Douma Witness: "Tawfiq Diab"

 ...along with some others, and calls for a "fresh investigation"

December 29, 2024

last edits January 6, 2025

Doxxing "Mr. Diab"

Reports from "Free" Syria have been heralding a new alleged witness to and survivor of the Douma alleged chlorine attack of April 7, 2018. "Tawfiq Diab" claims that he lost a wife and 4 children in the attack. Most people including myself had never heard of him, but now, safe to say, he's the main witness everyone has to talk to, seeming to appear in reports more than all other alleged survivors combined. I found eight 13 appearances:

Perhaps most widely-seen is a BBC News report from December 11 - "'I want justice': Victims of Syria chemical attacks speak freely for first time" by Yogita Limaye, which gives the name "Tawfiq Diam" and the photo at right.

The Guardian, Bethan McKernan, December 14, gives "Tawfiq Diab, 79" - with video report

Arabic-language video interview for Asharq News, December 15: auto-translate gives "Toufiq Diab"

NPR audio interview with Leila Fadel, posted December 17 (transcript), gives "Toufic Diab (ph)" All cited quotes are (Through interpreter).

Al-Jazeera 1 Dec. 18 gives "Tawfiq Diam, 45"

Later, Al-Jazeera 2 Dec. 28 gives "Tawfiq Ali Diab." A middle name sneaks in?

Also Arabic-language videos I didn't take anything from yet: 12/16 New Arab - Al-Jazeera 12/17 (is that 3 Al-Jazeera appearances?)

Add 1/2: TRT word Dec. 31 "Tawfiq Ali Diab is the only one left of his family"

Islamchannel video with subtitles (similar to or same as some others)

Anadolu Agency 12/26 gives "Abu Ali" with enough details to match the guy, but with some different details

Caolan Robertson and Audrey McAlpine video report, Jan. 5 gives "Tawfiq"

I had a look and his account(s) include inconsistencies, both internal (between reports) and external (with the other evidence, including with other dubious claims). Al Jazeera 2: "Tawfiq still struggles to cope with the memories of that day." 

Two ages are given - 45 and 79 - and neither seems correct. He appears to be somewhere between these, maybe around 60. (note soon after: he might be saying he's 45, having been BORN in '79. That adds up and seems possible. A very gray 45) 

Diam is not a personal or family name I recall seeing anywhere, so I assume it's Diab, but strange that it came through as Diam twice (BBC, Al Jazeera 1). But even Diab does not appear as a family name for any publicly named Douma victims. The names he gives for his four killed children all appear, more-or-less, but with the last name Bakriyeh (see list below). 11 of 35 identified victims have this very rare name and others (wives, in-laws) are also related. As I noted here and also here, the family could be prisoners taken and killed by Jaish al-Islam over their relation to a rival military commander, Mohammed Diab Bakriyeh, founder of Douma Martyrs' Brigade. 

So that should be his family name, just not given here, perhaps for a good reason. But it was revealed by Michael Weiss on X:  "One victim mentioned in this BBC report on Assad’s Douma chemical attack is Tawfiq Ali Diab Bakriyeh..." This fits with the name issue noted above, and was published before "Mr. Diab" came out with another part of this name: Ali. This name suggests he may be a nephew of the commander, perhaps the son of an older brother named Ali Diab Bakriyeh. The girls previously noted as likely relating, from the middle name Diab, are Tawfiq's alleged daughters.

Weiss continued: Mr. Bakriyeh is "...a man Russia Today and its conspiracist allies in academia and the blogosphere were looking to dox, making him susceptible to regime retribution." This takes some space to consider here. He cites and links to a 2021 article he co-authored at the US-backed propaganda outfit "Newlines" gloating over how a sleazy "sting" by regime change activists snared an anti-war academic apparently trying to work with some kind of Russian agent. Someone at the CIJA ("Commission for International Justice and Accountability" - charged with fraud in the course of their fraudulent work) managed to catch Paul McKeigue, a colleague at the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, trying to get "Ivan" (the CIJA account) to dox and expose the witness - at least as Weiss et al. characterize it. 

This is not a story I ever learned of past published articles and Paul's public statement, after which he dropped out communication with me and, as far as I know, everyone in our network. He admits some fault for falling into a trap and accidentally doxxing some his own contacts to an enemy attacker. He doesn't think his making contact with a Russian agent would be wrong (and I can only be sure that it's a wrong look), and he doesn't seem to mention the alleged spying in discussion. 

As the Newlines article explained the story:

Stephen Mangan, a reporter for Ruptly, a Russian state media organ, shared with McKeigue personal details about Syrian eyewitnesses who attested, contra the Working Group’s conspiracy theory, that a chemical attack did indeed take place in the city of Douma in April 2018. Despite Mangan’s fulsome cooperation in providing McKeigue with what would otherwise be privileged aspects of a field reporter’s findings, McKeigue was so suspicious of the countervailing evidence that he instructed “Ivan” to spy on Mangan, too.

Stephen Mangan was the Senior Verification Editor at the RT-linked Ruptly. The doxxing of the witness was apparently by Mangan, with those leaked details. It's not clear if Paul or Piers had asked for this, or if they ever had anyone "spy" on or expose him further, but I suspect this allegation was totally invented by the CIJA camp in order to smear their opponents. 

Weiss shared a later e-mail from Paul to "Ivan" - presumably provided to Newlines by CIJA - relating Mangan's report on the witness. He and Piers "are skeptical of this," he wrote, asking "how could such a witness have been overlooked by all the journalists who have previously investigated this incident, yet Mangan's stringers met him by chance in the street?" The verification chief seemed to believe the witness' story, having "verified" it however, so "either he is very gullible or he is not what he appears to be," Paul surmised. "We suspect that Mangan is up to something. ... Our suspicion is that this is some kind of "provocation" (to use the Russian term) in which Mangan will announce that his investigation has found evidence confirming that there was a chemical attack in Douma, that Ruptly has suppressed the story and he has resigned from Ruptly to tell the world." He cites Liz Wahl and Sarah Firth as doing just this in 2014, and notes "our contacts at Sputnik tell us that they also have been targeted by infiltrators." 

I can see why Paul might be skeptical of the witness and perhaps the journalist. He was deep into understanding the managed massacre of captives that probably did occur, and here's another local talking about this physically impossible "attack." And here is a Russian media figure seeming to use that account to argue back against and lead Western academics - who were miles ahead of him regarding evidence and verification - to accept the opposition narrative. That seems pretty strange to me as well. 

I did a quick search. Ruptly's "Verification Unit" dates back to at least 2019. Mangan was "of Ruptly" if not heading that in a 2020 podcast discussing Deepfakes and Manipulated Media. He was investigating in Douma and contacted Piers Robinson, reportedly, in December, 2020. In February, 2021 there was a webinar on "fact-checking excellence" with VU chief Mangan and Ruptly head of news Laura Lucchini (on LinkedIn). There was this episode soon after in March, and then nothing later that I've found. And it seems this Ruptly report never came out. Was it suppressed? I didn't see anything about a resignation to confirm Paul's suspicion, but this continues to feel a bit strange.

At any rate, this is the witness referred to, speaking with Mangan in 2019, and ending up at the center of that episode. As far as I can tell, Mangan was the only one doxxing the witness then, and Weiss is the only one publicly doxxing the man's (supposed) full name now. Of course, everyone can "speak freely" now that the regime is gone, aside from perhaps sleeper cells or the like, and Al Qeada v2.0 is running the place, so presumably it's much safer now. Maybe Weiss can finally publish the e-mail(s) he had to keep secret for containing personal details like that. 

Forced to lie for years?

Tawfiq told Yogita Limaye for the BBC report "If I'd spoken out before, Bashar al-Assad's forces would have cut off my tongue. They would have slit my throat." Both of those, at least! Possible exaggeration aside, "We were not allowed to talk about it," he says. 

There's no mention there of the coerced lies he would mention a week later to NPR's Leila Fadel; they did want him talking about it, he now says. "Syrian intelligence forced [Tawfiq] to say that it was terrorists and gunmen who killed his family. I don't know where people got the story of a chemical attack, he would say. It's made up. ...  If he didn't confirm the state's lies, he would be taken, maybe worse, he says. Syrian state TV and Russian state TV came to interview him, and he'd repeat his rehearsed story." "They even showed me pictures of my children in the attack and asked if they were mine. And I would say, no, it's fake."  He says "officers" were present "telling us that you can't say anything." Else.

Al Jazeera 1: “They told us that they didn’t use chemical weapons, but it was the terrorists and armed groups who did,” Diam recalled, with resentment. The Guardian: “After I was awake I started asking questions but police came and told me ‘don’t ask about them’,” he said, referring to his killed family. “I was arrested and spent a week at the police station. They told me ‘we will cut off your tongue’ if you speak." Wrongly.

Anadolu: "Abu Ali said the regime forced him to deny the use of chemical weapons, making him claim in Russian and Syrian media that his family had died in bombings."

Robertson/McAlpine: he was visited by the Russian media, major generals of the SAA, and "local doctors" who were "always telling me what to say: that my kids just died "during the war" not by a chemical attack. ... I am supposed to say that the smell was from dust and the odors of war remnants and artillery shells."

So he says he was forced to say that there was no attack, that there was an attack but by the terrorists, and that the terrorists killed his family, but not in that attack. He says they even made him specify that some Douma attack victims - his actual children - were not his children (did somebody say they were?). He says he repeated these lies more than once, but I haven't seen or heard of any such footage or reports ever being published. 

In an Arabic-language video interview for Asharq News, December 15, he says for "all these years" "I haven't been able to say a word." At least, none that was true.

NPR: FADEL: It must have been hard to not be able to say - to have to lie for all that time.

FADEL: "Yes," he says. 

By this, you would never see Tawfiq claiming those gassed kids as his own, or claiming they died in any chemical attack that either didn't happen or was done by the terrorists. He knew the stakes. He "buried that dangerous memory," as NPR's Fadel put it.

Nonetheless, Tawfiq has spoken at least once to Ruptly, as discussed above, in perhaps the same single interview he mentioned to Al Jazeera: "Diam added that regime officials brought along a journalist from a Russian network who requested an interview about the chemical weapons attack. He said he told the journalist and security officers what they wanted to hear under duress." 

What "lies," if any, did he tell in this interview? If it's the Ruptly one, it sounds like he told much the same story he now does, but that's not entirely clear. He probably was not explicit on the manner of attack or government blame, or else this would probably be mentioned by Weiss, if not in Paul's e-mail to "Ivan." To the extent he did hold back, that could be genuine fear or a performance of fear. But as Paul said "this witness has identified his family among the victims" of the attack, something Tawfiq now says he was forbidden to do. 

If this is the same interview mentioned above, he claims this was all said under duress by the government, forcing him to say some of the things they had also threatened to kill him or cut out his tongue for saying. Yet it seems he never was killed or de-tongued for speaking up, leaving him free to now claim that he would have been harmed if he ever spoke the truth, and that's why he had "to lie for all that time." But the very fact this guy was supposedly targeted - over suspicions upon hearing his story - is a reminder that he has, in fact, spoken up with about the same, dubious story he tells today. This raises doubts about his credibility and thus about all his different stories.  

