Syria was home to one of the first civilizations on earth. Today, the country is picking up the pieces from the ruins of humanity’s oldest sin. Half a century of dictatorship between Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez. Half a million lives lost in a civil war under the hand of young Assad.
now that he’s gone Syria looks to its future. But before the country can plan for what’s to come, its people want the world to remember what has happened.
Chemical weapons, bombing and torture
In 2013, the death in Syria was as arbitrary as it was brutal. Two years into the civil war, the assassination dragged through a suburb of Damascus in a suffocating fog. It was sarin gas. Outlawed in 1997, sarin is colorless and odorless. Often the dead drop without knowing what happened.
The nerve gas that killed more than 1,400 civilians that year was dropped by Syrian army rockets from land then held by Assad. Sarin is heavier than air, so it was dragged up the stairs and slipped under the doors in the basements, exactly where women and children slept to stay safe from artillery fire.
Cameras captured the moment a father held the bodies of his dead daughters, young girls he had lusted after months of hunger. — Do you know what they said before going to sleep? he asked, his voice breaking. “I fed her. She said, ‘Dad it’s not my turn to eat, it’s my sister’s.'” He continued, “What shall we do, good people? What shall we do? Look at this face, look at that face.”
Over the years, starvation and bombing continued, forcing 13 million Syrians to flee their homes. And in 2017, another chemical attack, this time in the city of Khan Shaykhun. 60 Minutes traveled there and saw how the dictatorship had used conventional bombs against hospitals and schools, in addition to nerve gas in neighborhoods. Why use the world’s most grotesque weapon against civilians, children?
“The Assad dictatorship is essentially wiping out any part of the country that it can’t control,” 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reported in 2018. “The bombing of hospitals kills the here and now. The bombing of schools kill the future and dropping sarin suffocates what hope is left.”
A group of Syrians made their mission wait: the volunteer rescue workers known as the White Helmets. When the Assad dictatorship dropped bombs, the White Helmets jumped in to try to save the civilians buried in the rubble. At one point in the war, they were responding to an average of 35 attacks a day.
During the war, the White Helmets say they saved more than 128,000 civilians. And with each one, they called out their thanks to God.
When bombing and gassing weren’t enough to scare his people into submission, Assad simply made them disappear. The dictatorship dragged thousands of civilians into prisons, where they spent years in a vast network of detention centers. Often, they were tortured.
In 2021, 60 Minutes spoke with a photographer who goes by the name Caesar. He had been a military photographer for 13 years, until the horrors he saw broke his loyalty to the regime. The photos he took were so gruesome that the broadcast had to add a masking effect when he aired them. To protect his identity, Caesar spoke to Pelley through Mouaz Moustafa of the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
“It was very clear that they were tortured, not tortured for a day or two, tortured for many, many long months,” Caesar told 60 Minutes through Moustafa three years ago. “They were emaciated bodies, just skeletons. There were people, most of them had their eyes gouged out. There was electrocution, you could tell by the dark marks on their bodies that were used there. There was use of knives and also of large cables. and belts that were used to beat them. And so, we could see all kinds of torture on the bodies of these individuals.”
César also photographed the regime’s cataloging of cruelty. Each body was carefully documented: a number indicated the specific detainee, a second number labeled the intelligence branch responsible for the torture, and a third number tallied a sequential count of the dead.
These photos are among the evidence that independent commissions are using to show Syria’s crimes against humanity started from the top.
“There’s no question they lead to President Assad,” Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador for war crimes, told 60 Minutes in 2021. “I mean, this is an organized effort from the top down. low. There are documents with his names that are there, it is clear that he organizes this strategy.”
Rapp was helping build cases against Assad and his regime. Having prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Rapp knows what it takes to amass irrefutable evidence. And in Syria, he said, there was no shortage of them.
“We have better evidence against Assad and his cabal,” Rapp said, “than we had against Milosevic in Yugoslavia, or in any of the war crimes tribunals I’ve been involved in, to some extent, even better. than we had against the Nazis at Nuremberg because the Nazis didn’t actually take individual photos of each of their victims with identifying information about them.”
Syria may never get its Nuremberg moment. Today, Assad and his family are in Russia, where they were granted asylum by the Putin regime, and are unlikely to leave. In Damascus, Syrians have been celebrating in the streets, but demands for justice are never far from their minds.
Taghreed Al-Badawi’s son disappeared at the hands of the regime 12 years ago. Now, he told Pelley, he wants Assad brought to justice. “He’s a war criminal,” he told Pelley this week. “Someone like him should die like a dog. He and the Assad family should be executed for the horrors we see now.”
When 60 Minutes spoke with Rapp in 2021, he said he was optimistic that one day there will be justice for Syria. If not, if Assad gets away with it, this cradle of civilization could become a cradle of more misery.
“If word gets out that you can commit these crimes, and you can get away with it, and that’s how you put down a popular uprising, then others will do the same,” Rapp said in 2021. “The future it will be much more dangerous than in the past, and much of what we have built will be destroyed.”
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.
Photos and video courtesy of The White Helmets, Getty Images and Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University.