Panel and exhibit feature civilian torture and execution by Syrian government

Thirty graphic photographs and five panelists highlighted the horrors of civilian torture under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in an exhibit and a panel on Thursday.

The explicit photographs on display were just thirty of over 55,000 photographs that make up a traveling exhibition known as “The Caesar Project,” according to a press release by the Wilson School. Released publicly in January 2014, the Caesar Project is a group of photographs taken by a Syrian military police officer and forensic photographer who, under the pseudonym “Caesar,” took pictures of detained prisoners in security branches in Syria.

These images capture the men, women and children who were imprisoned in Syrian detention facilities and who have been tortured and killed. Other than blurred faces to protect the privacy of the victims, the pictures graphically display the gruesome and shocking wounds, infections, whip marks, signs of starvation and other injuries suffered by the victims photographed at Military Hospital 601 in Mezze, Syria.

Each picture is captioned with a label of the victim’s gender, a series of numbers identifying the victim, as well as a reference to which of the four detention center branches the victim was killed in. These branches are the Department of Military Intelligence, the Political Security Directorate, the General Intelligence Directorate and the Air Force Intelligence Directorate.

These photographs are an indicator of a problem that needs to be addressed, panelists Jacob Shapiro, Mouaz Moustafa, David Pollock, Deborah Amos and Adam Entous noted during the panel after the exhibit. Moustafa and Pollock discussed their personal relationship to the events that took place in Syria and how these events were communicated to the public after the fact, while Amos and Entous discussed political reactions to this situation.

Moustafa, executive director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force and United for a Free Syria, was born in Damascus and grew up under the Assad regime.

“Growing up there, I remember, even if we made a joke about Assad in our house, we whispered,” Moustafa said. “That’s a huge amount of fear.”

Moustafa explained how the first eight to nine months of the start of the Syrian war began with peaceful protests of civilians seeking rights they believed they deserved, which resulted in the government’s creation of torture chambers and “slaughterhouses,” where tortures have been taking place since 2011.

Moustafa noted information about Caesar, the photographer in question, who he said was originally called in to a military hospital in Damascus and was labeled as having had an “accident.” During his time there, Moustafa added, Caesar captured pictures of fifteen people who had been tortured to death. Although Caesar did not want to be part of what was going on, Moustafa explained how Caesar bravely stayed to document these events with pictures for another two and a half years before eventually escaping to the United States to release the evidence at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Pollock, a Kaufman Fellow at the Washington Institute, explained that his exposure to Syria in 2012 as an English-Arabic translator for refugees and activists opened his eyes to what Caesar had captured in his photographs.

“I had seen my share of horrors, and there were times during that two-week assignment when I literally just could not go on,” Pollock said.

Pollock said he was first exposed to the reality of living conditions in Syria through a bilingual Arabic and English blog, called Fikra, which moved him to see for himself what was happening. He noted some of the reasons why the United States has not been more involved in this issue so far, including those given by President Barack Obama and the United States government. Arguments include a lack of a military solution, a belief that stepping into the situation might open up the regime for anarchy similar to what happened in Libya and a belief that Bashar al-Assad is useful in the fight against ISIS.

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However, Pollock said that he does not believe these reasons are valid and he believes that human rights violations in Syria are so widespread to the point that the United States should be involved.

Entous, a national security correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, said that the reason that the United States administration is not more involved in this issue is that they are stalling for time to eventually find a solution diplomatically, so as to avoid another situation similar to the Iraq war.

Amos, an international correspondent who covers the Middle East for NPR News, also added that the pictures were not released immediately out of concern for privacy and dignity of the dead.

The panelists also raised the question of how to deal with these widespread crimes, moving forward. While many difficult questions remain to be answered about sufficient funding, military strength and diplomatic readiness in order to come up with a solution to this issue, the panelists agreed that the situation needs to be immediately addressed.

“The war goes on and the atrocities continue,” Pollock added. “Even as we sit here right now, the pictures that Caesar took are being replicated in real life inside Assad’s prisons.”

The photos were on display in Shultz Dining Room in Robertson Hall between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m Thursday. The panel took place at in Dodds Auditorium of Robertson Hall at 4:30 p.m.