Syria was home to one of the first civilizations on earth. Today, the country is picking up the pieces from the ruins of humanity’s oldest sin. Half a century of dictatorship between Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez. Half a million lives lost in a civil war under the younger Assad’s hand.
Now that he’s gone, Syria is looking toward its future. But before the country can plan what’s to come, its people want the world to be reminded of what has taken place.
Chemical weapons, bombardment, and torture
In 2013, death in Syria was as arbitrary as it was brutal. Two years into the civil war, murder crept through a suburb of Damascus in a suffocating haze. It was sarin gas. Outlawed in 1997, sarin has no color, no odor. Often the dead drop never knowing what happened.
The nerve gas that killed more than 1,400 civilians that year was delivered by Syrian army rockets from land then held by Assad. Sarin is heavier than air, so it crawled down stairwells and snuck under doors into basements — exactly where women and children slept to stay safe from artillery fire above.
Cameras captured the moment as one father held the bodies of his dead daughters, young girls he had willed through months of hunger. “Do you know what they said before going to sleep?” he asked, his voice breaking. “I gave her food. She said, ‘Dad it’s not my turn to eat, it’s my sister’s.'” He went on, “What should we do, good people? What are we to do? Look at that face, look at that face.”
Over the years, starvation and shelling continued, forcing 13 million Syrians from their homes. And in 2017, another chemical attack — this time in the town of Khan Shaykhun. 60 Minutes traveled there and saw how the dictatorship had used conventional bombs against hospitals and schools, in addition to the nerve gas in the neighborhoods. Why use the world’s most grotesque weapon on civilians — on children?
“The Assad dictatorship is essentially clearing out any part of the country that it cannot control,” 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reported in 2018. “Bombing the hospitals kills the here and now. Bombing the schools kills the future and dropping sarin suffocates whatever might have been left of hope.”
One group of Syrians made hope their mission: volunteer rescue workers known as the White Helmets. When Assad’s dictatorship dropped bombs, the White Helmets jumped in to try to save civilians buried in the rubble. At one point in the war, they were responding to an average of 35 attacks a day.
Throughout the war, the White Helmets say they saved more than 128,000 civilians. And with each, they shouted their gratitude to God.
When shelling and gassing weren’t enough to scare his people into submission, Assad made them simply disappear. The dictatorship dragged thousands of civilians into prisons, where they spent years in a vast network of detention centers. Often, they were tortured.
In 2021, 60 Minutes spoke with a photographer who goes by the alias Caesar. He had been a military photographer for 13 years, until the horrors he saw broke his allegiance to the regime. The photos he took were so gruesome, the broadcast had to add a masking effect when it aired them. To protect his identity, Caesar spoke to Pelley through Mouaz Moustafa of the Syrian emergency task force.
“It was very clear that they were tortured, not tortured for a day or two, tortured for many, many long months,” Caesar told 60 Minutes through Moustafa three years ago. “They were emaciated bodies, purely skeletons. There were people, most of them had their eyes gouged out. There was electrocution, you could tell by the dark spots on their body that was used there. There was utilization of knives and also big cables and belts that was used to beat them. And so, we could see every type of torture on the bodies of these individuals.”
Caesar also photographed the regime’s cataloging of cruelty. Each body was carefully documented: one number indicated the specific detainee, a second number labeled the intelligence branch responsible for the torture, and a third number tallied a sequential count of the dead.
Those photos are among the evidence independent commissions are using to show Syria’s crimes against humanity started from the top.
“There’s no question they lead all the way to President Assad,” Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, told 60 Minutes in 2021. “I mean, this is a top down, organized effort. There are documents with his names on it. Clearly, he organizes this strategy.”
Rapp was helping to build cases against Assad and his regime. Having formerly prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Rapp knows what it takes to amass irrefutable evidence. And in Syria, he said, there was no shortage of it.
“We’ve got better evidence against Assad and his clique,” Rapp said, “than we had against Milosevic in Yugoslavia, or we had in any of the war crimes tribunals in which I’ve been involved in, some extent, even better than we had against the Nazis at Nuremberg because the Nazis didn’t actually take individual pictures of each of their victims with identifying information on them.”
Syria may never get its Nuremberg moment. Today, Assad and his family are in Russia, where they were granted asylum by the Putin regime, and are unlikely to leave. In Damascus, Syrians have been celebrating in the street, but demands of justice are never far from their minds.
Taghreed Al-Badawi’s son disappeared at the hands of the regime 12 years ago. Now, she told Pelley, she wants to see Assad come to justice. “He is a war criminal,” she told Pelley this week. “Someone like him should die like a dog. He and the Assad family should be executed for the horrors we now see.”
When 60 Minutes spoke to Rapp in 2021, he said he was optimistic that there will be, one day, justice for Syria. If not, if Assad gets away with impunity, this cradle of civilization could become a birthplace of more misery.
“If the word is that you can commit those crimes, and you can get away with it, and this is the way that you suppress a popular uprising, then others will do the same thing,” Rapp said in 2021. “The future will be much more dangerous than the past, and a lot of what we built will be destroyed.”
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.
Photos and video courtesy of The White Helmets, Getty Images and Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University.