Family / name / list issues 

(Optional section - in short, the names he gives or similar appear on lists of the dead, but half the time it's just similar. This could reflect bad research or memory on the witness' part or sloppy list-making by others - unclear)

 

No children with the family name Diab appear in published victim lists, but the 4 names Tawfiq give seem to match up - with some variable issues - with 4 entries sharing the family name Bakriyeh (listed below). As mentioned above, his full name is supposedly Tawfiq Ali Diab Bakriyeh, and he just left half of that off in these interviews. for whatever reason. Further, a man named Tawfiq should have kids with that as their patronym (middle name). According to some lists, just one of the claimed 4 does (Mohammed Tawfiq Bakriyeh), but according to other lists none do. The 2 girls tend to have Diab as their middle name - as if their father was Diab, not Tawfiq. A possible namesake son Ali (named after his grandfather) is usually given no middle name, From the list I made at the time based on the Douma-based VDC:

Mohammad Tawfeq Bakriyeh - Adult - Male [sic]

Jouri Diab Bakriyeh - Child - Female

Qamar Diab Bakriyeh - Adult - Female [sic]

Ali Bakriyeh - Adult - Male [sic] (Douma victim analysis masterlist)

Here's another where Ali also has no middle name, the girls also have Diab, and Mohammed again has Tawfik: SNHR "The Unprecedented”.pdf. I also saw a list where all 4 have Diab as a middle name, and some lists don't give any of them middle names. Ages: BBC heard they were aged between 8 and 12. NPR heard the youngest, Jouri, was in the first grade.

It's not clear how accurate any of these lists really is, but this variation could indicate a story problem. It could be Tawfiq - or a perhaps a real but deceased Tawfiq currently being portrayed by an actor - is the father of Mohamed only, or of none of them. 

NPR's Fadel was shown "Pictures of his Hali (ph = Ali), Hamar (ph = Qamar), Muhammed (ph) and Judy (ph = Joury) as babies, as toddlers, as little kids. In one, Muhammed is smiling with a fake mustache on just like his dad's. In another, his kids pose just outside the building where they were eventually killed." After Assad's fall, Tawfiq says "I put their pictures up" on Facebook, "and I wrote the martyrs of the chemical attack" now that he can speak freely. I didn't yet find this Facebook posting or try to match these to any seen victims.

A week earlier, but perhaps after that Facebook posting of "pictures" he only had one picture of the kids: BBC 12/11: "Not a day goes by when I don't think of my children," Tawfiq says pulling out the only photo he has of them, his eyes welling up with tears." It's the 4 kids outside a building. A week later, he had a bunch of photos, maybe with others helping after they saw the news story. That could be. Or maybe this was just the one he had on his phone at the time.

AJ2 says "his five children died," followed by "Tawfiq still struggles to cope with the memories" and his repeated showing of just 4 kids in photos. Had he forgotten one? Perhaps the youngest one, who was still a baby? Could be just a translation issue. Will see if that can be sorted out.

The Guardian report at least mentions the name of "his wife, Hanan." No Hanan is listed among the dead anywhere I've seen, but there's a Hanadi Bakriyeh - Adult - Female. Noting later: he says Hanadi in the video. The text report just got it wrong, among several other things. For his wife to have the same name as him would be unusual for Muslims. Was that already her name, were they Christians, or what? Perhaps the listing just got it wrong.

Fadel's report for NPR also mentioned 3 brothers: The subject Toufic/Tawfiq and "Rifat" (phonetic) - who both lived in this building with their wives and kids - and Mej (ph = Majd?), who lived nearby and rushed over to help. Mej "tried to shake their other brother awake. Rifat's (ph) bare skin would peel away at his touch. By day's end, Rifat and his whole family were dead..." There is no "Rifat" listed on any victim list, The closest is probably Rateb Bakriyeh, with at least one apparent child, Muhammad Rateb Bakriyeh. Maybe the list got it wrong, or the reporter, or the alleged survivor Tawfiq.

Add 1/1/25: I forgot to watch the Guardian video or follow up on the brother's family. Tawfiq says his brother Rateb Bakriyeh (not Rifat) and his brother's wife Insaf (listed: Insaf al-Hallaq) died, along with their 5 children (Haytham, Mohammad, Hadeel, Rahaf, and baby Jouri - all listed). NPR heard Jouri was just 40 days old. These 7 plus his own wife and 4 kids = all 11 named Bakriyeh plus one wife named Hallaq = 12 Bakriyeh deaths. He claims to be the sole survivor of this possibly targeted family, speaking for all the rest, and swearing they were sitting at home until Assad dropped gas on them.  

He shows a photo labeled Haitham (هيثم) with that nephew, seemingly aged around 15, holding baby Joury in a dark, sparse room somewhere, with a weak or sad smile. Both may be wearing exactly the clothes they would die in - a possible sign of captivity. Victim B2 as I dubbed him has a consistent age and face, and wears the same style JAKMAN shirt and perhaps the same trousers. But all the victim's clothing and perhaps hair seem lighter brown hair than in the image, where it all seems black. These could show the same boy and outfit, if the phone image is color-shifted and over-contrasted, and/or if this is from bleaching, which seems at least partly to be the case. Baby Joury is probably infant I2 (noting all white jumper and apparent hood, both of which I1 lacks). 

Rahaf was already identified somewhere as G8, pink striped sweater (visible here on the left). I cannot yet match the other 2 or any of Tawfiq's children.

Add 1/6: One source I saw (?) said Tawfiq had re-married with new children, and he's seen in a highly-decorated home with 3 children in some videos, all aged about 6 and under. But this point remains unclear. To the Guardian he says "I was able to continue with my life with the rest of the people who are here," failing to mention marrying any of them. The NPR report (no visual) says "Toufic is in his brother Mej's (ph) home just above the family tire shop" as he spoke. 

Revising the burial spot? 

This new central witness seemingly revised, in-between interviews, his story on his family's burial spot. The BBC report from December 11 includes this:

"Khalid and Tawfiq took us to a mound by the side of a road, a short drive away. They believe this is where the regime took their family's bodies and buried them in a mass grave. Looking down on the ground, amid gravel, mud and stones, pieces of bones are visible, although it's not possible to tell if they are human remains." 

The spot is shown in a photo with Tawfiq and another alleged survivor, Khaled Nusseir, at a barren lot next to some kind of park, captioned "the victims could have been buried in a mass grave." Tawfiq says he knew this spot where his family was likely buried and looked towards it tearfully at times, but he never visited it until now because the regime "would have executed me." The report notes "Tawfiq wants the graves to be dug up, so he can give his family a dignified funeral."

This spot was previously reported as the opposition's secret burial site (Kobs geolocation - f/c). Mr. Nusseir himself said it was near the zoo, and the government soon reported a terrorist mass grave was discovered just south of Jalaa park, next to the Douma zoo. Large-scale digging was done just south of there around March, 2018. Then the opposition SNHR mapped this spot as where the regime dug up the bodies - all back in 2018 (me on X). 

Michael Kobs on X questions this site's relevance, noting little change between satellite views, and that's worth considering. But I wonder how different it would look after bodies were added and then removed again, I still see a likely body-moving truck added to the site, maybe ready to remove any more bodies they found, and I remain impressed with how sources on both sides pointed to this spot with strange digging. Why dig in advance, back in March? The government offensive was well along by then and Jaish al-Islam's grip on Douma seemed doomed. They expected deaths, maybe of some hostages they didn't want to release, and this spot was likely prepared for that purpose.

Either way, most sources in and outside Douma have agreed for years this is where the bodies were until the government took them away. Yet in December 2024, Tawfiq and maybe Khaled still think - or pretend to think - the bodies are still buried here. "Tawfiq wants the graves to be dug up." But just a week after tearfully highlighting this spot, it seems he changed his mind and said the government took the bodies away, and now he doesn't know where they went. "FADEL: He doesn't even know where his family's buried. He says the bodies were taken by the regime." In fact, by the 14th, the Guardian (video) report heard "to this day, he is still not even sure where their bodies were taken by regime forces."

"Taken by the regime" can be read as from the attack site, whereas everybody knows it was the White Helmets who took the bodies away on April 8, well before Syrian forces controlled the area. And many people including me have known for years where they were reportedly buried and later exhumed. But more logically, he refers to the same removal from that mass grave everyone else already knew about; he finally got on board with what everybody else has been saying for years. 

But why the delay? Did he just learn about the body removal in between interviews, or what? Maybe he didn't get out much. But was Khaled Nusseir, who joined them on this trip, also just out of the loop all these years? Some kind of error by the reporter also seems possible, but it seems like a hard error to make. This looks like a serious discrepancy, but one so big it barely makes sense and fairly well begs another answer. 

Add 1/6: As Caolan Robertson and Audrey McAlpine wrapped up their interview, Tawfiq wanted to show them something remote. He drives there on a motorcycle as they follow in the hazy dusk. At the site the narrator says "this is known as slaughter street, the site of the mass graves where his family are buried" (present tense). A promo post with the photo at right said "He is pointing at the grave where they were buried, in secret, by the regime." He's pointing down into the trench where it doesn't seem that any digging occurred (but did it? this trench was formed at the same time of burial - between March 26 and April 13). The video report has Tawfiq saying "After the regime entered Douma, they dug up the bodies and took them to an abandoned building and burned them with diesel. I wish I was with my family. I wish I wasn't alive." It's not clear how he learned these details and no more, and it's unclear if he says they were re-buried here afterwards "in secret" or if, as said elsewhere, he has no idea where they were taken.

Other Issues

5 or "5 or 6" men survived? 

In 2018, as I noted, alleged survivor Khaled Nusseir said exactly five people from his basement survived. Diab is one we never clearly heard from, and he's more fuzzy on the number: "Just five or six men in this compound survived," he says in the BBC report, presumably including himself now. "Even I almost died. I was in hospital for 10 days," he also said. Maybe no one noticed him surviving, being taken to a hospital, recovering 10 days later and then, as he says, staying a week at the police station. I don't suppose that's the explanation, but his story seems to leave room for it. 

Attack details / Inside-outside issues 

Tawfiq is clear in reporting an aerial and thus government chemical attack as others do: "The chemical barrel came from up there, and it left a hole. The chemicals leaked into the building." (NPR) Guardian video: they were home at 7:05 pm when the attack happened. (Add 1/2: In this video, he says "I smelled the smell. It was 7:03.") This is some 1/2 hour before the accepted attack. Maybe it was just a last noted time before the attack?   

NPR: "That night, Toufic says, he heard booms. He and his family rushed to the basement for shelter, like they always did when strikes and fighting between the regime and rebels intensified, thinking it would be safer. But once they noticed the strong smell of chlorine and disinfectant, they tried to get outside." Note they knew to go up and/or to fresher air once the heavier-than-air gas sank into the basement. Everybody in Douma reportedly knew this, and it's just why people braved the gas to go back inside and sometimes even up to the 2nd floor.

BBC: "Tawfiq said his family was just outside his ground floor home when the bombs hit. "I heard an explosion and people shouted on the streets 'chemicals, chemicals'. I came running out. There was a foul smell." So just he was hiding in the basement while the rest were gathered outside for some reason? Note: there wouldn't be an "explosion," just a heavy thud followed by a minutes-long gas release.   

To Al-Jazeera 2, he says there was a "powerful explosion" when the cylinder hit, and then he heard neighbors out in the street shouting "chemical!" "I rushed out, saw yellow smoke in the air (gesturing a rising, expanding plume of the heavier-than-air gas rising from something, as it also sank into the house). Then, maybe since he saw it rising, "I immediately took my family to the basement," contrary to common sense, widely known protocol, and his other accounts. Same report: "Tawfiq still struggles to cope with the memories of that day." 

Islamchannel; "my children died on the stairs. Some people died outside at the basement's door.

they thought that I had died." He also says people call him Abu Ali (next entry). 

Anadolu: "Abu Ali, a resident who lost his wife and four children in the 2018 attack" and they're named "Omer, 12; Ali, 11; Muhammed, 10; and Cudi, 8." To Anadolu, he said "the family had been sheltering in a basement but “I had stepped out to get food for my family. As I returned, I saw people dying at the shelter's entrance. Then I lost consciousness.”

