‘Damascus dossier’ exposes Assad’s brutal state-run killing machine

A year on from the fall of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad’s government, details of his crimes are still emerging. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and 24 other international media outlets have spent eight months investigating a trove of Assad documents.

In 2011, populations across the Middle East and North Africa rebelled against their governments. The response was massive crackdowns. In some cases, like Libya and Syria, the result was civil war. Needless to say the US and others quickly moved to intervene, both overtly and secretly.

Syria’s Assad regime proved far more robust than most: surviving civil war, insurgency and US intervention for over a decade. Yet in 2024, Assad fled to Russia as his dynastic dictatorship seemed to fall almost overnight. The new government is led by former Al-Qaeda leaders brought in from the cold by the US. Despite their background, key figures were feted in Washington and London recently.

The so-called Damascus Dossier consists of 134,000 files, spanning:

more than three decades, from the mid-90s through to December 2024, and originate from Syria’s Air Force Intelligence, the General Intelligence Directorate and other security services.

The dossier states that:

These intelligence services faced wide-ranging sanctions in the United States and Europe for their brutality, which included torture and sexual violence.

And, the ICIJ describe the Assad regime as having:

one of the most brutal state-run killing systems of the 21st century.

And they’re not short of evidence. The regime photographed more than 10,000 of its victims brutalised bodies.

Assad operated a ‘state-run killing machine’

In a report titled ‘Assad’s Archive of Death‘, the ICIJ describe photo after photo of dead bodies. They often show signs of brutal torture. They even found the body of a newborn in a macabre gallery.

Some images show:

corpses stacked like firewood, stick-thin arms and legs askew, ribs, collarbones and shoulders jutting out from a heap of bones. Mouths agape and eyes ajar, their tortured bodies ready for disposal.

The ICIJ also discovered the purpose of the images. A former Syrian officer told them:

The photos were sent to military courts, where a judge would sign off on the deaths, essentially granting members of the Assad regime judicial immunity for their crimes.

He said:

There are things people need to know. There are people whose families need to know where they are and what happened to them.

A lost brother’s final breaths

The ICIJ report also details one family’s 13 year search for closure. Imad Saeed al-Najjar was one of three brothers who protested against – then physically fought – the regime. In 2012, he was snatched by security forces. He was never seen again. A death certificate from the dossier presented to his brother showed he died ten days after the raid on his parent’s house which captured him.

When the regime fell in 2024 Imad’s brother, Thaer, went to the infamous Sednaya jail. That period was marked by the families of the disappeared rushing to:

prisons, hospitals and mass grave sites; they rummaged through strewn paperwork and examined bodies in hospital morgues, hoping to find long-lost family members or, at least, a sense of closure about their fates.

The al-Najjar family now have a sense of what befell Imad al-Najjar. The ICIJ said:

Imad’s killing is one of over 10,000 documented in the files, which include photographs of victims and of death certificates.

UN paid Assad’s security agents $11mn

The dossier shows how the United Nations (UN) paid a security firm owned by Assad’s security forces. The security firm, named Shorouk, “was secretly owned by the intelligence services” of the president. Based in a Damascus shopping centre, documents show how the firm strategised to keep getting lucrative UN contracts. The ICIJ reported that the UN kept paying despite warnings:

Human Rights Watch and another NGO, the Syrian Legal Development Programme, warned the United Nations in 2022 about Shorouk’s multiple reported links to the Assad regime.

The United Nations responded that the contracts did not violate U.N. standards and continued to hire Shorouk for two more years.

The UN paid Shorouk for security, including for its offices at the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus. Other leaks demonstrate how the head of the security firm sent a check to an Assad state security agency for their share of the profits, and:

another memo described Shorouk as “owned and controlled” by the intelligence services.

The fall of a regime

The full horrors of Assad’s jails may never be known. And justice is likely to be partial. That the new leadership, endorsed by Washington DC, has former Al Qaeda members at its head is understandably disconcerting too. But the findings should chasten those – fringe though they were – who defended Assad as some sort of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero.

From the 90s into the early days of the War on Terror, Assad’s security forces tortured rendition victims for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). If the dossier is half accurate, when the Arab Spring swept through the Middle East in 2011, the same security state turned that expertise on its own people. And on a scale so massive and indiscriminate it is still difficult to fathom.

Featured image via the Canary