suffocated en route was found abandoned on an Austrian highway.
Yesterday two boats trying to make it to European shores capsized off the coast of Libya — at least 200 were believed missing and presumed dead.
Hey, that’s Europe’s problem, right? We here in fortress America have our own issues to deal with — and to hear Donald Trump tell it they would be largely settled by building higher fences and amending the Constitution to end birthright citizenship.
Just pull up the drawbridge and good luck to the “Old World” in dealing with the “wretched refuse” who end up — alive or dead — on their shores.
And yet here’s one factoid from that most recent horror in Austria to contemplate: Some of the dead carried Syrian travel documents. They were fleeing the violence and the turmoil, which our own nation and the international community have donenothingto curtail — not after President Obama’s “red line,” not after the proof of sarin gas attacks, not after pleas by rebels for something more lethal than meals-ready-to-eat.
The dead in that truck included eight women and four children, the youngest a girl estimated between age 1 and 2, the boys ages 8 to 10. These weren’t simply economic refugees, looking for a better life in Europe. These were families looking foranylife that could be lived without fear of violence.
Imagine the level of desperation it takes to gather the family, make the trip to Turkey, then Greece, through Macedonia, Serbia through Hungary — where thousands have been crossing the border daily (often over or under razor wire fences) — and from there into other countries in the European Union.
Earlier in the week 18 Syrians were found in an overturned truck on a highway in Hungary. They, at least, survived.
European governments are arresting the human traffickers who prey off the fear and the misery of these refugees. But they cannot stop this tide. Only regime change in Syria can do that — but our own nation and the world seem to have given up on that.
Three years ago today, citizen journalist and film-maker Osama al-Habali was arrested as he sought to cross the border from Lebanon into his native Syria. He has not been heard from since his disappearance.
TAKE ACTION:
Write to the Syrian authorities
Share his films on social media
Publicise his case in your country, particularly on 30 August, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances
On 4 April 2012, citizen journalist and film-makerOsama al-Habalisustained life-threatening injuries to his neck and back as a result of shelling. After receiving treatment in Beirut and four months recuperation, he was arrested near the town of Talkalakh as he attempted to cross the border back into Syria on 18 August 2012.
Frustrated with the mainstream media’s approach to coverage of the crisis in Syria, al-Habali sought to make films that would serve as an alternative (follow this linkto hear about al-Habali’s motivations in his own words). He began by filming protests in Homs, the heart of the Syrian revolution. His work was featured in several shorts for theaward-winningAbounaddara Collective, an anonymous group of self-taught filmmakers producing weekly portraits of Syria during the civil war.
Three years after his arrest, al-Habali’s fate remains shrouded in mystery. Despite the circulation of various rumours suggesting variously his transfer to a military intelligence facility in Damascus, his release, his death, the Syrian government have yet to confirm his status or whereabouts. His family have not heard from him.
Send appeals calling for:
Calling on the authorities to provide immediate information about his whereabouts and fate of Osama al-Habali;
Appeals to:
Permanent Representative to the UN, H.E. Bashar Ja’afari
Permanent Mission Of The Syrian Arab Republic To The United Nations
820 Second Ave.
15th Floor
New York, NY 10017
United States of America
At the beginning of the uprising which began in 2011, the Syrian authorities imposed a media blackout in an effort to hinder the reporting of impartial news from the ground. This blackout paved the way for the emergence of a citizen journalism movement, as an alternative media, with individuals reporting what is actually happening on a daily basis. This new media is being operated mainly by young men and women. Syrian citizen journalists have been particularly targeted for attack by the government’s forces. Since March 2011, hundreds of citizen journalists have been killed either by snipers from the security forces or under torture. Hundreds of others who have done nothing more than to witness, report, film, and photograph acts of violence have been arrested and many have been subjected to enforced disappearance by government forces. Writers and journalists in Syria are also amongst those at risk of political and sectarian violence from pro-government militias and armed opposition groups.
Those of us who concern ourselves with the Syrian revolutionary war will be more than familiar with the old line, almost solely repeated by leftists and ham anti-imperialists, that they simply just can’t support the Syrian rebels because they’re ‘supported by imperialism’ or, in its even more crude and directly antagonistic form, that they’re ‘proxies of imperialism’ or stooges of forces that they’ve deemed to be be in the wrong ‘camp’, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. The logic of this is inherently irrational and/or downright perfidious.
Firstly, it’s usually wielded not as any kind of genuinely analytical point, but rather merely as a means to deny support for and even just interest in the Syrian rebels and the revolution in general. It’s a position shaped by counter-revolution, eurocentrism and isolationism rather than any form of progressivism. In different circumstances, this intercedes with sectarianism, different forms of chauvinisms and Islamophobia, which is apparently rendered acceptable within the remit of this kind of ‘anti-imperialism’ and the context of Syria.
