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---
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Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🇸🇾", "🪖", "📸"]
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Date: 2025-03-23
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DocType: "WebClipping"
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Hierarchy:
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TimeStamp: 2025-03-23
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Link: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/code-name-caesar-the-man-who-photographed-assads-torture-victims-a-e64b5da8-0df8-4be6-bf88-812a2521162a
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location:
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CollapseMetaTable: true
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---
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Parent:: [[@News|News]]
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Read:: 🟥
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---
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```button
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name Save
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type command
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action Save current file
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id Save
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```
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^button-TheManWhoPhotographedAssadsTortureVictimsNSave
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# Code Name Caesar: The Man Who Photographed Assad's Torture Victims
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- [X.com](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?lang=en&text=Code+Name+Caesar%3A+The+Man+Who+Photographed+Assad%27s+Torture+Victims&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Finternational%2Fworld%2Fcode-name-caesar-the-man-who-photographed-assads-torture-victims-a-e64b5da8-0df8-4be6-bf88-812a2521162a%3Fsara_ref%3Dre-so-tw-sh&via=derspiegel "X.com")
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- [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/share.php?t=Code+Name+Caesar%3A+The+Man+Who+Photographed+Assad%27s+Torture+Victims&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Finternational%2Fworld%2Fcode-name-caesar-the-man-who-photographed-assads-torture-victims-a-e64b5da8-0df8-4be6-bf88-812a2521162a%3Fsara_ref%3Dre-so-fb-sh "Facebook")
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- [E-Mail](mailto:?subject=Code%20Name%20Caesar:%20The%20Man%20Who%20Photographed%20Assad%27s%20Torture%20Victims%20%28DER%20SPIEGEL%29&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Finternational%2Fworld%2Fcode-name-caesar-the-man-who-photographed-assads-torture-victims-a-e64b5da8-0df8-4be6-bf88-812a2521162a%3Fsara_ref%3Dre-em-em-sh "E-Mail")
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- [X.com](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?lang=en&text=Code+Name+Caesar%3A+The+Man+Who+Photographed+Assad%27s+Torture+Victims&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Finternational%2Fworld%2Fcode-name-caesar-the-man-who-photographed-assads-torture-victims-a-e64b5da8-0df8-4be6-bf88-812a2521162a%3Fsara_ref%3Dre-so-tw-sh&via=derspiegel "X.com")
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- [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/share.php?t=Code+Name+Caesar%3A+The+Man+Who+Photographed+Assad%27s+Torture+Victims&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Finternational%2Fworld%2Fcode-name-caesar-the-man-who-photographed-assads-torture-victims-a-e64b5da8-0df8-4be6-bf88-812a2521162a%3Fsara_ref%3Dre-so-fb-sh "Facebook")
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- [E-Mail](mailto:?subject=Code%20Name%20Caesar:%20The%20Man%20Who%20Photographed%20Assad%27s%20Torture%20Victims%20%28DER%20SPIEGEL%29&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Finternational%2Fworld%2Fcode-name-caesar-the-man-who-photographed-assads-torture-victims-a-e64b5da8-0df8-4be6-bf88-812a2521162a%3Fsara_ref%3Dre-em-em-sh "E-Mail")
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Heroes aren’t born. They’re made. Like Caesar, a Syrian man whose real name is Farid Almazhan.
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Up until spring 2011, Almazhan was an ordinary junior officer in the army of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, loyally carrying out orders at military police headquarters in northern Damascus. He was responsible for photographing the bodies of soldiers after they died – in accidents, for example. "That was my job,” he says.
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But then, he became the man who smuggled 26,342 high-definition photos of 6,679 dead bodies out of the country. A collection of images that make up the most damning evidence yet of the regime’s suspected crimes against humanity. Should Assad one day be dragged into court, it will be in large part due to these pictures.
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**The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 11/2025 (March 7th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.**
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That was almost 12 years ago. It’s a winter’s day and Caesar is sitting in the living room of a narrow rowhouse with no name on the door in a town in northern France. A powerfully built 56-year-old, he is wearing a blue down vest and dark creased slacks. His brown eyes are glancing nervously through the room. He keeps the down vest on as if to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.
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He has agreed to a meeting with DER SPIEGEL on this day, 10 years after coming to France and going underground, because he hopes to be able to regain some semblance of control over his own story now that Assad has been toppled and fled to Moscow. Control that he has lost little by little ever since going into exile and into hiding.
