Ahmad al-Musalmani, Child. So reads the card above his photo in Caesar’s collection. Ahmad and most of his family had fled Syria following the death of his brother during a protest, but he returned in 2012 after his mother died. On his way, Ahmad was arrested for possessing a song thought to be critical of Assad. He was tortured and killed within the month, at the age of 14. When his uncle found Ahmad’s photo among the thousands published online, he saw the numbers on his chest written by the Syrian government to record his death. "Ahmad was a soul," his uncle said told Human Rights Watch. "Ahmad was a soul, and they turned him into a number."
Ahmad’s photo is one among tens of thousands depicting the tortured bodies of detainees killed in Syrian government detention facilities. These photographs were taken by a Syrian defector codenamed "Caesar," who formerly worked as an official forensic photographer for the Military Police. In 2011, when the Syrian uprising began, Caesar initially wanted to leave his position and contacted a group asking for help escaping Syria. After speaking with the group, however, Caesar agreed to stay in his position within the Syrian government and smuggle out photos of the dead detainees, for no other reason than to let the family members of the victims he photographed know what had happened to their loved ones. He did so until August 2013, when he finally left Syria with over 50,000 images from two military hospitals in Damascus.
30 of these photos are currently on display in a room of the Campus Center of Smith College. On Thursday, a panel discussion was held between Ambassador Robert Ford, former U.S. Ambassador to Syria; Mouaz Moustafa, Executive Director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force; and Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of the Human Rights Watch; and moderated by Smith’s own Middle East Studies Professor Steven Heydemann. The panel highlighted the shortcomings of the current U.S. and U.N. policies regarding Syria and emphasized the importance of holding accountable the people responsible for inflicting mass detainment and torture.
Ambassador Ford referred to the U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254, which called for the release of arbitrarily detained people and demanded an inspection of the detention facility. He added that although this resolution should and could be used as an indictment of the Syrian government, so far the resolution has not been enforced. He also emphasized that the U.S. government and the U.N. are completely aware that people are being tortured to death in Syrian detention facilities every day. In fact, although they’ve seen and expressed outrage at the Caesar photos, they have not taken any action to hold the Syrian government accountable for their unlawful policies.
Director Whitson reminded the audience of horrors we have seen before; of past genocides to which we respond, "No more, never again." Director Mouaz explained how Caesar himself called the reveal of his photos our generation’s "never again" moment when we see the obvious violation of human rights and recognize the need for something to be done to end the cruel and unlawful practices. Caesar’s photos were published in 2014; it is now 2016, almost exactly 2 years since the photos were released. Both the U.N. and the world expressed outrage at the existence of such horrors and yet, as all three panelists pointed out, next to nothing has been done to stop the atrocities from continuing. The threat of detainment and torture by the Syrian government still looms large over the Syrian people, contributing to their fear and helping motivate them to flee the country.
Ahmad was not the first or the last child tortured and killed. Among the 30 photos displayed at Smith, two are of boys even younger than Ahmad. Their deaths have been attributed to torture inflicted by the Syrian government; they are not under dispute. Their short lives were ended brutally and painfully, but the people responsible are allowed to continue as if they have done nothing wrong. The "campaign of extermination," as Professor Heydemann called the mass detainments of Syrian people, continues to be carried out by the Syrian government. Caesar revealed just 50,000 images, but as Director Whitson said, "The victims in these photographs represent just a fraction of the deaths, just in Damascus during the short period they cover. They don’t cover all the deaths in all the detainment facilities all over Syria."
Thousands upon thousands of people have been killed in detainment facilities, and continue to be killed today. The U.S. government, the U.N., and the world knows this, and yet nothing has been done to stop it. Director Mouaz told the audience on Thursday that when asked what the most shocking or disappointing thing he has seen is Caesar would say that it is the fact that no one cared, that no one took action. These photos outraged people and continue to do so. They have the potential to motivate serious policy change regarding the Syrian government. If we continue to bring these photos to the people in power and pressure them to hold the Syrian government accountable for their crimes, it is possible that we would see change but we must be persistent. The photos were released 2 years ago but we cannot forget them. We must continue to demand that laws such as Resolution 2254 are enforced, that the U.N. may have access to detention facilities, and that the parties responsible for the systematic detainment and torture of Syrian people – namely, the Syrian government and Assad himself – are held accountable.
The bottom line, as Director Mouaz pointed out when he quoted Caesar, is, "The thousands of people that I’ve documented that are dead, we can’t ever bring them back, but there are hundreds of thousands of people that remain in Assad jails today that will face the same fate if we don’t do anything about it." And we can do something about it. We can honor those who have died by remembering them, by holding their killers accountable and by preventing the same fate from befalling anyone else. We cannot save Ahmad but if we act, we might be able to save his brothers.