So it's quite unclear in what order and why he and the others went to and escaped the basement, or if he was even there, but after this... BBC: "I saw yellow foam coming out of people's mouths. My children were not able to breathe, they were choking. I saw people lying in the street," he says. Guardian video: "I crawled here." NPR: "FADEL: So he just pointed to the road right in front of the building, and he said, all - I laid here. All of the bodies were right here and in the entryway of this building." 

They were out in the street, foaming and passing out on the street, he too passes out and lays there, all out there and also just inside - mostly inside, actually, and a bit up on the 2nd floor, but either way ... not carried all that far from the truck, as I see it, before they abandoned the operation with one body still on the stretcher. But he uses different words to over-explain this scene.

No water to wash with?

"Diab" told NPR "Right before [the attack], an explosive barrel was dropped in this neighborhood, so the - all the water tanks were broken, so we couldn't even wash with water." Islamchannel: "some went into the open apartments to wash but there was no water." He claimed to rush outside first thing before passing out there. When did he ever try a sink or see anyone else trying? 

Other reports are explicit on the victims successfully washing their faces and hair at every available sink, faucet, or basin on the ground floor and second floor, and doing nothing else before they keeled over and died (apparently, people in Free Syria think washing your skin with water helps your lungs stop melting, and I guess that's why they say regime cut off the water). Their deaths or immobilization seemed so sudden to the OPCW that the victims weren't even covering their faces yet - the first thing most would do in less than a second - or turning to escape the gas ("The victims do not appear to have been in the midst of attempting self-extrication or respiratory protection when they collapsed, indicating a very rapid or instant onset."). But they did allegedly manage to wash their faces and hair before they fell. Hm...

Images from 2-3 hours after the "attack" show many victims with faces recently washed, hair still wet, with damp rags nearby. It seems they were washed by someone - with ample water - less than an hour before, or well after the victims had died, perhaps trying to wash the soot off of some or to scrub off the worsening yellow-brown stains. (see the mysterious washing of faces and hair and below). It's possible someone brought in water to do this, for whatever reasons, but the stories of people washing at the sinks and Tawfiq's story of no water cannot both be true (and I don't think either is). 

Yellow foam 

"...I saw yellow foam coming out of people's mouths. My children were not able to breathe, they were choking. I saw people lying in the street," he says. Asharq news auto-translate renders yellow foam as "butter," something I've seen happen before. This sounds like something that appears instantly on exposure when real-world pulmonary edema usually takes hours to form, and probably no less than 30 minutes. Also this foam is unusually yellow, later shifting to brown. See next entry.  

Skin issues

NPR: "Rifat's (ph) bare skin would peel away at his touch." This is a strange thing to say. Neither chlorine nor sarin nor whatever was actually used usually causes skin to peel away, and I don't think I've seen that on any bodies, nor do I have an offhand guess what he might be talking about. 

Side-note: The Guardian's report also heard from Abdulhadi Sariel, 64, from across the street, with a weird description of the dead: “No one in that basement came out alive. Their bodies turned to black, their clothes went green and were burnt, they crumbled and stuck to their bodies. The clothes looked like wood,” he said. nothing like what we actually see, and I don't even have a guess what he's referring to.

The victims do have unusual skin issues attesting to a horrible death: irritation and often a worsening yellow-then-brown discoloration on the upper face, which I've never seen before and seems like a special clue to how they died. Their edema foam is also unusually yellow, then brown later on. (see Douma's mask of death part 1) Why that effect in the mucous and in the skin effect there? Why are their eyes universally free of redness that chlorine exposure usually causes? (Tawfiq says in this video "my eyes turned red" though he wouldn't see his own eyes, no one else had the slightest redness. Robertson/McAlpine: "I was in intensive care. They put on oxygen mask and my eye was [swollen] and my [cheek] also they were red like this." ) 

And why does the skin effect have exclusions around their eyes in the shape of swimming goggles? I propose an answer here; they didn't die from sarin or chlorine exposure but from something - perhaps as simple as diesel exhaust - that produces nitric acid on contact with water. Unlike chlorine's hydrochloric acid, nitric acid is known to cause yellow-then-brown discoloration in skin and other body proteins (like in mucous). 

Like chlorine, this gas/smoke was probably not paralytic, so someone hanging around long enough to breath a fatal amount could mean they were trapped or tied down. In fact, my best explanation for all signs is that the victims were bound upside-down at the time of exposure, and bizarrely fitted with swimming goggles (or similar), as the pattern of skin effect suggests. Even not going that far, some top toxicologists, consulted and then ignored by the OPCW investigation, agreed a simple irritant would not very well explain victims dropping in place, even in piles, when there was an available exit so close by.  They almost have to have been trapped or bound for some time, and there is no room for this other death at all in Tawfiq's story of an attack on his home, or in the many similar stories lodged by others. And a story with no room for the relevant facts is not a trustworthy story.

A sarin myth supporter 

The original explanation for so many dropping dead from a simple irritant was that sarin was also used. This never made much sense, and of course no sarin traces were found, so we've been left with this mystery. But Tawfiq helps revive the original explanation.

BBC: "There was a foul smell. ..." A "foul" and also "strange" smell - a bit like rotting flesh but not quite like anything they've ever smelled - is exactly how people most often describe the highly impure sarin used in Syria. Chlorine has a distinct "clean" smell most people recognize - "bleach and disinfectants" - and that few would describe as "foul." I don't suspect he actually smelled the nerve agent, but it's interesting that he uses this word, as if he knows a few things about the stuff. Does he want us to believe he smelled sarin? 

The sarin claims Tawfiq perpetuates - perhaps unwittingly - also came with reports of over 100 dead. It's unclear how he would know the full death toll or where all these other people died, but "Tawfiq says there were more than 100 dead."  It's a belief shared with sheikhs Abu Omar Burkush & Abu Azzoun, highly sectarian Sunni activists allied with Jaish al-Islam. Both men were insiders for this and the 2013 Ghouta chemical massacre of, I suspect, captives in some sort of gas chambers. They would say in 2019 that exactly 187 were killed, seen by them and counted down in "the bunkers," whereas neither man is seen in any video from the supposed crime scene. They also mentioned secondary contamination chlorine doesn't cause, suggesting sarin was used after all. 

Add 1/2: TRT also spoke with Basel Oyoun who said "we buried 130 people" killed in this attack, and the narrator was left saying: "what compound was used is still not clear." 

Imprisonment? A Militant? 

Anadolu: "He also said he was imprisoned for 18 months in various detention centers, adding that he was tortured for six years by a regime-affiliated officer who sought to suppress the truth about the chemical attack." The 6-year torture should be mostly in-home, after release.

Add 1/6: Robertson/McAlpine: "I was held and brutally tortured in many interrogation branches. In Harasta prison the 10th wing I was held for 8 months, getting tortured. The prison warden told me if you ever spoke about it, the next time you'll be sent to Sednaya."

NPR cited a "family tire shop," Islamchannel called him "a car mechanic," he has deeply dirty hands at all times, and is repeatedly seen with or riding a motorcycle. It could be he is a motorcycle mechanic, and previously worked for Jaish al-Islam, and maybe general agent or part-time fighter, perhaps involved in the chemical massacre, and arrested on those grounds? As noted, the victims may have died from prolonged exposure to diesel exhaust (probably the most common source for the nitric acid that seemingly killed them). Could a mechanic like him help rig this up? He also says their bodies were burned later, with diesel fuel. Why does the mechanic know that?

He sounds like a serious supporter of the new government, anyway: Guardian: "we waited for God's justice and God bestowed mercy on us and the liberation army and their leader Ahmed al-Sharaa may Allah support him" Robertson/McAlpine: "May the God take revenge from Iran and Russia. Those were helping the regime, killing our children and our families."

Tawfiq in summary, some others, calls for investigation

Summarizing the accounts of Tawfiq Ali Diab Bakriyeh: he claims that he was forbidden to speak of the chemical attack or how it killed his children, and forced to tell contrary stories. But this clashes with his prior telling, to a rather strange Ruptly reporter, how his wife and children were killed in the chemical attack. The details remain unclear, and he likely did avoid explicit blame - either in fear or in a performance of fear. But this raises questions about his reliability. 

The slow-revealing of his name and giving two incorrect ages are both unusual. The names of his claimed children, wife, and brother are given differently than previously listed, but it's not clear what this means. He seems to revise his family's burial spot, in between interviews, from current to former, as if just learning the bodies were reportedly exhumed and moved, as even I knew 6 years ago. 

There's a strange variance in attack details, with "powerful explosion" sounds that shouldn't happen, a sinking gas they smelled vs. a rising gas he saw, and whether they left or entered the basement upon learning it was a chemical attack. Like many others, he reports sudden foam and unconsciousness chlorine does not cause in reality. He claims there was no water when he probably wouldn't know and there apparently was, and everyone else says there was. Finally, two points of possible adherence to the original sarin claims ("foul smell," over 100 killed) raise the possibility that he's promoting that  narrative previously maintained by Islamist insiders. 

I wouldn't say this is the shadiest witness I've seen, but it's also not a great record. Based on these qualifications as a supposedly genuine survivor, NPR's Fadel saw fit to pass on Tawfiq's deep desire for a new investigation, apparently to improve on the OPCW's existing probes by blaming Assad even more clearly. "We want an investigation," Tawfiq said. "We want them to come and investigate. We want the rights of our children, our rights as well." To him, this means "Everybody who was involved [should] get prosecuted."

The BBC report crowed how witnesses can "speak freely for the first time" now that the Assad regime is gone; under the new, Al-Qaeda-spawned government, political pressure on witnesses and terroristic threats can be totally ruled out. This story featured three witnesses including Tawfiq, all seemingly locals who just happened by. Tawfiq was not speaking for the first time and, as far as I can tell, had already told much the same story back in 2021. 

Another was a well-known alleged witness from 2018:  Khalid Nusseir (here Naseer)  "Khalid Naseer says his baby daughter Nour, his two-year-old son Omar, and his pregnant wife Fatima were also killed in the 2018 chlorine attack." (error note: earlier he said 2 daughters died, Nour and Qamar, not a son and a daughter. Qamar can sound like Omar, and might be presumed a "son".) Previously, Khaled said he said he smelled a strange gas, but drank some water and all was fine, failing to mention anyone dying, yet still pointedly disagreeing with a crowd of other witnesses that there was not even a strange gas. He also said in a different setting that his wife, 9-months pregnant, and his two infant girls all died in the attack, which he blamed on the just-defeated Jaish al-Islam. Amid a string of accusations against them and the White Helmets, Khaled speculated that the cylinder didn't seem dropped from the sky but set there by hand and opened. (others said much the same, but this doesn't match the evidence of manual placement of the cylinder AND the bodies).  (see "the witnesses who don't blame Assad"). He says he found his 2 girls in the basement 10+ hours after he passed out at a clinic, then carried them to the hospital, while 2 girls in a photo match - for almost the exact clothing - with 2 girls removed early (but from the first floor, not the basement - see here). I don't think any of his story is true, but he seems to have accurate inside information about body removal, and he was the first to say the bodies were buried near the zoo.

Now that he can "speak freely," this highly unreliable alleged witness blames the just-defeated side again. But this time, we can definitely trust him? He says "The whole world knows Bashar al-Assad is an oppressor and a liar, and that he killed his own people" and "We want fresh investigations into the attack" because "He says the testimony given by many to the OPCW fact-finding mission in 2019 was not reliable." 