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The war in Syria lasted 13 years, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and drove more than 6 million Syrians out of the country. It began with unrest in 2011 in the city of Daraa, where youth sprayed anti-regime graffiti on a wall and were arrested and tortured by the secret service. Those were the sparks that ignited the fury of the Syrians.
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At the time, Almazhan was head of forensics for the military police in Damascus, and he and his team, right at the beginning of the uprising, received a new assignment: No longer were they only responsible for photographing the bodies of soldiers, but they were also to document the horribly disfigured bodies of civilians who had been killed in prison. Young men. The elderly. Children. Later it would be entire families. Almahzan spent two long years using his camera to log the daily tyranny the regime visited upon his fellow citizens. The Syrian security apparatus kept meticulous records of its atrocities.
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Whistleblower Farid Almazhan in Washington, D.C.
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Foto: Privat
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Former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad
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Foto: Syrian Presidency / AP / picture alliance
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Caeser would later tell the U.S. criminal law expert David Crane of his "surprise” at the regime’s "unshakeable sense of complete impunity.” Now retired, Crane had been a chief prosecutor for the United Nations and, together with his team of experts, was the first to investigate the authenticity of Caesar’s story and his photos after he fled Syria. On January 21, 2014, they published the "Caesar Report,” which sealed Assad’s status as an international pariah. The vast majority of world leaders no longer wanted to meet with Assad for political talks.
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And Farid Almazhan, the former mid-level military man, became Caesar, a leading Assad adversary. Crane gave him the alias to protect his identity.
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"I had always known that Syria was a dictatorship,” says Caesar on this winter day in the nameless rowhouse in northern France. "But it seemed to me to be the lesser evil, better than chaos or extremism.”
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Almazhan is sitting on an oversized sofa hugging the room’s inside corner like a U. The shelves are full of books written in Arabic script, and colorful foil letters still glitter on the ceiling beam spelling out Eid Mubarak, blessed feast – leftover from the festival in summer marking the end of Ramadan.
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Mass graves exhumed near the city of Daraa in December 2024
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Foto: Bekir Kasim / Anadolu / picture alliance
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It is his sister’s home. Almazhan himself lives a few streets away. Without her, whose codename, Cinderella, we will use here, and without her husband Ussama Uthman, who came out with his true identity four days after Assad’s fall, there likely never would have been a hero by the name of Caesar. Nor, perhaps, would this meeting with the DER SPIEGEL team have taken place – a discussion lasting just over eight hours, of which Caesar will only be present for 26 minutes.
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Almazhan sinks into the sofa, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He seems tense, as though it wasn’t just the camera that captured the corpses of those who had been tortured, starved and shot, but also his entire body.
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"Farid changed a lot during that period. He just wanted to get out."
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Ussama Uthman
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"I had always wanted a quiet life,” he says, kneading his large hands together. "I was never interested in politics.” But then, he says, he became witness to the largest political crime in the 21st century to that point. He saw horrific scenes in the country’s morgues and he realized: "Assad is the evil. Does a reasonable ruler do such a thing to his people just because they demonstrate peaceably for freedom and dignity?”
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As a member of the military police, he says, he was part of the state apparatus – complicit in the injustice. "I couldn’t do it anymore.”
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In spring 2011, Uthman, his friend and brother-in-law, convinced Almazhan not to leave the army. "Farid changed a lot during that period,” says Uthman. He grew angry quickly and had trouble sleeping. "He just wanted to get out.”
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### Fifty Dead Bodies a Day
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Uthman, 58, is sitting on the other end of the sofa, a man with a graying beard wearing a traditional felt cap. He says he immediately recognized the importance of the photos his friend was telling him about every day – and encouraged him to keep going, beseeching him to make copies. "In three months, it will all be over.”
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From May 2011 to August 2013, Almazhan and his team photographed as many as 50 dead bodies each day. They needed up to 30 minutes for each one. They no longer had time to photograph the dead from five different angles, as the military police bureaucracy called for, but only from three or four due to the time pressures.
