Thaer al-Najjar and his family spent 13 years searching for his brother Imad, who was arrested in 2012 by Syria’s former Assad regime. Despite multiple trips to a notorious prison outside Damascus after Assad’s overthrow in December 2024, they couldn’t trace Imad. Finally, a leaked document confirmed Imad’s death, dated 10 days after his arrest during peaceful protests against the regime.
The Damascus dossier, containing 134,000 Syrian security and intelligence records, including 70,000 gruesome images of torture victims, sheds light on the atrocities committed by Assad’s forces. The leaked files reveal a systematic “bureaucracy of torture” and execution by the regime, with over 10,000 documented detainee deaths.
René Provost, a law professor at McGill University, emphasized the importance of the dossier in providing closure to families like Najjar’s and potentially enabling criminal investigations against Assad regime officials. The photos were compiled by a former Syrian officer and shared with NDR, revealing the regime’s brutality.
These images, shared with German authorities and human rights organizations, show the severity of the killings over 11 years post-Caesar files, with victims displaying signs of starvation and physical harm. The systematic process of photographing and cataloging bodies underscores the regime’s atrocities.
Among families interviewed based on the dossier, activist Mazen al-Hamada’s relatives found closure with the discovery of his body, labeled as detainee number 1174. Escaping to the Netherlands in 2013, Hamada returned in 2020, only to be detained and never heard from again until his body was found. His family, like many others, seeks justice and closure for those still missing.