A mysterious Syrian defector known only as “Caesar” testified to Congress yesterday that he had documented the torture and murder of 11,000 people by the Assad regime, and that 150,000 more were currently imprisoned and facing the same fate:
After spending two years meticulously documenting the systematic torture and murder of thousands of men, women, and children, he carefully planned his escape with the photos and the files that accompany them. The FBI is near complete in its effort to verify them, increasing their evidentiary value for future war crimes prosecutions. “I saw pictures of young children and the very elderly as well, and pictures of women. Sometimes I would come across the pictures of some of my own neighbors and people that I recognized. I was horrified but I would not tell them the fate of their children,” out of fear of the regime’s retaliation, Caesar sad. “My religion did not allow me to be quiet about these horrendous crimes that I have seen.” …
International war crimes prosecutor David Crane, who led the first large research project looking at the Caesar photos, said that the atrocities evoked memories of the Holocaust, a sentiment expressed last month by the State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, Stephen Rapp. “We rarely get smoking gun evidence in my business… but what we found was just that,” said Crane. “The photos show crimes the likes of which we have not seen since Auschwitz.”
Some of Caesar’s gruesome photos can be viewed here. One example after the jump:
John Hudson suggests that Caesar’s testimony is part of a renewed effort to drum up support for US intervention in Syria:
Supporters of the Syrian opposition in Washington hope that the gruesome images will catalyze efforts to boost U.S. military support for Syria’s moderate opposition. The briefing was in part facilitated by the Coalition for a Democratic Syria, an umbrella group that lobbies for additional U.S. support to the rebels. “This brings it to a whole new level,” Oubai Shahbandar, an advisor to the Syrian Opposition Council, told Foreign Policy after the briefing. “This is genocide with a capital ‘G.’ You can’t ignore this. You can’t say there are no good options. We have rows and rows and rows of naked emaciated bodies.”
The Dish 