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Sednaya Prison just outside of Damascus was notorious for torture
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Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
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Uthman opens up his notebook and shows a photo of dead bodies stacked in the hallway of a military hospital. In another image, they are lying in a garage entryway. During this period, says Uthmann, Almazhan and his team would drive from their headquarters to Military Hospital 601 in Mezze to photograph the dead. The hospital was in western Damascus, near the presidential palace. "Here, on the hill, you can seen Assad’s residence,” says Uthman, pointing to a stately home.
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To document the dead, soldiers would collect more and more bodies at the secret service prisons in Damascus, pack them into refrigerated trucks and bring them to the hospital. They were photographed, officially declared dead by forensics experts and given death certificates for the benefit of the families. The photos, he says, served as evidence for the Syrian president, who received daily updates about how many alleged terrorists had been eliminated, says Uthman. "After that, the bodies were buried in mass graves.”
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### Tattoos of Assad
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Nobody trusted anybody in Syria at that time, Uthman says. Soldiers were deserting, and it became less and less clear who the government actually considered to be an enemy. Christians were now also among the murder victims, who were widely considered to be supporters of the multi-confessional state. There were even Alawite victims, from the same religious group that the Assad family belongs to. Some of the dead bore a tattoo of the president on their breast as a symbol of their loyalty.
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Almazhan speaking to the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. Senate in March 2020
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Foto: Joshua Roberts / REUTERS
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What did he think when he saw the photos?
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"I saw myself, my family. I was afraid that we could be next,” says Uthman.
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His wife Cinderella walks into the room wearing a long skirt and a beige headscarf. She places homemade baklava on the table. She, too, took a significant risk back then.
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When her brother came home from work at night, she was often the one who received the data, says her husband. As her young son slept, Uthman says, she would transfer the photos to an external hard drive, delete the data card and give it back to her brother before dawn. To make sure that nothing was lost, Uthman would also later upload the images to a cloud, encrypted and in low resolution. As he talks, his wife remains silent, a smile on her face.
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Uthman says his wife isn’t used to speaking with strangers. Her husband was the one who gave her the alias Cinderella.
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"I am tired, but I know that it was all worth it. For Syria!” is all the 48-year-old says.
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"If the security services had discovered that I was copying them, they would have punished me with death."
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Farid Almazhan, alias Caesar
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As time passed, Almazhan’s job grew increasingly dangerous, says Uthman. Starting in 2012, even the military police would be regularly searched as they left work – bags, coats, but not shoes. Caesar would often hide the data card holding the pictures in the heel of a shoe. Or he would put it in his belt or in a loaf of bread.
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On his computer, Uthman now opens a satellite photo showing the route Almazhan would take every evening. After leaving military police headquarters in Kabun, he would climb into a minibus and pass through several checkpoints in the part of Damascus under Assad’s control. His home in the town of Tall, meanwhile, was in rebel-held territory. As a regime soldier, he also had to fear the checkpoints set up by the rebels.
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Caesar only managed to get through because he had good contacts with the opposition, says Uthman.
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In contrast to his brother-in-law, says Uthman, he has been political since his youth – in part because he still has clear memories of the Hama revolt in 1982, when the Sunni group Muslim Brotherhood rose up against the state. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, was president at the time, and he had tens of thousands of people arrested and up to an estimated 40,000 people killed. As a schoolchild, Uthman watched as his teacher was led away as an alleged sympathizer. "He never returned.” Back then, he says, there was no evidence of the crimes committed. "This time, they won’t get away with it.”
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After finishing school, he refused military service, he says, making a living with his own construction company, which hired Cinderella as a designer at some point.
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"What Farid did, going to work every day in a security agency. I never could have done that,” he says.
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At some point, he says, it was just a matter of time before the operation was exposed. Security personnel even searched his home in Tall to arrest his brother, who was also part of the opposition, says Uthman. His brother wasn’t at home at the time, but they took Uthman’s computer. They failed to find the photos because Cinderella had buried the hard drive beneath a bucket in the earthen cellar.
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Uthman was the first to leave the country in spring 2013, followed by his wife and the children.
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“The interest of Western states was rather limited. Instead of being interested in the end of Assad’s rule, they were only focused on the fight against Islamic State.”
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Former UN prosecutor David Crane
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Soldiers were banned from leaving the country during the war. It was only in August 2013, when Caesar was sent outside the Damascus city limits on a work assignment, that he was able to escape. The opposition smuggled him across the border into Jordan in a truck full of sacks of flour. They later had a friend bring the hard drive containing the photos out of the country.