Secondly, it is qualitatively and quantitively misleading and, in certain circumstances, meaningless as a description of the kind of support the rebel forces have received from countries deemed to be ‘imperialist’ over the course of the Syrian revolutionary war. While it’s completely true that certain rebel brigades have received weaponry from countries like the US, the actual function of the US has been an arbiter of what the rebels can and cannot receive from other countries, namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Libya.
For example, as has been well established, the US currently enforces anembargoon rebel forces receiving anti-aircraft MANPADS, weapons which could be used to overcome Assad’s air force, which apart from being the main means used by the regime to terrorise civilian areas thus creating the massive refugee problem, has consistently given the regime the upper hand on the battlefield, but which could also in other circumstances, in the mind of the US, be turned against its regional allies, namely Israel.
But all of this obscures the fact that the vast majority of Syrian rebels have not been armed by ‘imperialism’ in any way, shape or form. When Barack Obama began to fully concentrate US attention on the rise of Daesh, not in Syria, as it happens, where the US watched as they overran the poorly-equipped rebel positions, doing literally nothing when the rebels launched anoffensiveagainst them that wielded successes until the over-stretched rebels werecaught outby the Assad regime when its forces, backed by Hezbollah and Iranian-funded ultra-sectarian Shiite militias like Badr and Asayib Ahl al-Haq took Yabroud, he rebutted the idea that the US hadn’t supported the rebels enough bydismissingthem as ‘farmers and pharmacists’.
In a sense, the president was not wrong. The rebels are mostly comprised of civilian volunteers who took up arms following the regime’s militarised attempts to crush the civil uprising, while the core contains tens of thousands of defected Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers. The vast majority of the weaponry these forces use is that which the defectors managed to bring with them from the SAA and that which has been taken on the battlefield or as a result of raids on military bases.
I remember speaking to a friend who has fought with a Free Syrian Army brigade in and around the Damascus area. We got onto the subject of how the revolution was perceived in the west among ‘my friends’, by which he meant fellow leftists. I told him straightly that many of them were convinced that people like him were proxies of imperialism and were being armed by imperialist forces –inshallah, came the partially sarcastic reply.
And this brings me on to the next point. What exactly would be the problem with Syrian rebels receiving weapons from ‘imperialism’? The only people who find it problematic are people for whom sourcing weaponry will never be a problem. That might sound a cheap point to make, but it is nevertheless a cheap point worth making. For many people, ‘imperialism’ is a word they so often use but rarely ever comprehend its meaning in practice in contexts beyond either hysterical, facile denunciations and sloganeering or often equally as facile academic detachment.
In February 2015, three teenage schoolgirls left the comfort of their homes in East London and traveled to Syria to join the self-styled Islamic State (IS). Around 60 women and girls are thought to have made the same journey from Britain.
The story of their disappearance dominated the UK press for weeks and the blame game inevitably began to hunt out whose fault it was. When the families of Amira Abase, Shamima Begum, and Kadiza Sultana found out that the police had been interviewing the trio about another girl from their school who had already joined IS, the case was picked up for investigation by the government. But soon certain sections of the press would turn on the families themselves.
VICE News gained intimate access to the father of one girl, Amira, and joined him as he dealt with the press and parliament to find out what it’s like for those left behind by the tragic choices of their loved ones.
Images of dead bodies in Syrian prisons, taken by a Syrian government photographer, are displayed at the United Nations on March 10. The photographer, who goes by the pseudonym Caesar, took the pictures between 2011, when the Syrian uprising began, and 2013, when he fled the country. His photos will be on display at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters/Landov
A Syrian forensic photographer, who now uses the pseudonym Caesar, documented the death of thousands of detainees in Syria’s brutal prison system. He made more than 55,000 high-resolution images before he fled the country, fearing for his safety, in 2013.
He spoke publicly for the first time in July 2014, when he appeared before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, wearing a blue jacket with a hood to protect his identity.
Dozens ofCaesar’s photographswill be displayed again in the halls of Congress on Wednesday.
The exhibition is sponsored by theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museumin cooperation with the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The graphic images show beaten and bruised bodies, many are skeletal, most with signs of torture. Now, Syrian families are searching the photos online after Syrian opposition groups posted more than 6,000 images in March.
NPR spoke to a member of the group that posted the pictures, as well as a friend who identified a victim, and a lawyer working on a war crimes case. Here are their stories:
Amer fled Damascus two days after his friend, Kutabia, a 40-year-old father of two, was seized by government agents from a bookstore in Damascus. The two friends demonstrated together through 2011. They took even larger risks together, smuggling money and medicine into restive neighborhoods besieged by the Syrian government.
