Human Rights Watch Identifies Some of the Thousands of Victims of Syria's Prisons

New research carried out by Human Rights Watch has offered a glimpse at the identities of some of the thousands of victims of Syrian government detention, and whose photographs were spirited out of the country by a defecting member of the military.

The defector, who has only ever been identified with the code-name Caesar, was responsible for smuggling more than 50,000 photographs in 2013, including 28,707 that Human Rights Watch on Wednesday said depicted at least 6,786 people who died during detention or later, at military hospitals. Of those, Human Rights Watch identified 19 victims, all of whose families said they have never been able to retrieve their bodies.

"We have no doubt that the people showing the Caesar photographs were starved, beaten and tortured in a systematic way, and on a massive scale," said Nadim Houry, deputy MIddle East director at Human Rights Watch. "These photographs represent just a fraction of people who have died while in Syrian government custody — thousands more are suffering the same fate."

Most of the victims, wrote the human rights group, had been arrested by one of five branches of Syria's intelligence agency between May 2011 and August 2013, at which time Caesar fled the country. The photographs, which have been shared and displayed around the world, including at the UN, show the corpses of Syrians, many of whom bear clear signs of torture, or have been disfigured by castration and other means.

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Abdullah Arslan al-Hariri, a laborer in his mid-30s at the time of his abduction in 2012, was one of those profiled in the report. Shortly after anti-government demonstrations began in 2011, Hariri became a prominent protests leader in Namr, the town where he lived. Hariri was arrested on June 16, along with a relative named Tal'at. Though Tal'at was released, Hariri remained in custody, and pictures among the Caesar files were positively identified as Hariri by his family. In total, seven photographs depicted his corpse, which, upon examination by a forensics expert, showed gunshot wounds in his right arm and shoulder, and one in his head, which was "suggestive of a close range entry," according to researchers.

Another victim identified by the report was 14 year old Ahamd al-Musalmani, a boy also from Namr, and whose brother had been shot and killed in March 2011. After initially fleeing to Lebanon, Musalmani returned in August 2012. Members of Syria's Air Force intelligence boarded a minibus on which the boy and several family members were travelling. Allegedly after finding an anti-Assad song on his phone, Musalmani was taken away. Despite family members paying thousands of dollars in bribes to government officials, Musalmani was never seen again, until his uncle found the boy's face among a folder in the Caesar dossier labelled Air Force Intelligence.

"It was the shock of my life to see him there," said the uncle, Dahi al-Musalmani, a former judge. "I looked for him, 950 days I looked for him. I counted each day."

Forensic experts working with Human Rights Watch said Musalmani's body showed signs of blunt force trauma.

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Like Musalmani's family, that of 25-year-old Rehab al-Allawi, an engineering student in Damascus involved in a local activist network, paid more than $18,000 in vain to secure her release following her detention in January 2013. Later, after being told she had perished, and then that she was in fact alive, they handed over a further $90,000 and were told she had been spirited out of the country and into Lebanon. In reality, she was dead, evidently having perished in June of the same year. Photographs of Allawi were identified both by her family and a former prisoner who was detained alongside her.

Interviews with other former detainees indicated that death was common among prisoners captured by the government in the first several years of Syria's civil war. Often, they would simply perish in their cells, where detainees suffered torture, starvation and various chronic and infectious diseases that went untreated.

Wednesday's report was released in Moscow, where the Kremlin has remained resolute as one of the Syrian government's strongest backers through more than four years of war. Despite blanket media coverage of their crimes and an international coalition aimed at wiping them from the map, extremists groups like the Islamic State have killed comparatively fewer civilians in Syria than the government itself. Either from the conditions of detention, torture, forced starvation or as a result of illegal barrel bombs, most analysts say that of the majority of civilian deaths can be tied to government actions. More than 250,000 people have died in the conflict since 2011.

"Many of the former detainees who were held in these nightmarish conditions told us they often wished they would die, rather than continue suffering," said Houry.

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