## Damascus Dossier: A Chilling Archive of Assad’s Brutality
One year after the fall of former Syrian president bashar Assad, a new leak shines a light on the brutality of assad’s rule and the lengths his regime took to catalog the bodies of those killed during his last decade in power.
The Damascus Dossier is an investigation based on a cache of more than 134,000 records obtained by German broadcaster NDR and shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 24 media partners. The leak contains the largest photographic archive of bodies of syrian detainees who died between 2015 and December 2024 – more than 10,200 bodies in 33,000 photographs.This is how ICIJ and its partners arrived at those figures.
The Syrian civil war began in 2011 following the arab Spring protests and ended on Dec. 8, 2024, when the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham militia toppled Assad’s government,leaving Assad and his top officials to flee to asylum in Russia. At least 160,000 Syrians where arrested and disappeared during those 13 years.
The chilling archive of photos, taken inside Assad’s system of incarceration, includes images of thousands of bodies, nearly all men and what appear to be a few teenage boys. A cross-border team of reporters and editors reviewed hundreds of these images and found that the bodies were mostly naked, emaciated and appeared to have been abused, lying on the floor, and sometimes covered in flies or fly droppings. Some appeared to have been starved to death; others likely died under torture. All died at the hands of Assad and his functionaries. The dead included at least one newborn.
Stripped of their dignity even in death, prisoners were also stripped of their names, reduced to a detainee number visible on white labels usually placed on their chests or foreheads.
As part of the investigation, members of the ICIJ technology and data teams received a dataset of folders containing photos. To assess how many people were among those photographed,the data team analyzed the folder structure,as each folder was organized by year,then month,then day and photographer. each directory within the dataset shared with ICIJ was named with arabic characters and numbers representing the detainee numbers assigned to each victim. Some folders were named with a single detainee number; some with several detainee numbers,and some had more than a dozen detainee numbers in a single folder name.
ICIJ’s data team mapped out the file paths from the dataset.Reporters separated out the year folders, then the months, then the folders containing the detainee photos. They then created a list of the long Arabic folder names and put them into a spreadsheet. Once the team translated the folder names to English,they included all those labeled “detainees,” or “detainee,” eventually arriving at the figure of more than 33,000 detainee photographs.
The data team then analyzed the photos and manually counted the detainee numbers in each folder name.That process allowed us to determine that the photographs in the leak contained more than 10,200 bodies, 70% of which were dated from 2015 to 2017.
This dataset was different from any other ICIJ has received in its 25-year history. The challenges were emotional as well as intellectual.
Such work has a cumulative effect. One member of the data team, having seen thousands, reached a point at which she could not bear to look at any more.
The images “burn themselves into your mind,” said Benedikt Strunz, an investigative reporter and editor at NDR. “Because you see things in them that shouldn’t really exist.”
Twelve journalists from ICIJ, NDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung agreed to examine and analyse a random sample
Syrian “Damascus Dossier” Reveals Evidence of torture and Killing in assad Regime Detention Centers
A cache of photographs and records, dubbed the “Damascus Dossier,” reveals harrowing evidence of systematic torture, starvation, and killing of detainees within the custody of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad‘s security forces. The investigation, conducted jointly by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the North German Broadcasting (NDR), the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), and Süddeutsche Zeitung, has uncovered details of widespread human rights abuses.
The investigation centers around thousands of images depicting the bodies of deceased detainees. Analysis of the images shows a disturbing pattern: approximately 75% of the bodies exhibited signs of severe starvation. Furthermore, roughly two-thirds displayed evidence of physical trauma, including bruises and lacerations, while over half showed injuries to the face, head, or neck – often resulting from blunt-force trauma, but also including cuts and stab wounds.
Crucially, the vast majority of the photographs included a white card bearing the detainee’s identification number and a clear indication of duty by Assad’s security forces.In some cases, identifying markings were directly inscribed on the bodies themselves, though the prisoners’ names were rarely included.
Efforts to Identify victims and Provide Answers to Families
Recognizing the importance of identifying the victims and providing closure to their families, the investigative team meticulously worked to extract names from the records. Through analysis of Arabic text within the photographs, alongside death records and arrest reports, journalists identified over 1,500 individuals – 454 confirmed deaths in detention and 1,099 arrests. This involved translating data from Arabic to English, with rigorous fact-checking by Arabic-speaking reporters from Süddeutsche Zeitung. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology was used to extract text from the white cards in the images, yielding 323 names.
The compiled lists of detainees have been shared with organizations dedicated to documenting Syrian human rights abuses and assisting victims’ families. These include the United Nations’ Autonomous Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, Ta’afi (an initiative providing resources to Syrian victims of detention and torture), and the syrian center for legal Studies and Research, a German NGO.
Ongoing Legal Efforts
the Syrian center for Legal studies and Research had independently obtained the photographs, as have German prosecutors who are actively pursuing cases against former members of the Assad regime for crimes against humanity. This suggests a growing international effort to hold those responsible for these atrocities accountable.
Sources:
* Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria
* Syrian Network for human Rights
* Ta’afi
* Syrian center for Legal Studies and Research
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