Atrocities of the Assad Regime

Incongruity in Reporting and Failure to Utilize the Past to Ameliorate the Present

Reports and personal stories that describe the horrors inflicted upon opponents of the Assad regimes are abundant, credible, and sufficiently documented. Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, meticulously verified dozens of stories and is confident that the Caesar photographs, a collection of photographs “taken by the Syrian security apparatus to maintain a photographic record of the thousands who have died in detention since 2011 as well as of members of security forces who died in attacks by armed opposition groups ,”present “authentic – and damning – evidence of crimes against humanity in Syria.” The United Nations Human Rights Council published a report, “Web of Agony”: Arbitrary Detention, Torture, and Ill[1]Treatment by former Government forces in the Syrian Arab, which is authoritative and convincing.

This article has no intent to soften the human rights violations committed by the Syrian governments or be insensitive to the extensive sufferings of families caught in the cauldron of madness and wild accusations that led to inflictions and deaths. There is no argument with the revelations of the past. There are arguments with the concentration of the past as past and with presentations as representative of the happenings. Victims provided sensational stories and statistics; officials have not used them as guides for preventing contemporary tragedies. Incongruity in the reporting leads to questioning conclusions and leads away from accepting pounding assertions. A narrative may have truths and not be entirely true.

Compare the Syrian Arab Republic war and the American Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln’s government fought a war, which “Honest Abe,” America’s most respected and admired president, defined as a war to preserve the Republic, a purpose not much different than Bashar al-Assad’s assertion. In a letter to Horace Greely, editor of the influential New York Tribune, Lincoln clarified the direction of the conflict:

Executive Mansion,
Washington, August 22, 1862.
Hon. Horace Greeley:
Dear Sir.

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

The disputable and magical figure of 600,000 dead appears in both wars. Atrocities were abundant. On a road in southern Maryland, close to Point Lookout, where the Potomac River joins Chesapeake Bay, the Union established a prisoner-of-war camp on August 1, 1863. A sign close to the fenced area succinctly describes the ordeals suffered by Confederate prisoners of war.

During 22 months, more than 3,000 Southern prisoners died from cold, starvation, chronic diarrhea, dysentery, and typhoid fever.

Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s scorched earth policy extended the battleground to a war against the civilian population. In Sherman's Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of war, Matthew Carr describes Sherman’s March through Georgia.

For more than a month, Sherman's army marched through the state known as the granary of the South, seizing or destroying vast quantities of food and provisions, demolishing and burning public and private property, and leaving a trail of devastation fifty to sixty miles wide…. In February the following year, Sherman led his army northward into South Carolina. Here the destruction was more extensive and more explicitly punitive, as his soldiers burned and looted their way through the state.

More than any military campaign in history, Sherman's March has become a byword for wartime devastation and cruelty…. historians have depicted Sherman as the spiritual father of total war, the general whose campaigns broke with the polite conventions of nineteenth-century warfare and paved the way for the new forms of military barbarism that followed.

Commander-in-Chief Abraham Lincoln’s connection with General Sherman’s total war is not in American history books. Bashar al-Assad’s connection with the brutalities exhibited in the Syrian War will forever be highlighted in U.S. textbooks of foreign history.

War is the atrocity. Other atrocities are a product of the total war, where nations will do anything to survive. Stopping the atrocities starts with stopping the war. As described in a previous article, foreign elements took advantage of the unrest and seized an opportunity to depose the Assad regime. Halting, rather than provoking an escalation of violent confrontations, should have guided the international community. Other disturbing aspects have a mismatch in the post-description of the atrocious events and their acknowledged history. Not using past events to ameliorate the tragedies occurring in present situations exposes the hypocrisy of those who promote human rights initiatives,

Incongruity in the reporting
Maybe it is me; maybe I did not see enough or learn enough. What I saw and heard from the media did not match what I observed. For days, the news in most media started with the same mind positioning words, “Glimpses of the horror emerge from the warren of dank, airless corridors of Seydnaya Prison, from what has been dubbed “The Slaughterhouse.” Seydnaya prison, as many prisons, had dank and airless corridors. The term “slaughter house” might be a correct description. I proceed from what I know and not from what I am being told. From what I know, the adjective came from Amnesty International and has been repeated without complete verification.