"Abdul Rahman Hijazi, one of the eyewitnesses who testified before the mission," also happened by and spoke to BBC, saying "he was forced to give the regime's version of events." ... "They told me to say that people were killed because of dust inhalation not chemicals." He claims he was threatened with death to do this, but then he and his family "were shunned by the community for years after he gave the testimony. He found it tough to get a job. ... Now he also wants a fresh investigation." So Hijazi previously denied an attack, perhaps just due to the political situation and threats that came with it, but in the new situation under Salafist rule, with its own crimes to conceal and myths to perpetuate, seeking community acceptance and improved job prospects, we're to assume his word can finally be trusted as free from coercion or influence. 

Some had reported smelling no gas where they were, or speculating that people had died from smoke and dust. Several claim they were compelled to say this, and it seems entirely possible, if stupid. But a government-enforced denial of an attack doesn't prove there was an attack - they could just see it as suppressing misinformation and they could be right. These accounts were never as relevant as some think, and were pretty well overruled by the investigators with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as they pointed to government guilt for the attack. 

Most of the news reports I've cited unquestioningly point to the reports of the OPCW, ignoring revelations that key findings, notably in the areas of ballistics and toxicology, were censored and altered to achieve the ridiculous final product. NPR: "Assad's government denied ever using chemical weapons. And its ally Russia said the Douma attack was "staged"." The OPCW's own engineering sub-team also concluded the gas cylinder impacts were probably staged manually ("there is a high probability that both cylinders were placed ... manually rather than dropped from an aircraft.") This is what Khaled said, and anyone can see this for themselves in the available images. But this was "corrected" in the end, overruled and replaced, and now this obvious fact is presented as nothing but Russian disinformation. 

The same kind of distorted product has followed prior alleged CW attacks in Syria, in my assessment, elevating, diminishing, or ignoring evidence seemingly based on whatever helps to blame the targeted government. But never before Douma were there whistleblowers and leaks to show us there was more real science involved, perhaps in all these cases, but it was being suppressed. Is this why someone decided Douma in particular needs a new probe? Is there some stupid way to re-investigate everything now to blame Assad even more clearly, and pretend even harder that the science agrees with the implausible, contradictory and propagandistic accounts of alleged survivors, militant occupiers and their allied "civil defense"? How are all these chance-encounter witnesses getting this same memo and calling for a "fresh investigation"?   

We do indeed need a new investigation, for this and other alleged chemical attacks, that can truly follow the science instead of the regime-change agendas of certain state sponsors. According to the last best word of that science, a genuine crime against Humanity transpired in Douma on April 7, 2018; the mass murder of perhaps 187 kidnapped civilians, using toxic chemicals under circumstances a great many labor to obscure. 

But the investigation these guys want would, I fear, even better absolve the true criminals. It would "verify" again that Assad's chlorine barrel bombs punched through or not-quite-through 2 roofs, one of them bouncing onto a bed and the other spraying explosive fragments before stopping outside the hole it made, and this time with zero dissent. It would find that all the unexplained signs and symptoms are due to sarin mixed with the chlorine after all; the prior science to the contrary just needs re-written. It would accept new samples loaded with fresh sarin and assume most traces at the time were vanished from the whole environment by Syria and/or Russia. And such a probe would also seek to raise the death toll, I predict, to 187 or probably even higher, based on verbal claims and maybe shocking new "discoveries."

This probe would hold officials of the old regime fully to account for what they were found to have done, maybe along with all the Alawites, and would advocate punishments for Russia, or Iran or whatever other enemies they want to implicate. But it would never pursue punishment at all for Assad's grave violations of the laws of physics. In fact, these offenses seem to be encouraged and necessary for the regime-change machine.  

The only parts that would need done differently: there can be no contradictory ("unreliable") witnesses who might be coached (by the wrong side). There can be no honest engineering study or toxicology assessment to erase and replace halfway through the process; vague approvals of the told stories will be sought the first time around. Finally, this time they need to completely stop any whistleblowers from revealing the true process. The OPCW will need less ethical employees and/or tighter controls. 

Or maybe this is how the OPCW's demise begins. Considered untrustworthy due to allowing leaks in the past, the organization will be deemed unfit to handle the urgent re-investigation of Douma. Perhaps a new body will be floated to handle that and other such things in the future, and these alleged witnesses were sent out to set the stage for this.

Assad's Top Crimes in Review...

...now that the likely perpetrators are suddenly in charge of all Syria's people.

December 13, 2024

(rough, incomplete)

last updates 12/15

Thoughts on the Fall of the Syrian Arab Republic

As all readers are probably aware, in recent days the longtime government of the Syrian Arab Republic has rather suddenly collapsed, allowing Idlib Islamists to somehow take every major city up to and including Damascus. Genocidal terrorists linked to Al Qaeda - supposedly reformed - now run the country. The axis of resistance to Israel has been broken, leaving Lebanon isolated as Palestine is being erased with the Gaza genocide and incoming president Trump's implied promise to let Israel annex the West Bank, besides Gaza. (He did take the money - Haaretz.com) To boot, many Palestine supporters are now distracted with celebrations and/or joining with Israel again to hate on Assad and cheer the fall of one of the staunchest state supporters of their cause.

I'm not at all happy with these developments. From 2012 to 2018 I made some quite serious (volunteer and self-directed) study of events in Syria. As I'll explain below, this work left me what many call an "Assadist." I was highly sympathetic with the government of Bashar al-Assad as it came under a foreign-backed dirty war using terrorist proxies staging false-flag massacres. The government didn't fall then, but Syria was severely injured, losing hundreds of thousands of people, and was left more carved-up than ever before; Idlib province was occupied by Al-Qaeda offshoot Hayyat Tahrir al-Sham (fka Jabhat al-Nusra) and run under strict sharia law - Syria's oil and wheat fields were occupied by the United States, on the notion that giving local Kurds autonomy from Syria while stealing Syria's oil and wheat was the only way to "stop ISIS" - the US under Trump illegally recognized Syria's illegal occupation of Syria's Golan Heights; it was Israel's sovereign territory according to the then-and-now boss of the world. 

Finally, the US congress imposed crippling economic sanctions on Syria in the name of "protecting civilians" there by preventing the country from rebuilding until the Assad government was deposed. Once Al Qaeda is in charge, ok, you can rebuild and have your lives back. Well, not quite the same lives, but ...

It was all fine to most people, considering how insanely evil the Assad regime was, butchering whole families, gassing villages and more in a desperate bid to crush or kill all the country's Sunni Muslim majority, starting with the most innocent. But this preposterous alleged plan would achieve nothing but sowing seeds of revenge, fueling the Sunni extremist insurgency. And as far as I can tell, opposition militants seem to have provided their own fuel here, in probably every single atrocious instance. 

Consider an incident from the Douma-Harasta area (unclear exactly) in August 2012 (All details here: https://acloserlookonsyria.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Douma_Hostage_Massacre) A Musab bin Omar Battalion, part of a Capitol Shield Brigade (app. Muslim Brotherhood connected, allied with Liwa/Jaish al-Islam at least) had 16 men captured after an "attack on one of the centers of Shabiha and the gangs of Assad" and perhaps also a police station. Here are the notorious killers waiting an unspecified justice, giving their names and ranks on prompt. 

They won't be allowed to signal to their families or reveal their location or any secrets they've witnessed, but I can almost see #5 Hassan Ismail saying with his pose "look at this distinctive Coca-Cola shirt they gave me. Remember it." These are all supposedly military men, captured on-base and presumably in uniform. If so, it's unclear why someone went to hassle of re-dressing them all in these distinctive civilian clothes. Seriously, why? 

Well, some grisly activist videos (since deleted) posted soon thereafter showed - by clothing and other matches - at least 6 of these same men (those w/red Xs above), dead with throats cut, on video as 16 (revised to just 12) local civilians kidnapped - in their civilian clothes there - and killed BY "Assad's forces." Assad's gangs would have to pay for this crime, would hopefully be captured alive, killed and rebranded like this, revenged again, and so on. 

I start with this example because it's basically undeniable. The story was given credence even in a few mainstream media outlets (Tracey Shelton in Salon), and cannot really be challenged except with nonsense like this "trial by word salad." Credit for the original find on this story goes to German OSINT sleuth "Ursula Behr" who caught it right off in 2012, and had Syrian media pick it up from her. More an "Assadist" than I could ever be, she would later travel to Syria as she was dying of cancer, had her paintings put on display, and then passed away. She was buried in Syria at her request, and now she's still there even after Assad has left.

They actually did this kind of shit, and I think it was done widely all during the Dirty War. In fact, it can be essentially proven like this in a great many cases. The vilest acts may have all been done not by the government (actually elected, FWIW) that had to live in and govern Syria, but in a false-flag manner by the foreign-backed, takfiri terrorists; they were always the agents of chaos, working on this multinational program to break down, carve up, and consume Syria, as seems to be happening now. 

This seems like a rather evil but likely a winning strategy, if allowed to play out very long. The government had to give up on Douma by October, 2012; it was "liberated" like all of Syria now is, with Liwa al-Islam left in general control. That "liberation" and this particular Capitol Shield Brigade ended long ago after fighting half the world tried to complicate. But as far as I know, some of these same guys kept rolling with different groups to this day, and now help govern all of Syria and all of its people.  

I'll try to catch up some on the details of the fall, what transpired, how things evolve from here, and on emerging "proofs" of "Al-Assad's brutal rule" that are now being "discovered." (A Closer Look On Syria has been keeping some track, so I'll be starting there) I'm still open to the idea some of it might even be true, but I'll have to compare to the reality-based picture I have so far, which the reader can start to form from reading or just skimming this post.

There's been widespread celebration of the "new Syria" because, compared to the well-known crimes of the Assad regime, especially since the rebellion began in the "Arab Spring" of 2011, almost anything is seen as better. An endless river of accusation was almost universally accepted by hostile, Western governments, by other openly hostile forces, and even by ostensibly neutral and trustworthy agencies like human rights groups and bodies of the United Nations, the mass media and the general public (with some leading and some just led). Nonetheless, the best evidence suggests these agencies, the public and everyone got the story wrong, sometimes on purpose.

Here I'll try for a brief overview of several classes of alleged crimes of the "Assad regime":

* shooting protesters

* torturing and killing kids

* sectarian massacres

* bombardment massacres

* chemical attacks

* prisoner abuse and extermination

Each section is illustrated with select details from select cases, almost off the top of my head but with some needed review. I give a few links to scattered work, mainly at this blog. (at the links are piles of text often summarizing other piles), with hundreds of individual, primary citations I'm not going to recreate here. I'm not just "citing myself" with these links, just sticking to the stuff I can vouch for and locate easily. 

The cited work was done collaborating with others who bring their own expertise and knowledge in open-source research. We consider all available evidence, emphasizing the best primary source evidence (the visual record, the accounts of witnesses, especially ones conforming with and not contradictions the visual record, direct documentation of related government orders, etc.) not just to poke holes in the official narrative, but to discover, as possible, what actually did happen, we map out events in time and space, parse available reports and read between the lines for what isn't said, what doesn't make sense, etc. with often astonishing results, even as they're often incomplete, over-filled and under-edited. 

There are a lot of the great work by others out there (a few cited here), but the quality of the core information is mixed, and I didn't want to go digging. And I never personally absorbed all the brilliance at ACLOS and in comments here, and by now I've grown rusty on much of what I did. So this won't be adequate, but maybe close enough to be of some help. Some adds and improvements are likely.

why bother?

Why bother now that there's no sitting "Assad regime" to defend, or to cut me an imaginary paycheck, just a new government to raise the alarm about? I guess it's for the latter reason. We should probably be aware if evil and lies have won on such a grand scale in Syria, even if the new government doesn't start exterminating all the Alawites or mass-executing all loyalists of the deposed regime. Is it possible HTS have changed and wind up being cool, allowing open elections and so on? Even sticking up for the Palestinians? If there's a next time, a next country, maybe this kind of outcome should be avoided? Is there any way of fighting this, turning back the new status quo, maybe with mass civil disobedience by the betrayed Syrian people that ISN'T met with mass head-chopping, to topple this terrorist regime ASAP? 

