[Midden-Oosten] Syrian War Crimes Tribunals Around the Corner - Franklin Lamb

[Jeff]

[Of course, if they had been interested in prosecuting such war crimes 7 
years ago, then a half million deaths and 10 million displacements might 
have been avoided. - Jeff]


March 16, 2018
Syrian War Crimes Tribunals Around the Corner
by Franklin Lamb

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/16/syrian-war-crimes-tribunals-around-the-corner/

“No terrorist bodies; no evidence;
no evidence; no crime; no crime; no
Tribunals. Disappear terrorist bodies!”


At the site of one of more than two dozen Syrian government’s secret 
‘slaughterhouse’ prison body dump sites. This one in Najha, Syria, ten 
miles south of Damascus Syria and approximately 50 yards north of the 
burial site of East Ghouta’s conjoined twins Nawras & Mou’az Al-Hashash

One of Bashar al-Assads’s, Vladimir Putin’s and Iran’s “Supreme Leader” 
Ali Khameini’s growing problems is that an assortment of Syrian War 
Crimes Tribunals are finalizing their cases, sooner than many of us 
thought probable,  is the fact that millions of vetted documents 
gathered from countless sources within the Syrian government are being 
prepared for trial including several hundred Syrian and Iranian war 
crimes cases. Unlike many previous International War Crimes Tribunals 
once jurisdiction is passed to a body like the ICC or a Special 
International Tribunal for Syria (SITS), the approaching trials can 
proceed quite quickly because of all the preparatory work that has been 
done and there will not be the need for such  long case preparation lag 
time as in the past.

U.S. and European officials allege that Assad’s regime and its allies 
have committed war crimes on an industrial scale. They contend that 
rarely in the annals of international justice has the evidence of such 
actions been as voluminous.  These invaluable photographic and 
documental resources in addition to more than a dozen other current 
reliable professional forensic evidence gathering undertakings 
constitute a massive amount of probative evidence.

Once Syria’s Hobbesian nightmare of massive crimes against humanity 
dissipates somewhat, and the day of justice draws near, the prosecuting 
global community will have much more dispositive evidence to secure 
convictions than we’ve had anywhere or at any time since Nuremberg.

For reasons perhaps known only to Assad and his inner circle, hospital 
functionaries, working closely with Syrian intelligence agents, have 
been carefully documenting the regime’s handiwork, using a distinctive 
numbering scheme to track victims and keep records of the killings that 
contain fictitious death certificates.  The paper trail shows that Assad 
himself “reviewed the proposals [of the cell], signed them, and returned 
them for implementation,” according to the New Yorker, adding: 
“Sometimes he made revisions, crossing out directives and adding new 
ones.”

One regime investigator, Mr Salem Barak (assume name to protect his 
family in Syria) reported to investigators in Europe that he  was 
“certain that no security decision, no matter how small, was made 
without Assad’s approval.”

One group of highly experienced specialized international war crimes 
lawyers has already drafted a 400-hundred page legal-brief, which traces 
the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a 
written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad, coordinated among 
his security-intelligence agencies, and implemented by regime 
operatives, who reported on the success of their campaign to their 
superiors in Damascus. Acts of torture, murder, and detention under 
inhumane conditions in Syria have been widely reported by survivors but 
never linked to signed orders by Bashar al-Assad. Now they have been.
Many of these documents come from Syrian government security and 
intelligence facilities taken over by government defectors or anti-Assad 
groups. Other documents were stolen by others who worked as moles within 
Assad’s top security committee and secreted scores of thousands of 
documents out of Syria to investigators.

The most striking evidence concerns Assad’s response to the mass 
protests his rule that swept Syria from 2011 onwards. He appointed a 
“Central Crisis Management Cell” and gave the security chiefs on this 
committee supreme responsibility for suppressing the unrest.

Amnesty International, working on this case with a former government 
employee of the Al-Assad appointed “Central Management Crisis Cell.” The 
cell held daily meetings in Damascus, chaired by Mohammad Said 
Bekheitan, the second most senior member of the ruling Ba’ath party. The 
government employee reported that an average of 20 to 50 people were 
hanged each week at the Sednaya military prison north of Damascus. 
Between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed at Sednaya in a four-year 
period since a popular uprising descended into war. Today the number has 
been estimated to total more than 50,000.