“They invaded on New Year’s Eve at 6 p.m. I was at a café nearby. And when I finished I said, ‘Let’s go and say hi [to Kutaiba].’ I knocked and there’s no one. No lights inside. And I continued home and that’s when I heard that my friend was taken to the detention center or the torture center.
This is where the story begins. Once your friend is detained by the government, you try to figure out where he is.
His parents started to ask. They usually go to people in the intelligence service and the guy will say, ‘I can’t tell you, you have to give me money.’
For two and a half years his parents are paying money. Sometimes they take a couple of thousand dollars and [they] get back and say, ‘He’s alive and well, and says hi to his sons.'”
In March 2015, Syrian opposition groups published 6,000 of Caesar’s photos online. For the first time, Syrian friends and families could search the gruesome photo gallery and identify the victims. Kutaiba’s picture was among the dead, killed within a month of his arrest.
Rep. Ed Royce (center), R-Calif., speaks during a July 2014 hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, with “Caesar,” a Syrian army defector who wore a blue, hooded jacket to protect his identity. Caesar smuggled out of Syria more than 55,000 photographs that document the torture and killings in Syrian prisons.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
“It was him. His eyes were closed. He had stitches on his forehead like the ones you see in horror movies. And I was shocked. I was in the middle of work. I don’t know what sort of people can do this harm and torture to another person.
I saw his color, and was like, ‘Thank God he wasn’t starved to death.’ He didn’t have his ears taken off or his nose. So, I thought he made them furious enough to kill him right away rather than being tortured on a daily basis. It’s always better to know, is he alive or is he dead.”
Dr. Mohammed Ayash works with the Syrian Association for Missing and Detainees of Conscience, based in Istanbul. In March, the group published some of the Caesar photos online and has organized private showings in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan and even in some rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus. Dr. Ayash is scanning all the images and documenting the dead. It is a grim task made harder still because Dr. Ayash has seen friends and neighbors among the dead.
“We have about 6,700 victims in this website. I am a doctor, I’m not a pathologist, but I describe what I see in every picture. We have children in these pictures. There are older men. There is one woman.
It comes to my dreams sometimes, because of the horrible methods. By torture, by starvation and eye gouging, and it’s very hard for me.
(The work) is very important because we need the families as witnesses in any court. We need families to say, ‘Yes, this is my father and my brother,’ and they were taken and killed by the Assad regime.”
Muna Jundi, an attorney in Flint, Mich., works with United for a Free Syria, a coalition of Syrian-American nonprofit organizations. She was part of a team of Syrians who got Caesar to testify to Congress last year and will be in Washington for the event on Wednesday. She took part in the decision to publish the photos online.
“It was systematic, the regime was using it as a way to quell the revolution.
There’s a lot of missing Syrian people and a lot of people don’t know the fate of their family members. They hear about it through rumors. They pay money to try and find information and really there’s nothing concrete. And unfortunately there’s nothing more concrete than pictures of dead bodies. So the idea was to open up to help people identify their own family members.
For an American audience, I think it was shocking. But the sheer … mass production of this, I think, is what overwhelms. They’ve documented it in such detail.
Syrians inside Syria that had any experience with intelligence [services] automatically knew why the documentation had to happen.
When there’s an order from above, they need evidence that those orders are being carried out. In a highly corrupt government, where you can pay people to release people, they need the evidence. They needed to keep the evidence to show that you told us this is what we need to do, and therefore, this is what we are doing.”
The Pan-Arabists of the Middle East are celebrating the US-Iranian deal along with all the Progressives of the world. Every spin is being put on this deal to make it look like a guarantee for peace in our time, that somehow the Iranian regime’s desire for a nuclear bomb has been curbed. In exchange, however, the world has offered Syria to Iran on a platter. We’re told by reasonable people that of course, “no deal is perfect”. What they won’t say is that the “imperfect” bits are Syria, and that the millions of people who can’t go home anymore, and the hundreds of thousands who have died in the last four years, are directly a result of Tehran’s actions.
I didn’t always used to think like this. You’re reading the blog of a bitter and disillusioned man who once cheered for Hassan Nasrallah during the 2006 war and believed that Tehran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ was the region’s only hope. I changed my mind because Syrians were being murdered by the thousands, their legitimate claims dismissed, and their uprising brushed off as a terrorist uprising by a tinpot dictator who would not have survived had it not been for the help of Tehran and Hezbullah. The pan-Arabists were blasé about the news. We were brutalised and the world did nothing. We were tortured, and the world did nothing. We were starved, and the world did nothing. The world looked away when Syria started.