I don't know. What do we do with this information now? It's just what I have and where we are. And still, it seems to me, too few people know these stories.

So FWIW, here's a review of what - as far as I can tell - happened last time, what all this unfinished business truly was and remains. I present a very dark vision of events no one needs to accept in full, but this is how I see what Syrian officials described in a top-secret document as "circumstances we are better off without." This is the hell Syrians won't want to go through again. This may be why some people there might agree to a quick surrender, as may have just happened, when faced with a new and maybe final round of the Dirty War.

More reading (Optional) in some external articles, here at Monitor on Massacre Marketing (cited as "Monitor" below), at the wiki I helped start A Closer Look On Syria (ACLOS) - and in some work with the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda, and Media (WGSPM) alongside Dr. Piers Robinson and other professional-level academic types (because I am one?), besides co-founding a now-defunct Citizen's Investigation Into War Crimes in Libya (and Syria, Ukraine, and Beyond) (CIWCL-SUB) with Petri Krohn, and some valuable informal collaborations, especially with Michael Kobs. Relevant posts at this blog: Syria Masterlist, last updated 2017:  I may update this, but other than quite a bit on the 2018 Douma chemical attack, I didn't add very much, so that plus Douma masterlist (and, since that's not complete either, tagged posts) could keep you reading almost forever. 

More than reading, (which is often a chore, sorry), this stuff should be saved in several places by people who care. I do and oversee brilliant work that's worth preserving, but I sometimes lose it and, in the current climate, it could even be made illegal or otherwise made to vanish. So things you can do with the info presented and linked below: read, skim, copy, paste, save, read other stuff & compare, double-check, improve, re-publish, add your own thoughts and your own magic.

Running Under it All: the "Assad Files"

I'll start with the "Assad Files" - some million pages of top-secret government documents seized by militants all across Syria. Not all of it is relevant, but the files are said by their curators to provide the best case for war crimes since Nuremberg. I had a pretty obsessive look at all the actual documents that were publicized - presumably selected as good examples - besides what people were saying about them. A good lot of rambling consideration, with links to original sources and quite a few interesting direct quotes: Assad Files masterlist - tagged posts.  

My strong impression is that these files are genuine and provide an accurate view of government response to a crisis gripping their country. However, as far as I've seen, the Assad Files reveal no clearly criminal orders, despite the public branding, and certainly nothing close support for the kind of atrocities widely alleged. A 2019 post considers a large sample of files (3,470 relevant pages) examined by SJAC ("Syrian Justice and Accountability Center") that apparently revealed no seriously criminal orders, and none has emerged anywhere else I've seen. This actually suggests, but far from proves, that no such orders were ever issued by Syrian authorities, probably because all of the most heinous crimes of the Dirty War were committed by the foreign-backed opposition militants.

As such, it will be interesting to compare these files with the documents likely to be "discovered" by the new government all across Syria and provided as proof of all the alleged crimes the real "Assad Files" somehow never mentioned. 

I penned one external article at 21st Century Wire: "Revolution Unraveled: ‘Assad Files’ Now an Achilles’ Heel for War Crimes Narrative" to explain how the "linchpin" of the case against Assad lodged by the CIJA ("Committee for International Justice and Accountability") was a seized document outlining a new "Crisis Management Cell" in August, 2011. The purpose of this was said to be targetting “protest organizers” and “those who tarnish the image of Syria in foreign media” for arrest, apparently just on those grounds, with no mention of what they planned to do about all the armed militants. However, a full copy of the document was shown to El Pais, and it revealed the real targets were actually those “wanted for the crimes of vandalism, killing, and assault on citizens and their properties and the government institutions,” as happened on a grand scale in Hama just a few days earlier. 

Among those violent people, they wanted “especially those” who were also involved in inciting or funding “demonstrations.” But as another document in the El País video shows, they were concerned with a type of "demonstrations" that involved “funding and armaments” whose origin they were curious about. I checked and there seems to be a real translation issue here. They don't use the usual word for protests: المظاهرات (almuzaharat) but rather التظاهرات (altazahurat) which Google Translate also turns to "demonstration" but with alternates readings: feint, simulation, pretense, or just "events" (from the base article here). I guess it's just a term the Syrian military used for this special kind of event, involving a "pretense" at protest along with real guns, that might have no single accurate translation. But we can see a few examples in the next section to get an idea.

An SJAC study of the files found document discussing Syrian troops detaining "family members to encourage suspects to turn themselves in." This is a pretty serious offense, but no details are given aside from this being one of several actions "soldiers were to cease" after deciding to do them, apparently, on their own. So there was no order found to kidnap innocent people, just the admission that it has happened, and the order to stop doing it.  Monitor on Massacre Marketing: A Clearer View on the "Assad Files" 

The Assad Files were used in the Marie Colvin case in 2019 to show command and control, who would be in charge of her killing, if the government had ordered it as alleged. There was no evidence that happened actually found anywhere in the files, suggesting it never happened, but some defector claims he witnessed the orders coming from the top and that was taken as good enough to consult the files for "who was at the top." (Monitor)

This all the CIJA and their ilk can do - show papers referring to officers and arrests and prisoners, then insert stories they were told, found no support for, and used anyway. As often as possible, they also cut to the visual proof of the "Casear photos." It's only the words of Caesar, other defectors and possibly unreliable witnesses that really link the photos and documents to alleged regime crimes. The documents themselves seem to provide little aside from black-and-white fluff to rest these dubious claims upon. More illustrations of this can be found below, as the Assad files come up by subject. The photos certainly add some terrible color. We'll consider these below, as the final topic.

2011: Shooting Protesters  

From March 2011 breathless reports spread far & wide claimed Assad's forces, Hezbollah, or others were shooting and killing peaceful protesters, as well as police, and regular citizens. Others report seeing shooting from the protester side, from rooftops and minarets, etc. as the government claimed. The top secret "Assad files" revealing the regime's orders should help clear this up.

A post half-done in 2021, and simply posted like that just the other day, looked at a publicized overview of several documents published by "Center for Justice and Accountability" (CJA and yes, that's a third cited group covering these files with "Justice and Accountability" in their name). As it happens, they found no orders to shoot and kill protesters, only reiterations not to shoot except in self-defense against armed gangs. 

An April 20, 2011 document referred to "Multi-faceted confrontation of demonstrators, saboteurs of security and vandals" - is that the full definition of "demonstrations"? Instructions on dealing with them include "Counter with weapons those who carry weapons against the state, while ensuring that civilians are not harmed." (v3 p104) Maybe that was code for "you know, do the opposite." August 19, 2011: "Ensure that no drop of blood is shed when confronting and dispersing peaceful demonstrations." (19/08/11 v1 p163) "Ensure that all elements hide their personal weapons, do not show it and do not shoot under any circumstances, except in extreme cases of self-defense. Make sure they use reason, wisdom, prudence and absorb and deal with the sedition in a way that preserves the prestige of the state. (30/03/11) Or maybe they meant "squander the prestige of the state on mindless killings, especially of the national majority group."

Sniper shootings of protesters, widely blamed on secret regime and Hezbollah elements, are acknowledged, with orders to stop and apprehend any of these snipers, if possible. In Hama, they reported May 6, 2011 "An unidentified sniper[sniped] on the rooftop of Mounekh mosque and another on the rooftop of a house off Umar Ibn Khattab Mosque shot demonstrators, killing one and injuring 43." (06/05/11 v3 p233) 04/05/11 Branch: Deir ez-Zor: "Our elements will keep on covering of our branch sector and will spread on the roofs of the building to stop the saboteurs from shooting the protestors. We are keen on tracking down those who incite others to demonstrate and carry out acts of rioting." v2 p95

When shooting deaths following a clash in Izraa on April 22, 2011, started by "an infiltrated entity" firing on security forces but with civilians somehow also killed, it was described as "a difficult day ... pushing us into circumstances we are better off without. If the directives previously issued had been adhered to we would have prevented bloodshed, and matters would not have come to this culmination." Indeed, 2 days earlier, they reminded everyone "ensuiring that civilians are not harmed" was a top priority. Recommended actions now included "Focusing on arresting inciters, especially those shooting at demonstrators (snipers or infiltrators)" and that "a sniper, inciter or infiltrator be presented to the public in a manner that convinced them, and earns their trust."

In June, 2011, some 120 Syrian soldiers were killed in Jisr al-Shughour, reportedly by their commanding officers and/or their Hezbollah bosses, when they refused to shoot at some peaceful Sunni protesters. (ACLOS). But it's also said they were killed, after their ammunition ran out and they became incapable of shooting, by a Turkish-backed local unit of a Free Officer's Movement (precursor to the FSA) that fled back to Turkey afterwards. In fact, the group's commander Hussein Harmoush bragged there of beheading all the Alawite soldiers to his (Alawite) Turkish MIT handler Önder Sığırcıkoğlu, who was so disgusted he had Harmoush smuggled back to Syria to appear on state TV and presumably face execution. For this act of treason against the Turkish state,  Sığırcıkoğlu was publicly tried and imprisoned, then broken out by some capable admirers, and remained in hiding last I heard. (see here) So yeah ... the proto-FSA butchered those soldiers, not commanding officers, Hezbollah, or any other Shi'ite boogeymen. 

Assad Files: did the regime forces order protesters killed or massacre their own? No mention of such an order or event. Behind closed doors, they only say the same thing they told world, to widespread yawns; foreign-backed terrorists were butchering their boys, besides massively lying about it. At Jisr al Shughour, they said in secret, a first mass grave with 12 soldiers was found, "killed by the armed gangs after their ammunition ran out ... their bodies had been desecrated and their heads and limbs cut off." 

That was June, 2011, not 3 months into the "peaceful" uprising, just as army defectors like Harmoush were moving to finally "offer the protesters some protection." It went downhill from there as the FSA then Jabhat al-Nusra and others, then ISIS swelled, partly on the back of sectarian lies like those about the Jisr al-Shughour Massacre of dissenting soldiers. 

2011: Torturing and Killing Kids

Assad files: SJAC's sample of 3,470 pages includes reference to 6 children detained (presumably all teenagers, but ages not given). Two were taken in for insulting Assad, and one for being in a protest - arrests we could well question - while the other 3 teenagers (b. 1997-1999) were arrested in 2014 for more militant crimes (training to shoot, joining in attacks, filming attacks, suspicious surveillance of pro-government civilians, etc.). There was no mention of any of them being tortured or killed in custody or of any remotely related order. 

There's also reference to one boy killed in Deir Ezzour, not in custody but in clashes, quite likely after his training as an opposition child soldier was not interrupted early, as with those other 3. Maybe some of these bemoaned arrests wound up saving the detainee's life. 