A glimpse of the news horror started with claims of hidden underground cells, and, in one report, verified by someone who claimed to have had endured an imprisonment. The White Helmets investigated and “after inspecting all entrances, exits, ventilation shafts, sewage systems, water pipes, electrical wiring, and surveillance systems, no hidden or sealed areas were identified." I heard the lead investigator state, “apparently it was only a rumor.”

German news agency, Deutches Welle, examined several videos and photos of inmates in harsh conditions and found them to be either AI generated, from a Vietnam war museum, or fakes. A video of a confused child emerging from the prison was that of a child with visiting parents, staged to appear as if emerging alone from a cell. Would those who found the child permit the toddler to wander alone? Shows how a merchandiser can sell anything.

Statements of “haggard and emaciated inmates, some helped by their comrades because they were too weak to leave their cells, circulated worldwide,” did not coincide with videos of released inmates. Google the words “inmates leave Sedanaya prison.” and find a video that shows “haggard and emaciated inmates, some helped by their comrades.” All of the videos that I observed showed normal individuals walking fast, running slowly, and none stumbling or held by others. I repeat, Sedanaya prison might have been a “slaughterhouse.” However, validation needs more concrete information than personal stories to convince. “Scripted stories,” which provided exciting entertainment and were obvious theater, added to the bewilderment.

CNN reporter, Clarissa Ward, hosted the breaking of a cell lock and the “discovery” of a shaken and incoherent prisoner under a blanket. Clarissa described how she kindly escorted the incoherent prisoner to his hometown and reunification with family. Her video entered a report of “One young man, now a living skeleton, wrapped in a tattered blanket, trembled as he swore that he was scheduled for execution along with 54 others just half an hour after being freed from his cell.” The video generated suspicions of authenticity. It was later revealed that the detainee was Mohammad Salameh, a former intelligence officer who had been incarcerated for theft, extortion, and coercion, and the drama was staged.

An interview featured a man claiming to have been detained in the Palestine Branch, a prison in the outskirts of Damascus. He was later identified as Anas Majdhoub, ”a known informant for the branch, who had previously facilitated arrests and torture.”

These false stories framed a question: “If the human rights abuses were extreme and abundant, why was it necessary to create faked stories, unverified rumors, and repeat comments that did not match the reality displayed on the glass tubes?

Enforced Disappearances
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) uses form submissions to document enforced disappearances. As of August 2014, the Syrian Network listed 96,321 persons abducted by Syrian intelligence agencies and whose existence remains unknown. Other abductions occurred in rebel areas, by ISIS, and in the battles between the Turks and the Kurds. The SNHR number is equivalent to Mexico’s official number of “forcibly disappeared,” which recently grew to 111,916 people. Not much said by U.S. authorities about Mexico’s “desaparecidos.”

Thousands are an unacceptable and realized statistic; one hundred thousand is an unacceptable number and an outrageous statistic. Exact numbers matter in a country ravished by madness, atrocities by all sides, revenge, hatred, internecine warfare, and fear, where crazed persons lose control of the value of life and find emotional release in the killings of others. Look at the American Civil War, Spanish Civil War, Vietnam Civil War, and Yugoslavian wars. Purposes exist for exaggerations or for soliciting support to locate those who disappeared for other reasons. Certainly, some of the missing are in the the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimate of 7.2 million internally displaced, of which one million have been displaced since the fall of the Assad government, and are part of the 4.8 million Syrian refugees registered in Türkiye, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. SNHR correction of the number of disappearances depends on notifications and leads to an uncertainty that it has corrected statistics. Has SNHR used all available tools that have been made available after the fall of the Assad regime to ensure credibility of statistics of enforced disappearances? Note, we are only examining one aspect of the human rights violations ─ enforced disappearances.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can provide a convenient method for comparisons between two sides of a ledger. In this case, one side of the ledger contains information of those missing, including photos. The other side of the ledger contains information received from sources — individuals, incarcerated, jailers, prison officials, prison guards, immigration authorities, and others — anyone who can contribute information that leads to locating a missing person. AI examines both sides of the ledger and prints out its findings.

