2014 Syrian detainee report

The source, who for security reasons was identified only as Caesar, was at the time a photographer with the Syrian military police who worked secretly with a Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Movement. In 2025, after the fall of the Assad regime, the whistleblower revealed his identity as Farid Nada al-Madhan. His job was "taking pictures of killed detainees" at just two military hospitals in Damascus. He did not claim to have witnessed executions or torture. But he did describe a highly bureaucratic system. The bodies would then be buried in rural areas. He began making duplicates of his photo evidence in September 2011 and sending them on thumb drives to a relative who fled Syria and was working with human rights groups. After sharing thousands of images, he feared for his safety and was smuggled out of the country in August 2013. The authors of the report who interviewed him found him credible and truthful and his account "most compelling" after subjecting it to "rigorous scrutiny". == Authors ==

The authors of the report are: • Sir Desmond Lorenz de Silva QC, former chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. • Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, former lead prosecutor of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic. • Professor David Crane, who indicted then-president of Liberia Charles Taylor at the Sierra Leone court. Also involved in the report were three experienced forensic science experts, including evidence from a forensic pathologist, an anthropologist who investigated mass graves in Kosovo and an expert in digital images who examined and authenticated samples of 55,000 digital images, comprising about 11,000 victims. == Content ==

The 31-page report, which was commissioned by a leading firm of London solicitors, examined thousands of Syrian government photographs and files recording deaths in the custody of government security forces. Most of the victims were young men and many corpses were emaciated, bloodstained and bore signs of torture. Some had eyes gouged out and others showed signs of strangulation or electrocution. == Implications ==

The report was made available to the UN, governments and human rights groups. Experts say the evidence is more detailed and on a far larger scale than anything else that has yet emerged from the Syrian conflict. As a result of the report it has been suggested that Syrian government officials could face war crimes charges in light of the evidence presented within. De Silva told The Guardian that the evidence "documented industrial-scale killing," and added: "This is a smoking gun of a kind we didn't have before. It makes a very strong case indeed." A representative for Bashar al-Assad denied the images were even taken inside the country. But representatives of the U.S. State Department, British Foreign Secretary, Amnesty International and other bodies said the photographs are irrefutable testimony of widespread human rights abuses that could well rise to the level of war crimes. Due to the report and other findings, the head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, stated, "The mass scale of deaths of detainees suggests that the Government of Syria is responsible for acts that amount to extermination as a crime against humanity". == Related reports ==

According to a report by Amnesty International, published in November 2015, the Syrian government had forcibly disappeared more than 65,000 people (who were yet to be heard from) since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. According to a report in May 2016 by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 60,000 people were killed through torture or died from dire humanitarian conditions in Syrian government jails since March 2011. If the Dead Could Speak The HRW report If the Dead Could Speak corroborated the images and findings in the Caesar Report. Human Rights Watch had released a torture report about the Assad government years before this, titled, "Torture Archipelago." == Caesar Exhibit ==

The Caesar Exhibit is a high-profile exhibition showing photographic evidence of torture and death committed by the Assad government in Syria's prisons. This exhibit is sponsored by the non-profit organization Syrian Emergency Task Force. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, European Parliament, UK Parliament, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the UN have showcased this exhibit. == Koblenz trial ==

Mostly on the base of the data from the Caesar Report, a universal jurisdiction trial under German law () started on 23 April 2020 in the city of Koblenz in Germany. The trial had two defendants, former Syrian security servicemen, a colonel Anwar Raslan (57) and his aid, Eyad al-Gharib (43); both were working in the Branch 251 of the Syrian secret service in Damascus. As stated by prosecution, there was a prison just near the Branch 251 where 4,000 prisoners were tortured from April 2011 to September 2012 under Anwar Raslan's leadership. "for a crime against humanity in the form of killing, torture, severe deprivation of liberty, rape and sexual coercion in unity of action with 27 counts of Mord ('severe' murder in the German penal code), 25 counts of dangerous bodily harm, two counts of especially serious rape, sexual coercion, 14 counts of deprivation of liberty for more than one week, two counts of hostage-taking and three counts of sexual abuse of prisoners." == Criticism ==

Assad denies the findings of the Caesar Report. == See also ==