Back on April 29, 2011, dozens of men and 3 boys (age 12, 15, 17) were allegedly detained from a mobile protest near Saida, Hama, after security forces opened fire on them for no reason. Some 50 were reported killed in a "Saida massacre," some on that day and others allegedly killed under torture in regime detention. 12-year-old Hamza Al-Khatib is the most famous of these, with a detailed story of how he was held and tortured for nearly a month, beaten and shackled, bizarrely bloated up with fluids and finally castrated before he was shot dead. The government, in contrast, claimed Hamza's body was found after the shooting on 4/29, somehow left naked and unidentified, and was held in refrigeration ever since. 

report: lost then found but needing reposted - overview post here: https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2016/04/re-considering-hamza-al-khatib-and.html

Hamza's body was released to his family on May 25, having allegedly been killed that same day. But what some call bruises and torture-related bloating on his body are clearly signs of decay, probably equating to a month in refrigeration, like the government said. Several other late-released bodies show the same kind of decay, starting with a green spot on the belly and spreading to darken the whole body in the latest case. This all suggests the "Saida massacre" was a one-day event that remains quite murky. Whatever happened to Hamza's penis (unclear/disputed) was probably done before the government found the body. Other bodies show various signs of torture as well; 15-year-old Thamer had a mangled face as if hit with a claw hammer, before he even went in the fridge and had his belly slowly shift yellow-green and his wounds black. He was also reportedly "bludgeoned" in the genitals (Amnesty). An older man, Mahmoud al-Zoubi, was found to have died from a heart attack resulting from "torture," also prior to his appearing naked after the shooting. His face would also appear as one of the earliest entries in the "Caesar photos" of unidentified bodies (see below) - perhaps a telling inclusion (Monitor).

2012: Sectarian Massacres

From the beginning, more heavily in 2012, and rarely after that, Syrian forces were accused of grisly massacres of civilians along sectarian lines, in literally hundreds of cases, each killing a few to over 100 civilians. With Syrian military support, as the story tended to go, Alawite "Shabiha" death squads would murder entire Sunni Muslim families based on religion alone. 

Assad Files: no orders to carry out such massacre has ever been mentioned. Instead, they say things like "We should not turn any of our fellow citizens into enemies" because, as put elsewhere, "We are all in the same boat," a boat called Syria.  https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-clearer-view-on-assad-files.html

SJAC found nothing about sectarian tensions in the files except, I presume, many orders to avoid it, which SJAC ignored, and one hybrid case where a government policy led to deadly tensions until another policy corrected that trend they considered negative.Security forces had decided to use knowledgeable, largely Alawite locals to identify people (mainly Sunni) for arrest, leading to revenge kidnappings and maybe counter-kidnappings until "reciprocal sectarian kidnappings and killings peaked in Homs" in a crisis the government wanted resolved. So they decided "The use of civilians at some checkpoints to openly select targets" was to be banned. Authorities were urged instead to "use covert security methods that do not incite hatred and tension among the citizens." 

So, again, even in secret, Syrian officials can only be seen working to lessen tensions and minimize the chance for strife, which other parties were working to instill in Syria in those days. "Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the Grave" was a popular chant at anti-Assad rallies in these days. 

But somewhere even more secret, they must have decided to make most Syrians their enemies and to try and kill them all, in barbaric and shocking way when possible, judging by the widely-accepted narrative of, for example, the infamous Houla Massacre of May 25, 2012. ACLOS page linking to a number of detailed sub-pages. I had 2 PDF reports posted to my old CIWCL page that I let expire - with CE's helps, now reposted at ACLOS: 

* Official Truth, Real Truth, and Impunity (2013) 

* The Battle for The Houla Massacre (2014)

Alleged: 108 Sunnis killed at random, including a few opposition fighters but mainly whole families of civilians, including 49 children. (However, a list made from other lists correlated has 9 opposition fighters killed besides 112 civilians, including 64 children.) They were killed, as reported, by army shelling and home invasion massacres by Alawite "Shabiha," in the "liberated" and 100% Sunni "town" of Al-Houla, after the small FSA force had fled, hoping their absence could ease the shelling. Instead, they say, the FSA absence allowed another Shabiha massacre, by Alawite butchers recruited from nearby villages. 

In fact, the massacre happened in Taldou, the last part of the Houla region still secured by the government as of May 25, when reinforced local Islamists attacked and took or circumvented at least some - and probably all - the town's security posts, killing several soldiers. Despite their efforts to conceal this truth, careful analysis of the opposition-supplied videos shows rebels taking over on that day, engaging in clashes inside the once-secured area. Security scene map:

The water co. post (lower right, on a hill overlooking the town) was never overrun, but attacked, pinned-down and circumvented. Best evidence has all other security posts taken: UN investigation even agrees on the roundabout post ("overrun," allowing potential terrorist access to the bulk of victims on Saad rd.) and MIHQ ("likely overrun), in their likely pre-planned offensive that day. The investigators didn't seem to care the arches post was just a truck that wouldn't stop anyone for long, and didn't notice that the national hospital seems to be on fire and belching smoke by sunset, when it was reportedly overrun along with the army post there, and then set on fire. Army snipers at the hospital were the UN's main basis for ruling out a rebel massacre on Saad Road - the snipers would've stopped that. But those guys were likely killed, so ... yeah. And there was a massacre there by someone just then.   

The massacre happened in these newly liberated areas, on Saad road and Main Street, immediately after the liberation. The witnesses who correctly describe "the battle for the Houla Massacre" say the victors killed - in a very targeted way - Sunnis who converted to Shi'ism (Abdulrazaq families, the bulk of those killed) and Sunnis who supported the government (2 families named Al-Sayed). The family butchers came in after the FSA, these witnesses said, like their upside-down version of "Shabiha," wearing black, and suspected of being with Al Qaeda (Jabhat al-Nusra was either unformed or little-known at the time). Children had their heads sliced open, their jaws torn off, and more. 

An "Alawite family Shomaliya" also reported killed in the Houla massacre was apparently a confused reference to a next-day massacre in the not-so-close Alawite village al-Shumariyeh. Syrian state TV did show some grisly scenes of at least one family executed in their living room, presumably in that village. Shumariyeh Massacre - A Closer Look On Syria

So many I've looked into, I'm skipping a lot. Just to give an idea of the scale, my post on Homs Massacres, 2011-2013 has numerous shady stories compiled, with no summary here, just from Syria's #3 city Homs. https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2015/06/syria-homs-massacres.html

Al-Bayda and Baniyas massacres of Sunnis, May 2013: With the later, massive and grisly Banyas massacre being far murkier, I've focused on the all-Sunni village of Al-Bayda, where there's also more information to work with (the opposition seemingly wanted us to focus on this one and let it shape our idea of Baniyas, which happened in a district of the Sunni-majority city that's unusually mixed = possible massacre of Alawites or other minorities). Some 70+ civilians were killed on May 2 in Al-Bayda just for being Sunni, following a "Shabiha" raid in response to a fatal rebel attack on other "Shabiha" in the pre-dawn hours. 

Or, as some videos might show, the killing happened hours before that raid, in the same pre-dawn dark when local Islamists were killing security forces in the town. So who was killing local civilians at that same time? Most or perhaps all of those killed were relatives of a Sunni imam - sheikh Omar Biassi - who happened to be a prominent supporter of the government and a critic of the armed rebellion. (36 victims shared his name, and many others come from intermarried families). Rebels said one of his female relatives who was pregnant was sliced open by the "Shabiha" and her fetus was separately executed. It sounds far-fetched, like the false claims leveled by some Israelis against Hamas fighters, but they did show a photo of an executed, underdeveloped fetus. And one of their pre-dawn videos shows several executed women and children opposition people had discovered, including a seemingly pregnant woman but fully clothed and apparently not yet butchered. Is that the same woman? If so, who sliced her belly open after rebels had access to her body? https://acloserlookonsyria.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Al-Bayda_Massacre

Somehow the opposition's Al-Bayda massacre story remains widely accepted, even though the victim targeting raised a few eyebrows (as it failed to do with Houla & others), and even though this sectarian Shabiha massacre narrative was already falling apart and out of fashion by then. People realized that opposition Islamist fighters could -potentially - carry out massacres like these, using guns and blades close up, and somehow, that idea actually took root. At the end of 2012 and early 2013, three massacres blamed on Assad were met with skepticism even from opposition activist and mainstream Western media. 

UK Channel 4, ITV News and BBC News actually spoke with local witnesses, besides hearing phoned-in activist reports, for the massacre of perhaps over 200 Alawites in Aqrab on December 10 and of ~100 Sunnis in Haswiyeh in January. The locals blamed rebels, Al-Nusra Front specifically, and it was not laughed off. Supporting evidence appears in each video report. In between these, a reported massacre in Ma'an around December 25 was pre-questioned by the opposition SOHR, who had worried publicly the Islamist rebels about to seize the Alawite village Ma'an might commit a massacre there. They did take Ma'an and claimed to just find 23 people killed, they say all of the local Sunni minority killed and left behind by retreating Shabiha, but left charred and unrecognizable, with some beheaded. I suspect that those were either Alawites or Sunnis killed for happily living alongside Alawites. Aqrab Massacre - A Closer Look On Syria - Haswiyeh Massacre - A Closer Look On Syria - Maan Massacre - A Closer Look On Syria

After all this growing skepticism regarding these family-slaughtering massacres that could have been by the genocidal terrorists known to be stalking Syria, Assad allegedly decided to start massacring Sunnis in less confusing methods that only his military could manage - missiles and barrel bombs from jets and helicopters rebels lacked, scud missiles that rebels had only seized a few of, and then chemical weapons they presumably couldn't have.

Bombardment Massacres

Just 2 quick examples of cases that didn't turn out so good, not that anyone much noticed or cared:

Khalidiya, Homs, Feb. 2012: some 200 locals killed, with a core of 138 from regime shelling that flattened homes, killing entire families of men, women and children, leading president Obama and others to call for Assad to step down. Other locals reported the victims seen on video were their relatives, including Christians, who were kidnapped by the terrorists enjoying free reign in Homs after the army was compelled to withdraw; the terrorists killed them by "dynamiting" or perhaps shelling a place they were held. Opposition sources said differently, but listed the core 138 victims, the families killed in shelling, as 100% male and nearly all adult by Islamist standards (age 13+). These aren't families. The segregated male hostages, it seems, were in the place someone blew up to get Assad in trouble while killing some religious enemies of the Sunni extremist insurgents. (ACLOS)

Douma market attack, 2015: some 112 civilians were reportedly killed at the open market in a regime jet attack, punishing them for their undying support for the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam. However, all 4 "jet strikes" look like artillery strikes from the south, and all fit in a perfect arc wrapping around a spot 800m to the south. As for the punishment part ... the locals had protested Jaysh al-Islam, compelling them to leave the area, maybe to the south. At least 100 of the 112 or so reported victims were listed as adult males, video analysis reveals at least some of them were killed before the alleged jet attack even occurred, and at least 95 of them went unclaimed and were interred in a mass grave. All this suggests the bulk of victims were, again, controlled and gender-segregated prisoners, executed on demand to flesh out yet another alleged regime crime. http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2015/08/douma-market-attack-masterlist.html

2013-2018: Chemical Attacks

Assad also turned, allegedly, to chemical weapons the rebels supposedly didn't or couldn't have, at least not in the reported quantities ... or so people hoped, assumed, and insisted. He still tried to blame the rebels, but it didn't work very well, and so Bashar al-Assad stands accused of all these incidents considered below and more, some of them killing his own soldiers. There's far too much found, by myself and others I work with, to cover here even in passing, so a fast and partial review is in order. 

The Assad Files of course reveal no orders related to the use chemical weapons. One passage taken as a coded hint was a mention, on February 8, 2012, We received information stating that the Libyan terrorists have acquired chemical weapons from the Libyan chemical arsenal. The weapons will be shipped to Turkish territories to be used later in some Syrian governorates, especially the ones that are facing unrest. This will be done in order to accuse the regime, in coordination with biased television channels, of using the chemical weapons, in order to escalate the Syrian crisis and internationalize it after all the failed attempts to move the Syrian crisis dossier to the Security Council. File:Assad Files 2-2-2012.jpg - A Closer Look On Syria

Some early, vague allegations of regime CW use in Baba Amr, Homs, followed on or by February 21. (Monitor)  Otherwise, there were no such incidents until late 2012. Obama's red line threat/offer stated that if Assad used, or seems to have used chemical weapons, the US might decide to intervene militarily to aid the opposition. I missed it when he first said this on August 20, 2012, and it didn't seem to spark anything at the time. But when he repeated it on December 3, I noticed, and started watching for the false claims or false-flag attacks he had just invited. 