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The Syrian opposition had a global network, including powerful contacts in Washington, Ankara, Riyadh, Doha, Paris and Berlin. Many diplomats were given the opportunity to view the photographic material. "The interest of Western states was rather limited,” says Crane, the former UN prosecutor, in a telephone interview with DER SPIEGEL. "Instead of being interested in the end of Assad’s rule, they were only focused on the fight against Islamic State.”
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An official appraisal of the photos was eventually commissioned by the government of Qatar. The emirate had supported the uprising against Assad from the very beginning, pumping billions of dollars into the effort. A law firm in London was awarded the contract and that firm turned to Crane, who put together a team of forensic experts and two additional ex-UN prosecutors to determine the authenticity of the photographic material and write a report.
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Crane recalls first meeting the former military photographer on a sunny Monday in January 2014. He, two colleagues and the whistleblower from Damascus sat down together at a large round table in the Ritz-Carlton in Doha. He later reconstructed the conversation using his notes.
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"Why did you do it?” he says he asked the man, whose identity was unknown.
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"For the Syrians. For the people. So that the murderers would be held responsible and sentenced. For the family members,” Almazhan replied.
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"Wasn’t it extremely dangerous to copy the photos?” Crane’s colleague, the British criminal lawyer Desmond de Silva, wanted to know.
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"Yes, very dangerous. If the security services had discovered that I was copying them, they would have punished me with death.”
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"Did you receive any money in exchange for the photos, or did you derive any other benefits?”
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"No.”
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"You performed this work solely for reasons of conscience?”
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"Inshallah. How can you guarantee my safety?” the former soldier responded, according to Crane’s notes. He says they could sense his fear.
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"He is a simple, honest man,” says Crane. "We were extremely impressed by his motives.”
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One week later, the report was published. In the 31-page document, they left no doubt about the authenticity of the photographer’s material. In an interview with the broadcaster Al Jazeera, de Silva described the report as a "smoking gun” showing evidence of "industrial-scale” killing by the Assad regime. "The pictures show over a period of years the systematic murder of detainees by starvation, by torture, the gouging out of eyes, the hideous beating of people, the mutilation of bodies.”
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### A "PR Coup"
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Crane and his colleagues gave interviews for days and the level of global disgust was immense. The pictures were sent around in ministries and shown at international conferences.
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In New York, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and his U.S. counterpart John Kerry called the 15 members of the UN Security Council together for an informal special session. They wanted to bring Assad’s atrocities before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
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Uthman in front of a computer in France with original pictures taken by Caesar on the screen
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Foto: Susanne Koelbl / DER SPIEGEL
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Even the Russian delegate seemed distraught after viewing the photos, say diplomats who were present. Russia had consistently backed Assad in the war.
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But when the diplomats reconvened two months later to pass a resolution to refer Syria to the ICC, two veto powers voted against it. The Russian delegate called the images a "PR coup.” The Chinese argued that they didn’t want to interfere.
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"We couldn’t believe that the world knew everything and didn’t do anything."
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Ussama Uthman
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Hopes for justice were crushed by international realpolitik.
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"We couldn’t believe that the world knew everything and didn’t do anything,” says Uthman.
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Cinderella convinced her brother to travel to Washington in July 2014. "That’s the only way to make anything happen,” she urged him, according to Uthman. In the U.S., he testified in Congress before the House Foreign Affairs Committee wearing glasses and a blue raincoat, the hood pulled low over his face. Photos and videos were not permitted during the session. Afterwards, nothing happened.
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### Asylum in France
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While still in Syria, they thought their evidence would be enough to get the world to intervene in their country’s civil war, says Uthman. But they were neither able to protect their fellow Syrians from torture, barrel bombs and chlorine gas, nor could they embark on a new, better life overseas.
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In the war, the friends had a shared project. In exile, they seemed to grow alienated from each other. The two men, says Uthman, increasingly disagreed when and how they should go public with their knowledge.
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Quiet heroes like Caesar, Cinderella and Uthman usually don’t survive persecution by the terrorist regimes of their home countries. But the Caesar team managed to do just that.
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"The years in France weren’t easy,” says Uthman. "The French state offered us asylum and a certain amount of protection.”