Whilst I write this I am thinking about a young Syrian boy I shook hands with in Turkey. Well, we didn’t shake hands. He shook my hands, I shook the stump of his arm because his hands were blown off by a Syrian regime missile strike. The Iranian deal means more bombs, more bullets, and more militias will be sent to Assad, and the easing of sanctions means more money will be used to prop up his economy and keep him in power. That’s why I’m not enthusiastic about the deal with Iran. That’s why I’m angry and biased. I don’t know, maybe I’m not thinking straight; I’m too ’emotional’.
I’m sorry that Syrians are inconvenient, that we’re not being killed by the right type of enemy for you people. I’m sorry we haven’t received your stamp of approval. Pan-Arabists are cheering a deal with Iran, because, as they keep reminding us, Israel is the real enemy; Palestine the real goal. Never mind the untold misery, guts and excrement that we are being forced to crawl through in the name of this mythical liberation that hovers on our horizon like a promised paradise for the wretched of the world. Syria is “complicated”. Syrians are only to be felt “sorry for”, like the victims of some flood or an earthquake. From your glass towers in Dubai you intellectual pan-Arabists can toast a deal with Iran, and celebrate the fact that nothing has been allowed to deviate your attention from the lofty goal of “liberating Palestine”.
I can’t write. My thoughts are scattered as my attention jumps from one story to another. I read into people’s comments on social media to then-th degree. I know – not even sure how – where they are coming from when they make a statement about some subject, and that’s when I start to wrestle with ghosts. Start is probably the wrong word. My paralysis is because I amtryingto reach the start point, the firm ground from which I can begin pointing out where everything started to go wrong. I read praise for a long serving foreign minister who has just passed away. The only discernible legacy I can make out is that “he was there”. He didn’t do much, but he was around to see stuff happen. So we clap for him because we don’t know what politics is. The only thing we know is mediocrity, so we applaud it as an accomplishment.On the same note we have the Pied Piper of the Middle East claiming that “the road to Jerusalem” passes through the towns and cities of Syria. Where do I start with that? I’ve spent the last hour typing and then deleting pages of nonsense on how wrong, how inconsistent, and how hypocritical that man’s statements were. A liar celebrating a day which is a lie, for a cause which is dead, to a people who are merely animated husks. Why should that bother me? Who was I trying to reach? I can’t honestly say.
We don’t even realise that the Middle East is dead, that there existed before all this noise pollution a region that had a very different view of the world, of its place in it, and a hope for the future that the soldiers killed. We think we have inherited something, but in reality we are all squatters in the mansions of people long gone. We dress up with the clothes they left behind, dine in their halls, and pretend to understand the books in their libraries or the art on their walls, like children play-acting at being adults, but we don’t get it. We havenoidea.
Six former hospital staffers from Syria—photographed in shadow, out of concerns for their safety—pose together in Turkey. All claim to have witnessed war crimes, perpetrated by Syrian security forces, in their medical facilities. (Abu Odeh, mentioned in the text, appears third from the left.)
Photograph by Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer.
When a photographer-archivist working for Syria’s military police defected with grisly evidence of the regime’s brutality, he became a war-crimes whistle-blower. Adam Ciralsky uncovers “Caesar’s” story.
On a stifling day in August 2013, a police photographer with chiseled features and a military bearing moved hurriedly about his office in Damascus. For two years, as Syria’s civil war became ever more deadly, he lived a double life: regime bureaucrat by day, opposition spy by night. Now he had to flee. Having downloaded thousands of high-resolution photographs[see second set of images below]onto flash drives, he snuck into the empty office of his boss and took cell-phone pictures of the papers on the man’s desk. Among them were execution orders and directives to falsify death certificates and dispose of bodies. Armed with as much evidence as he could safely carry, the photographer—code-named Caesar—fled the country.Since then, the images that Caesar secreted out of Syria have received wide circulation, having been touted by Western officials and others as clear evidence of war crimes. The pictures, most of them taken in Syrian military hospitals, show corpses photographed at close range—one at a time as well as in small groupings. Virtually all of the bodies—thousands of them—betray signs of torture: gouged eyes; mangled genitals; bruises and dried blood from beatings; acid and electric burns; emaciation; and marks from strangulation. Caesar took a number of these pictures, working with roughly a dozen other photographers assigned to the same military-police unit.But Caesar himself, like the intelligence operation of which he became a part, has remained in the shadows. He appeared only once in public, last summer, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he wore a hood and spoke through a translator. He spoke briefly, and in a restricted setting, though I have been able to obtain a copy of his complete testimony. He sought and was granted asylum in a Western European country whose nameVanity Fairhas agreed not to disclose, for his personal safety.
An edited version of this piece was published at the National.
band annie's Weblog 