In another “Crimes Documentation Center”, for two years, as Syria’s 
civil war became ever deadlier, one government employee, later using the 
code name, “Caesar” downloaded thousands of high-resolution photographs 
onto flash drives, he snuck into the empty office of his boss and took 
cell-phone pictures of the papers on the man’s desk. Among them were 
execution orders and directives to falsify death certificates and 
dispose of bodies. Armed with as much evidence as he could safely carry, 
the photographer fled Syria country for Europe.

The Syrian intelligence images that Caesar secreted out of Syria 
continue to be thoroughly studied by western specialists and 
intelligence agencies and judged to be indictable evidence of massive 
war crimes. The photos, most of them taken in Syrian military hospitals, 
show corpses photographed at close range—one at a time as well as in 
small groupings. Virtually all the tens of thousands of bodies show 
clear signs of torture: gouged eyes; mangled genitals; bruises and dried 
blood from beatings; acid and electric burns; emaciation; and marks from 
strangulation. “Caesar” took a number of these pictures, working with 
roughly a dozen other photographers assigned to the same military-police 
unit, at the Damascus area “Horror Hospitals” Tisreen, Messeh (“Hospital 
601”) where, in addition to three other Syrian hospitals this observer 
visited when searching for conjoined twins Nawras & Mou’az Al-Hashash in 
late summer 2016. Both “hospitals” seemed “normal” to me with friendly 
doctors, smiling nurses and busy arrival and departure hospital lobbies. 
I never gave of thought about what might be happening several floors 
down.

Some relevant key dates:

August 2013, Syrian police photographer “Caesar” presented clear 
evidence to the global community of the Syrian regimes war crimes. 
“Caesar” smuggled out more than 57,000 photographs, most of them taken 
in Syrian military hospitals Tisreen and Messeh (Hospital 601) among 
other locals. Both Mezzeh and Tishreen are run by Syria’s Military 
Medical Services. The authenticated photos show corpses photographed by 
“Caesar” and his colleagues at close range with all of the bodies show 
signing of torture: gouged eyes; mangled genitals; bruises and dried 
blood from beatings; acid and electric burns; emaciation; and marks from 
strangulation. “Caesar” worked with roughly a dozen other photographers 
assigned to the same military-police unit.

Mid-2015 and forward, more than 600,000 documents exposing crimes 
against humanity and war crimes by the government of Syria, some bearing 
the stamp and signature of Bashar al-Assad are smuggled out of Syria and 
transported to the Commission for International Justice and 
Accountability (CIJA) for analysis and trial preparation.

May of 2017. Based on US and EU monitoring of Sednaya prison north of 
Damascus, the Trump administration announced that the Al-Assad regime 
has set up many crematoria and is incinerating thousands of corpses in 
order to destroy evidence that could be used to prosecute war crimes.  
Some Syrian opposition supporters asked why, if the US had satellite 
pictures suggesting the existence of the Syrian crematoria why they were 
only now being made public. Others accused the Obama administration for 
sitting on the satellite images.

3/15/2018 and continuing and indeed intensifying, are Syrian, regional 
and international crimes against humanity evidence collection campaigns 
documenting in detail, often with consultation from specialized 
international criminal lawyers, the massive accelerating war crimes in 
Syria these past nearly eight years. This painstaking evidence gathering 
became a major secret project in late 1212. Today it is dramatically 
intensifying with the increased involvement of former and current 
government employees including Baath party officials, current 
high-ranking members of the military, security services, and reportedly 
includes members of the regimes inner circle.

8/24/2016). Death of conjoined twins Nawras & Mou’az Al-Hashash.

8/29/ 2016. Graveyard sleepover by this observer with the boys and the 
chance witnessing body dumping at the government military cemetery at 
Najha, 10 miles south of Damascus.