Three days later, on Dec. 6, the first reports came in, as I noted at ACLOS - vague reports of regime gas use in Daraya, with no details and no clear word on casualties. The first reported deaths were on December 22 - seven soldiers in the Syrian army who had cornered some terrorists in that same Daraya. Details are sparse, but the gas was reportedly yellow, just like the sarin used in all the attacks to follow. (ACLOS)

On March 19, 2013, Syrian troops and civilians in the reclaimed Shi'ite village of Khan al-Assal, Aleppo, were affected by a chemical attack reported to use sarin (yellow, reported by some as chlorine), killing some 20 people, including a treating physician. (Monitor) Syria demanded a probe, which was stalled for 5 months  by Western governments, adding invasive demands and other alleged attacks by the government,  (Monitor) before UN-OPCW investigators ("inspectors") finally arrived in Syria on August 18, ready to analyze that terrorist sarin attack. 

But before they could leave Damascus, in the early hours of August 21, a massive chemical attack happened nearby, in Eastern and Western Ghouta, killing hundreds of civilians (reportedly 1,429, and by visuals it was at least 400, probably 500+ and perhaps as many as claimed). It's reported that over 400 of the dead were children. This deadliest chemical attack since Halabja obviously distracted the investigators from the planned probe of Khan al-Assal attack. Instead, investigators visited both Moadamiya (next to Daraya, in W. Ghouta) and Zamalka / Ain Tarma in E. Ghouta, inspected 5 impact points, collected many samples, interviewed supposed witnesses, and took biological samples, all under guard of local Islamist forces, and sometimes under fire from mysterious snipers.

Skipping some interesting anomalies in what was found, the UN and/or OPCW somehow used a single and grossly wrong rocket bearing from E. Ghouta (where there were reportedly 12 impacts), paired with an untested reading from W. Ghouta, in their initial report. Combined with ignorance of the weapons' effective range, these incorrect bearings allowed many (Human Rights Watch for one) to point to a Syrian military base, falsely implicating the Syrian military within a few weeks. Later work I was involved in (overview post with links to 2 reports, our discussion with Aaron Mate on Push Back) explains that error and correctly reads more than 7 rocket impacts for trajectories, finding that they intersect 2km out in a small area in Jobar that includes a field matching the one seen a video of Islamist fighters launching the same kind of rockets (3 firings seen) in what would be the same directions, on what they say is August 21 (and it's dark), and this field seems to have new, consistent scorching by a satellite view taken 2 days later. So, strange as it sounds, that video seems to depict the Ghouta attack, by apparent Islamists, in a spot the Syrian military could hardly access. 

I found 2 more sites later, but with no clear direction clues. It's pretty clear the 12 rockets reported were all fired then. The 3 sites the UN-OPCW visited in E. Ghouta all tested sarin. Most likely but not surely, 12 sarin rockets impacted, almost surely killing a good number of people, even in this semi-rural and war-depopulated area. However, as the late Denis O'Brien (PhD, neuropharmacology) explained, first in an open letter to congress and then in an e-book Murder in the SunMorgue, the hundreds of seen victims overwhelmingly fail to display the signs expected for sarin fatalities (like cyanosis and the SLUDGE syndrome). This remains a bit subjective, but suggests a different toxin was used. I have also noticed the clinical signs varied from one location to the next, which is also subjective but would indicate different toxins (plural) were used in different areas. 

Could it be, like the bombardment massacres mentioned above, that controlled prisoners were killed for this event? 

There were some 200 women and children taken captive a few weeks earlier in rural Latakia, after their men over 13 were openly executed by fighters in a grand Islamist coalition involving Jabhat al-Nusra and literal ISIS, among others. The victims of the Ghouta massacre were not culled from among these, as many have claimed. That would mean they were gassed in or near Latakia, whereas a few batches totaling over 300 bodies have been geolocated to certain spots in E. Ghouta. (Monitor). Still, I collected some signs that the victims were prisoners, includes how, as O'Brien noted, one gassing survivor in Kafr Batna was finished off with some kind of throat injury. (Monitor) (later note: his face was initially covered with a cloth to help see if his breathing increased. It apparently did, and then the cloth covered his bleeding neck). As noted in the first link above, one boy seen alive in Irbeen would later be seen dead, with new freckles on his face and a nosebleed, both being signs of death by manual strangulation.

Hardly any bodies were shown where they fell - in homes, in the streets, or anything. Some people are seen arriving at the Kafr Batna "clinic," but they're not the ones seen dead there. Just one family of 8 or 9 was shown dead in a vacant building. But they appear executed with weapons, judging by decay, a couple days before the Ghouta attack. And their lack of shoes plus winter coats on the women - in August - suggest they were held prisoner by Islamists before someone executed them in this vacant building. (Monitor) Otherwise, it could be we don't see where the people died because those were terrorist gas chambers we weren't meant to see. But they might've slipped and let us see the one in Kafr Batna (as noted by O'Brien, same link as above) and maybe in Irbeen. (See also William Van Wagenen "Sarin doesn't slice throats") 

But the official bodies had the wrong rocket bearing and whatever other reasons, be it evidentiary or just political, to blame Damascus, and this had follow-on effects. Having analyzed sarin found at the site of these terrorist rocket strikes in Ghouta, and having decided it was regime sarin, the UN-OPCW investigators came back to finally investigate that terrorist attack at Khan al-Assal. They found that too was sarin and the formula was a match and so, sadly ... the regime must have gassed their own and just blamed terrorists, demanded a probe, then distracted the probe with their own attack using the same sarin, providing this proof all on their own, for whatever reasons. This is one of the most absurd tales ever told, and it's accepted as fact by most people, because official bodies said so, and they never cared enough to apply any skepticism.   

Three days after Ghouta, on August 24, Syria reported its troops were closing in on the area the sarin rockets were fired, some 3-400m from that spot we identified, when 2 canisters of sarin were reportedly launched at them, with one failing to detonate. 4 soldiers needed hospitalized, one of them severely affected and taking days to recover, but none were killed. The OPCW would confirm the government's blood test proving sarin exposure in the one soldier (time lapse probably explains the 3 negatives), and would later find the sarin inside the improvised canisters had the same formula as the sarin used in the Ghouta and Khan al-Assal attacks. Alleged Chemical Attack, August 24, 2013 - A Closer Look On Syria

So the regime must've kept on gassing their own troops. This was just one of three CW attacks on Syrian troops in the days after the Ghouta attack. One of them in deep E. Ghouta on the 22nd was found to be something milder than sarin and that seemed likely enough to me on review. The third attack on August 24 was next to Daraya. Symptoms and initial blood tests indicated sarin, but with the time elapsed before OPCW analysis, they couldn't confirm the exposure. (UN report) There's no word on the exact formula, but it's most likely the same as used in all the other attacks running back to December. 

The same formula sarin would be confirmed in, at least, 3 other sarin incidents over the years:

Saraqeb, 4/29/13 in a special hand grenade otherwise associated with Jabhat al-Nusra, but dropped from a regime helicopter by Assad's forces, killing one woman.  (ACLOS) https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2017/10/saraqeb-sarin-incident-magic-grenades.html

Lataminah, March 2017: in at least one or another of a few attacks (one seemingly invented after-the-fact), the same formula of sarin was reportedly dispersed by a M-4000 bomb from a passing Syrian jet. The evidence is all messed up. I'm behind on it and there may be a review project I'll help prompt by failing to go into detail here.

Khan Sheikhoun, April 4 2017, the same sarin would be delivered, also reportedly by a M-4000 bomb, hardly any of which was produced (a bit more detail below).  

The four known weapons used to deliver "government-stockpile" sarin in 2013 are each interesting, and especially put together like this.

In between these sarin attacks was a long pause between 2014 and 2017. After the massive Ghouta gambit failed to get him attacked by the US, and as Assad agreed to give up his chemical program, he allegedly stopped trying with Obama, and acted like a man with no more sarin program. He waited to test his secret sarin with the next president instead, biding his time between with lower-fatality chlorine attacks, as if just to keep the issue alive until 2017. 

These include an attack in Sarmin, March 2015, where a bizarre binary chlorine barrel bomb was said, implausibly, to fall down the air vent of an unfinished house, killing a family of 6 living in the basement. 3 children are seen dead or dying, with no eye redness from the alleged hours of chlorine exposure, and symptoms of paralysis and suppressed breathing more suggestive of an overdose with an opiate or CNS depressant. The infant boy at least is seen alive, managing one yawn-like breath on video, before the Islamist attending surgeon stabs him in the chest with a likely adrenaline syringe, but never injects anything or offers any other CP support. Instead, he twirls the huge needle around in the infant's chest, removes it with the plunger in the same position, and then lets him die ... from "Assad's chlorine barrel bomb attack" as reported. 

White Helmets Movie: Updated Evidence From Swedish Doctors Confirm Fake ‘Lifesaving’ and Malpractices on Children – The Indicter

https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-killed-talebs.html

That was one of the first appearances of the White Helmets, jointly documenting that grisly scene with the local chapter of the Al-Qaeda offshoot JAN/JFS/HTS. They would work together on most of the other alleged CW attacks listed below.

Then, almost as soon as president trump took office, 2017 saw new sarin attack reports. An alleged attack on Khan Sheikhoun on April 4 saw some 80+ locals killed. (ACLOS)  As with Ghouta, no one is seen where they fell - they just appear pre-collected in pickup trucks or at the White Helmets' cave hospital, where the victims were just sprayed with water until they died. Among the standing questions in this case is how sources indicate there was no jet over Khan Sheikhoun at the time to even drop this sarin bomb. Underrated point: opposition stories were clear and detailed in relating a wind to the SW causing deaths in that direction, whereas video shows the wind blowing the exact opposite way, to the NE, including at ground level. The real direction was likely cited but read backwards (the "to" and "from" directions are easily confused), and all the stories built atop that error are basically proven fakes. (Monitor) But it sparked the first US military attacks ordered by president Trump, over no "red line" he even had to specify. Bingo. He would do the same over Douma a year later. 

There was at least one sarin attack reported in November 2017 and another in February 2018, both non-fatal and confusingly said to involve chlorine as well. The OPCW found sarin at the stie of the February attack but had to rule it a coincidence (coincidental sarin! Can you believe it?), as they saw clues for a chlorine attack but felt the 2 agents cannot be mixed and still be effective, as opposition morons reported. 

These 2 events seemed to build up to the attack in Douma on April 7, where "Assad" still hadn't learned and launched another sarin-chlorine attack. But oddly, this time he switched back to simple chlorine mid-attack as it were. On the verge of Jaish al-Islam's defeat in their home base of Douma, a regime sarin-chlorine attack was originally said to kill around 200, with the death toll strangely revised to 43. The reported sarin never turned up, although chlorine and the canisters for it did appear. The visual evidence and all open, professional analysis of it, including from but rejected by the OPCW's investigation, suggests the evidence of an aerial attack was staged; the best reading is that someone manually placed the canisters next to pre-existing damage at the 2 alleged impact sites. The 35 bodies found at one site seemed arranged there as well, following an unclear death, perhaps somewhere else.

I can add, among other points, that the Douma victims were likely relatives of a rival opposition commander, probably held prisoner in some way by the ruling Jaish al-Islam, and were likely killed by exposure to nitric acid, or something that produced it, while bound in an upside-down position, and fitted with swimming goggles for unclear reasons. Only some have yellow-then-brown staining and/or irritation on their upper faces, with exclusions in the clear shape of swimming goggle lenses and sometimes unusual securing straps (right: extracted pattern on a female victim's face). But nitric acid, like chlorine, is an irritant to the eyes, and no victims display eye redness. What else can explain death from breathing acid with no eye irritation except for goggles someone has since removed? (the chlorine that likely passed over their eyes caused no redness because that requires a heartbeat, and they were dead before they were ever laid here).

