Evidence against Assad

News footage has brought to light heartbreaking images of Syrian civilians gasping for air, targets of their government’s chemical weapons attacks. But little evidence to date has detailed the systematic kidnapping, torture, and murder of suspected political dissidents by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. That changes with Syria’s Disappeared: The Case Against Assad, a new documentary written, directed, and produced by Sara Afshar.

Afshar examines evidence of atrocities from two main sources—a cache of 600,000 documents smuggled out of Syria and nearly 7,000 photographs supplied by a defector who once worked as a forensic photographer for the Syrian military police. Key documents reveal high-level government officials coordinating a network of military detention centers that includes hospitals. Photographs from those locations show (and viewers see) the emaciated bodies of young men, skin burned and eyes gouged out, their last moments of pain frozen on their faces.

Many of the photographs contain a tag with identifying information, like “Corpse 320.” So much evidence exists, the legal case against Assad is a “slam dunk,” according to Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador for global criminal justice.

Syria’s Disappeared includes a clip of a February 2017 interview with Assad. He looks at some of the same photographs and suggests they’ve been “photoshopped” or depict inadvertent casualties of the country’s civil war, but are “not policy.” Yet Assad’s “not policy” has resulted in tens of thousands of victims murdered, missing, or still in custody.

Numbers don’t tell the personal stories. Through tears Mazen describes how security forces jumped on him until his ribs broke. They then suspended him in the air by the wrists with handcuffs and assaulted him with a clamp and a pole in ways, he says, that “can’t be imagined.”

The documentary lays out a solid case against Assad. How will the international community respond?