After opening the prisons and having available a myriad of new information sources, which includes those who may have had fear of previously speaking, we remain unaware of any organization pursuing an efficient and dutiful process to acquire information. The media does not show a large number of reunited or many discoveries of the disunited. Where are tens of thousands clamoring for information of their missing relatives? Where is a central office to receive them? Something is amiss. The numbers remain as statistics and that is unsatisfactory and unreliable.

Mass graves
Comments concerning the findings of mass graves and the extrapolation of the number of graves to a number of innocent civilians murdered by Syrian intelligence and deposited in the graves were more speculation than authoritative. Agencies gathered data from morgues, hospitals, and field reports, all of which were difficult to obtain, controlled, and suspect. How did the agencies arrive at a figure of 600,000 killed in a conflict that had no mass armies facing each other, few major battles, and only two highly populated areas? Chat GPT estimate of deaths from the five major battles, shown in the table below, did not reach 100,000. Where did the other 500,000 deaths occur?

Before speculating that the graves contain executed persons who expressed hostility to the regime, shouldn’t it be ascertained where the casualties from the conflict were buried? Isn’t it probable that after Syrian government forces entered a battered city, littered with body parts and corpses, that they removed the dead, placed then in body bags and found suitable graves for the deceased. One report has “Local witnesses reported seeing security forces transporting bodies in refrigerated containers throughout the war. A religious leader, Abdul Kadir al-Sheikha, “provided testimony about conducting burial rites for at least 100 victims within a 30-square-meter area, before being excluded from further ceremonies by secret police.” Don’t use of refrigerated trucks to preserve the corpses and prayers at the graves indicate attention for the deceased? Where are unknown dead buried? Aren’t they buried in unmarked graves in cemeteries? The apparent becomes unapparent and is turned into speculative stories that suit an agenda.

As of February 4, 2025, there are no reports that investigators have taken DNA samples of the buried and made matches to abducted civilians. Seems like it is taking a long time for doing the task and the task is neither a high priority nor a coordinated effort. Could the reason be that it is preferred to impress the public with wild speculation than with the truth?

Failure to Utilize the Past and Ameliorate the Present
As shown by the WWII Holocaust and the several wars and genocides that followed, the dead from tragedies do not serve to prevent further tragedies; they are used to satisfy agendas. Media attention to that “which had become synonymous with arbitrary detention, torture and murder,” would have been genuine if the same attention had been given to similar prisons in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Here are some details.

A decade ago, Israel, by several magnitudes, exceeded Syria in the number of detainees of Palestinian dissidents.

On 11 December 2012, the office of then-Prime Minister Salam Fayyad stated that since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians, or roughly 20% of the total population and 40% of the male population, had been imprisoned by Israel at one point in time. According to Palestinian estimates, 70% of Palestinian families have had one or more family members sentenced to jail terms in Israeli prisons as a result of activities against the occupation.

Although the number of arbitrary executions in Seydnaya prison is not known, much mention is made of the executions. Passing mention is made of the hundreds of arbitrary executions of Palestinians in the West Bank, those shot for planning attacks or while escaping, and the tens of thousands murdered in Gaza.

No investigations into the number of dissidents held in Saudi and Egypt jails. We read of constant executions in Saudi Arabia and pay no attention to the reports. No execution has matched the grisly slicing and dicing of Saudi journalist, Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, “who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 by agents of the Saudi government.”

The Assad government committed atrocities.
The present HTS government committed atrocities.
The larger atrocity is the exaggeration and use of previous atrocities to diminish attention to contemporary atrocities.

The dead speak and the living don’t listen.