Also, initial reports that would run to around 200 killed, and later be specified as 187, remain credible. That would make it the second-deadliest chemical massacre of the Dirty War, with most simply de-listed along with the sarin, whatever exactly caused that strange story change (were the militants bringing sarin to spike the site killed by the SAAF along the way?).

https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2023/02/regarding-how-victims-were-killed-by.html

https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2018/04/doumas-mask-of-death-part-1.html

Some 2,000 people Jaish al-Islam held prisoner and agreed to release never did emerge from that captivity, with their fates being unclear. Likely several hundred were killed for the Ghouta chemical massacre, and some were probably used up in the last days for the Douma massacre, besides those killed and used for other events. 

And that brings us to the final point and people who allegedly died in enormous numbers inside the prisons of the "Assad regime."

Prisoner Abuse & Extermination 

Recent post-liberation finds at Sednaya prison are supposed to prove all the alleged abuses in Syria's prisons, and this news will merit some study next. Piles of bloody nooses. A body press to illustrate their repressiveness. Michael Kobs on X is covering that stuff. I'll try to catch up, but first, here's where I had left off seriously questioning all that. It's a wide subject I never tried to master, so I'll be brief until I'm less-brief.

There are many stories, quite possibly made up, swearing to a range of horrid abuses, sometimes seemingly tailored to fit the content of specific "Caesar photos" as if the verify them. However, some million pages of top-secret "Assad files" seemingly provide no supporting evidence for orders to torture, starve, neglect, abuse, kill or mass-exterminate prisoners, at least that anyone whose looked at them has mentioned. It's widely accepted as fact that this was all ordered from above, and opposition-supporting defectors claim to have seen the orders passed down all the time. And the Assad files curators make it sound like they have massive proof but, again, every time they want to show this proof, they turn to a witness claim instead of a single verified order. The documents seemingly provide little aside from black-and-white fluff to rest these other dubious claims upon. 

Assad Files: Investigators mainly found re-iterations of previous orders to care for and not abuse the prisoners. The Syrian Justice and Accountability Center (SJAC) in a report (now deleted? link is 404 - my review) had to concede "None of the pages in the sample set explicitly admitted to the use of torture, despite widespread and consistent accusations..." That's zero out of 3,470 relevant pages they had, despite all those claims of routine, horrific torture. The best the report could do was point to "a handwritten note from a detained individual who confessed to crimes and swore that he was not beaten or tortured during his arrest, raising suspicions that he may have indeed been tortured or mistreated in detention." Yeah, with some imagination, there you go - a supposed lack of torture, once specified, becomes evidence for torture that strangely lacks any straightforward evidence. 

Reference to just one death in custody was found in the SJAC sample, and they had to doubt its claims that the man died from an infection, stemming from an injury sustained during his arrest (probably shot so, in fact, likely a shooting militant). SJAC think the Youtube video shows bruising, but that was likely the fatal infection they saw, and/or the early stages of decay like the "bruising" seen with Hamza al-Khatib and the others (video date/time lapse also unclear). Anyway, no other deaths were noted, and no order to cause deaths were actually discovered. Again, despite the widespread and likely 100% fake stories.   

A memo of August 27 2013 "stresses how the detainees should not be beaten, humiliated or detained arbitrarily." It goes on to acknowledge: “Certain errors made by some Department branches were reviewed, including: (Arbitrary detention… the use of intensity, beating, and torture of detainees ….etc.), emphasizing the imperative of averting these issues.” Is that meant to be read sarcastically, or written in code? (https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2018/09/assad-files-2018-part-2.html)

Another passage: “It is imperative to attend to the cleanliness of the prison and all its facilities, and the hygiene and health of detainees…to preserve lives and reduce deaths which have considerably risen lately.” 

The "Caesar photos" seem to depict a very different world. These are said to show nearly 7,000 men, older boys and one woman killed systematically in Syrian detention, just from 2011 up to August, 2013, in a system feared to continue well after that. The horrific photos were smuggled out of Syria by a defector code-named "Caesar" (and not for the illogical given reason). The photos and Caesar's explanation of them, corroborated with some contradictions by other opposition-supporting defector-types, are the basis of "Caesar civilian Protection Act" of US Congress ...  any country governed by a dictator willing to do that cannot be allowed to rebuild from the US funded proxy war there, because a lot of suffering was needed, I suspect, to finally break the will of Syrians and bring down Assad. And civilian suffering is just what the act actually promised.  

The supposed military intelligence ID numbers attached to the bodies in the photos (like 215-1234), allegedly assigned upon arrest - would suggest most prisoners were systematically killed in the exact order they were arrested - assembly-line style. Their bodies come in just that sequentially and judging by the other (unidentified body?) numbers, at a rate of about 1,000 a month for at least 10 months in a row (November 2012 to August, 2013). Most of them have suffered severe malnutrition and neglect, sometimes prolonged bondage and, more sporadically, signs of torture like lash marks. 

This photo of perhaps 50 emaciated corpses, with no kind of prison uniform and mostly naked, processed at once, might be a typical day. But this and a few other unusual views allows a clear geolocation the garages area behind military hospital 601 in Damascus, where Caesar says he took all these grim photos. The fact that he includes geolocation shots for later investigations goes to suggest these were never official photos he smuggled out, but his own improvised ones. That improvisation might include elements of dishonesty to misrepresent what was happening here.

Syrian officials have been fairly quiet on these photos, but have explained they show unidentified bodies being processed, attaching numbers to photos for later retrieval of the buried body, once the family made an ID, adding that some are soldiers killed by armed gangs. But the last part is standard boilerplate and this clearly is not a complete answer, even if true. Why so many unidentified bodies and what about their horrible condition? 

In several rounds of work some years back, I saved screenshot copies of over 99% of the 6,700 ish publicized faceshots (only some 5 or so needles lost in the branch 215 haystack, and total coverage of other folders), saving them with all attached info, for a readable catalog I obsessively went over for visual, temporal, and other clues. My research suggested these ~7,000 men, boys and the one woman were definitely prisoners, but more likely held by opposition forces - maybe Liwa/Jaish al-Islam and/or their allies Jabhat al-Nusra (now known as Syria's new government?). It seems plausible that they were killed in repeated large batches and dumped for the government to find and process. I suspect they sent so many because their inside ally - the heralded hero "Caesar" - was there to help launder the bodies as prisoners of the government. He could incorporate the fictional military intelligence numbers written on the bodies onto ID cards he made up, putting them alongside the unidentified body/burial number, to make these look like known but coded prisoners set to be buried. And if it can be made into a show like that, why not make the show truly cinematic in scale?

The suspect ID numbers initially came on forehead tape that was often removed prior to morgue photos that were supposedly meant to confirm these numbers (ex: body 645 of "unknown branch" in the July 1, 2012 folder) later they would be written on the body in permanent market, sometimes in many spots, and then the numbers stayed in the photos. Did someone declare the ID tape offensive terrorist graffiti, or suspect it was for some insider to see and document? "Caesar" had a spell then (mid-August to October, 2012) where he was unable to collect photos, but somehow he came back to witness, just as the show exploded to 1,000 per month. 

Monitor on Massacre Marketing: "Caesar Photos": Timeline of Terror

There are a great many reports from alleged fellow prisoners and family members of Caesar photos victims swearing they had been arrested by the government and that they learned of their deaths in custody in great detail ... usually from some opposition-aligned friend of his who happened be there to see it all but then be released. I admit I haven't tried to review all these reports, but that's how it was with a few I did check, and I don't trust those "friends." 

A frequent general pattern that I might have an alternate explanation for: Example citizen "Fadi" is detained on a phoned-in tip, held in normal conditions with visits allowed until trial, found totally innocent (and the tip itself found suspicious?), and "Fadi" is released. Then with this record or detentions by the regime down on the record, it seems obvious what happened when he vanished a week later, arrested at some "checkpoint." Authorities won't say or don't know where he is, but a former prisoner says he saw "Fadi" at Sednaya, for example, and then he appears starved down and purple in the Caesar photos.

Assad Files: docs said by HRW and UK Channel 4 to help prove TWO photo lineups between 2 "Caesar photos" victims and 2 regime prisoners referenced in the Assad files with the same number, as if that were a special and not a common thing. I was able to show how the dates only approximately line up between the fake terrorist numbers on the Ceaser photos victims and real prisoners who died in unrelated news (indeed, different reasons were given). That's just the kind of coincidence you'd expect a case or two of in datasets of this scale. Those are probably the only two, and the rest of the cases failing to even approximately match up just go to suggest these were always two different sets of prisoners. 

https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2018/10/assad-files-caesar-photo-line-ups.html

Assad Files: A December 2012 Circular to the Military Intelligence Department, signed by its Head, asks: “When any detainee dies in the prisons of the branches of the Department…. their status is then presented to the Head of the Department on the same day by telegram regarding the reasons for their arrest, the findings of their interrogation and the causes of death…”  Consider branch 227 and 215 - with over 80% of the dead between them - killed every prisoner, in roughly or exactly the same order they were arrested (going by what Caesar says). body rate at this time - November 2012 to August 2013, was about 1.000 per month, in a routine and total system ... and one of the guys in charge wants every one reported individually to him? Maybe. Or, is it possible ... these were always two different sets of prisoners?

I find it quite interesting how the Caesar photos run up to August, 2013. Then, on August 20, Caesar reportedly faked his own death and fled Syria with his photos, fearing he was in danger. A strange detail no one mentions but that I finally discerned from the bizarre clinical symptoms so many displayed: most of the Caesar photo victims seem to have died from exposure to a strongly caustic gas, while suspended upside-down. (Finally explained in decent detail in this post) Was someone testing chemical extermination methods for their prisoners? Just hours after Caesar fled, the Ghouta chemical attack killed x hundred app. prisoners, but now including women and children, publicly crossing Obama's red line and risking bombs on Damascus. Is that what Caesar knew to fear, suddenly, on August 20? What kind of company would he keep to receive tips like that? What would he have given in return?

Note: Only a few Ghouta victims  (some of the "Ain Tarma cemetery" ones - see here, with ugly graphic images) show clear signs of being suspended upside-down and exposed to toxic gas like the Caesar photo victims, but this same method would appear again, as noted above, with the 2018 Douma massacre, again likely captives of Liwa/Jaish al-Islam (however there is no sign of nitric acid and only limited sign of goggles/eye protection in the Caesar photos - those would be new twists). Are these all variations on the same theme, an obsession of some local armed group?

FWIW I suspect the massive body flow to August stopped once that audience was gone. I don't suspect the same horror show kept running, at least not on that scale. I sure hope it didn't.

Summary

The celebrated overthrow of the "Assad regime" was supposed to remove the criminals from power in the name of Justice and Accountability over a lot of extremely serious crimes. But to the extent the research above is correct, it just removed the peoples' protector and brought to power the same forces - broadly speaking - behind perhaps every serious "Assad crime." The shooting of protesters, torturing and killing of kids, sectarian false-flag massacres like the ones in Houla and Al-Bayda, staged bombardment massacres, chemical weapons massacres, and the mass extermination of ~7,000 men and boys as documented in the "Caesar photos," and even more. The side responsible for the crueler, grislier, and much larger half of over half a million killed in Syria's Dirty war was - I think - just rewarded with control of all Syria's people. And, of course, it's being cheered all over. What do we think of and do about this?