Dear reader may have seen earlier reports by this observer the past 
couple of years from Syria about the short life and homicide of East 
Ghouta conjoined twins, Nawras and Moaz Al-Hashash. Link:  Why Conjoined 
Syrian Twins Nawras and Mou’az Were Condemned to Death, September, 16, 
1916.

A few days after the boys death, I was allowed by the Syrian government 
to visit their gravesite and add a stone but no name. Next to the boy’s 
small concrete slab, the Meals for Syrian Refugee Children Lebanon 
(MSRCL) left the boys, their grieving family and the Syrian public a 
copy of the original one drawn by Syrian artist Akram Abo Alfoz.

Two plants placed by MSRCL on either side of the twins grave which this 
observer was honored to plant and water.

I personally failed the boys. Surely there was more this observer could 
have done to help save them. And as Syria’s civil war enters its 8th 
year, without any end in sight, another generation of Syrian children 
face ever-increasing ruin, with child deaths doubling last year and the 
number of child soldiers tripling since 2015. A new report by UNICEF 
found 2017 was the worst yet of the war for young Syrians, with more 
than 1,100 killed this past year that has taken a vastly 
disproportionate toll on the country’s most vulnerable people.

Near the end of my visit with the boys and sitting at their gravesite 
and telling them about Gulliver’s Travels, it began to get dark. A 
security guard approached and warned me that the area was not safe at 
night and that I should leave quickly. Only later was I to learn his 
real motive. After singing softly to the boys, “Twinkle Twinkle Little 
Star” which I like to think is their favorite song, I told them another 
story and planning to return to Damascus, I dozed off instead after a 
long day.

The time was approximately 3 a.m. on 9/14/2016 when I was awakened by 
the sound of a roaring dump truck entering the large field perhaps 50 
yards behind the boys grave site. (see photo below).  I had no idea what 
it was doing and tried to ignore the noise.  When it did not leave for 
about half an hour and I heard yelling, I carefully looked up and was 
shocked to see what looked like bodies being pulled from the truck and 
then dragged and thrown into a large freshly dug pit.  I wondered what 
that was about but then recalled having been told that the area of Najha 
was considered my locals as “the land of government cemeteries given the 
air force cemetery complex a few miles north including this one. When it 
started to get light, I spoke with the boys for a few minutes and headed 
back to Damascus.

The shown gentlemen below work at the burying site.  The open pit body 
dump from Senayda and other prisons is in the area above several hundred 
square meters behind the power line shown just North of Nawras and Moaz 
Al-Hashash’s gravesite.

At this point, I had heard gossip and rumors but I knew little of the 
regimes ‘horror hospitals”, “slaughterhouses” or crematoria but upon 
learning more I reported what I saw and was assured that the site would 
be monitored by UN specialized agencies to acquire evidence of war 
crimes and crime against humanity.  A week later I was informed that 
given the disclosure of events at the Najha cemetery that no bodies 
would likely be removed from or added to the site on orders from 
Soleimani or Al-Assad but if any were they would be photographed via 
satellites and drones and would be available for examination by the 
relevant UN agencies pursuant to criminal indictment and prosecution of 
all concerned.

CONCLUSION Mr. Solemani and those he instructs with respect to “no 
bodies, no evidence, equals no crimes” misses the point and methodology 
of forensic investigations. In addition of thousands of bodies, the 
governments will not be able to locate and “disappear” there are 
countless additional sources of proof of war crimes and crimes against 
humanity committed in Syria over the now past eight years.

Not least of which being literally hundreds of thousands of 
eye-witnesses including thousands from within the higher echelons of the 
Assad regime and increasing numbers of regime loyalists defect. Many are 
gathering probative, relevant, material and admissible evidence which is 
not a major problem and Soleimani’s instructions to ‘disappear” damaged 
terrorist bodies’ will not solve the Al-Assad regimes legal problems 
before the approaching Special Tribunal for Syria (STS).



Franklin Lamb volunteers with the Lebanon, France, and USA based Meals 
for Syrian Refugee Children Lebanon (MSRCL) which seeks to provide hot 
nutritional meals to Syrian and other refugee children in Lebanon. 
http://mealsforsyrianrefugeechildrenlebanon.com. He is reachable c/o 
fplamb op gmail.com.