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But they and their families lived as targets of persecutions, constantly trying to remain invisible and always wary of the long arm of Assad’s secret service. They consistently avoided deeper friendships and new encounters. When the parents of other Syrian children made videos during school events and field trips, they would turn away. Almazhan felt that attending a French language course with other refugees would be too dangerous. Both families remain reliant on state support even today.
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And then they were forced to stand by and watch as the pictures were wrested from them – as other appropriated their story. A friend from the opposition, whom Uthman had taken into confidence and given a copy of the photos before fleeing, uploaded Caesar’s images to the internet without prior agreement and even shared details of the operation. Another Syrian man, who had emigrated to the United States in the 1990s and who had translated for Caesar during his trip to Washington, began presenting himself as Caesar’s spokesman and referred to himself as "keeper of the Caesar files.”
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Anwar Raslan, a former colonel in Assad's secret services, was convicted in 2022 in Koblenz, Germany and sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity.
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Foto: Thomas Lohnes / AFP
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A torn-up portrait of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in the presidential palace in Damascus in December
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Foto: Ali Haj Suleiman / Getty Images
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Certain lawyers and court cases did give the activists some hope, however: In 2022, a regional court in Koblenz convicted a former colonel in the Syrian secret services to life in prison on the strength of Caesar’s photos. The man, formerly the deputy head of the Khatib torture prison in Damascus, had previously fled to Germany. With the help of the pictures, his involvement in the killing of at least 27 prisoners, including a child, was proven.
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"The trial is a milestone in the history of justice, and for the future investigation of Assad’s dictatorship,” says the Berlin-based legal expert Patrick Kroker, who works for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Should Assad be extradited and prosecuted one day, he says, the material will be useful for illuminating chains of command and determining where responsibility lies.
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In 2019, Caesar again traveled to Washington. The U.S. government didn’t send troops, but it did implement sanctions against Damascus. The law was called the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act.
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From that point on, Syria was largely isolated internationally. The country’s currency, the Syrian lira, plunged in value and ultimately, 80 percent of Syrians in the country were dependent on humanitarian aid.
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And the country’s suffering bore Caesar’s name.
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"That was not our intention,” says Uthman.
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A young girl with dark curls suddenly runs into the living room and snuggles up to her father. "My sunshine.” Uthman’s daughter has never seen her parents’ homeland.
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### The Word "Amnesty"
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In December 2024, things began moving quickly, with rebels from Hayan Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) first taking Hama, then Homs, and then, within just a few days, Damascus. In the night before Sunday, December 8, Assad fled the country. Euphoria was everywhere as people tore pictures of the dictator off the walls of offices and cafés and destroyed his statues. Mass graves in Syria were exhumed – after 54 years of dictatorship.
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The rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the country’s interim president, wrote on Telegram: "We will not hesitate to hold accountable the criminals, murderers, security and army officers involved in torturing the Syrian people.”
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But Caesar’s happiness about the end of the regime wouldn’t last long. Because in al-Sharaa’s first speech, the word "amnesty” made an appearance.
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The view over Damascus from Mt. Qasioun
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Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
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Rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the country’s interim president, in Damascus in January
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Foto: Syria's Transitional Government / AFP
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"What did we do all this for?” he demands during his brief presence in the living room in France, his voice trembling.
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He says he just recently received a call from Damascus from the man who had translated for him in the U.S. The man said he was in the process of showing journalists in Damascus where exactly Caesar had been active. "Hey, where exactly was the morgue where you took the photos?” he asked.
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"I want to say that I have never authorized anybody to speak in my name,” says Caesar angrily. "Write that!” They would be his final words before his sister Cinderella escorted him to the door. He would say nothing more on this day.
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His brother-in-law Uthman is now on the phone every day with human rights activists in Syria, Washington and Berlin. He says he has to get to Damascus as fast as he can to somehow prevent amnesty from being extended to Assad’s security forces.
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"But I’m stuck here!” His residency status is currently unclear. He is unable to travel back to the homeland he fled.
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Cinderella places a glass of tea in front of him and whispers soothingly into his ear.
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Assad has found refuge with his family in Moscow, under the protection of Vladimir Putin. From Syria, meanwhile, the first stories are emerging of brutal lynchings of former government supporters.
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It is not the kind of justice that Cinderella, Uthman and Caesar had been hoping for.
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*With reporting by Bushra Alzoubi*
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---
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