Some Different Opinions on the Return of Mazen al-Hamada

March 4, 2020

As refugees from Syria continue to make big news in different ways, most have ignored the odd story of one former refugee who just went back to Syria to face arrest - voluntarily, it seems but under murky and slightly disputed circumstances. The former prisoner who was willing to go back is Mazen al-Hamada (Hummada, etc. - Ar: مازن الحمادة ) I've written about this guy previously as a star witness for Ben Taub, later for Sarah Ashfar, and others covering the co-mingled allegations dubbed "Assad Files" * and "Caesar Photos." **
https://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2016/04/witness-assessment-mazen-hamada.html
* http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2014/11/fail-caesar-exposing-anti-syria-photo.html
** http://libyancivilwar.blogspot.com/2016/04/regarding-those-assad-files.html
** https://21stcenturywire.com/2018/10/11/revolution-unraveled-assad-files-now-an-achilles-heel-for-war-crimes-narrative/

Hamada (reportedly an oilfield worker with Schlumberger) was one of those who filled in the blanks - and there are huge blanks in the touted primary evidence. He claims to have been Air Force Intelligence prisoner #1858, arrested for tying to smuggle infant formula to the besieged people of Daraya (he was from Deir Ezzour, clear across the country, and … infant formula?) He says he was entrapped into even tying that, and was arrested with a nephew in a devious sting, both threatened with death and tortured. Mazen says he witnesses several deaths and killings just like the kinds in the Caesar photos, with numerous random slayings by one guard called "Azrael."

But then Hamada says a judge ordered his release in 2013 when he saw torture scars, which might go to show how "systematic" this torture was. He had to leave his nephew behind, and the poor alleged guy could hardly have survived long. Mazen fled to the Netherlands and started lodging these claims, with great conviction and easily-tapped emotion, and others in the media amplified that signal with apparently zero thought as to its truthfulness. There are apparently official records showing his detention, but then they give the arrest as 15 months later than in his own story, and we're to believe him where he clashes with the supporting evidence? Well, I didn't. I bet all the terrible details he saw were during the disputed 15 months when he probably was NOT in jail with his nephew over smuggling baby formula. 

A semi-iconic image:

I always thought he had an odd look, like a sleep-deprived Indonesian man, or something. Note the only described torture in the prior repots (that I noted) was cigarette burns on his legs. The info I'm seeing is clear he's been "taking drugs" - some kind of heavy downers, I suppose. It's said he picked this up in the Netherlands to deal with the trauma of his torture and subsequent social dislocation. No one suggests this goes back to his infant formula days and prison time, and his flight to Europe and his first reporting of crimes. See his apparent chain smoking and superb calm in this video of his understanding of Kurdish history. I could see this guy having burns on his legs, cuts on his arms, needle tracks, and clearly some kind of scars on his mind and soul, some of it preceding jail, and none it coming from regime torturers. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x8WAe5Lgao

I can also see his jailers torturing him for some reason they might have, likely a good one. I'm not ruling that out. But most of his details seem completely fabricated and far out of step with the illustrated reality of official orders and responses as seen in all discovered internal reports.
  
Most of these sources are auto-translated, primarily from Arabic. Few European and fewer English-language agencies have reported on this ambiguous story. All are from the second half of February and forward.
---
Petra Vissers
Where is Mazen Hamada? The Syrian activist disappeared from the Netherlands a month ago and popped up in Damascus. Friends and family are seriously worried. "" This proves that Assad's long arm is back, and very active. " #mazenhamada
https://twitter.com/PVissers/status/1234396603840126976

Suhair Atassi
Let us not forget the case of Mazen al-Hamada: Victim: the Assad regime, despair and loneliness in Europe, luring the regime to him after Mazen found in the drug a way to forget, using only the path of the detainees ’important testimonies, but without following up with their psychological situation .. Mazen may not be the last with The effects of the Caesar’s Law begin on the butcher.
https://twitter.com/suhairatassi/status/1234072241647865857

George Sabra:
Mazen Al-Hamadeh has always been missing behind bars, and we know which ordeal he faces with his arrested colleagues. We miss him today with more pain, because he faces the ordeal alone with a tired body and a spirit that has been thickened by the regime's obedience.
 Freedom deserves the effort of those fighting for it.
https://twitter.com/GeorgeSabra_sy/status/1232704865320783872

Ahmed Naji
On the return of Mazen al-Hamada, or his suicide in this manner, is the tragic expression of the tragedy of these survivors, and we may witness other shocking expressions that may not be like his return
https://twitter.com/AhmedNajiTW/status/1232776979843186688
(links to...)
https://www.almodon.com/opinion/2020/2/25/إنتحار-معتقل-سابق
article including this unexplained photo of what looks like Mr. Hamada, but older and heavier, sitting in what looks like a jail cell.

It is not news of the "voluntary" return of a former detainee to Damascus Airport, to be arrested again upon his arrival. According to what was reported by the "Zaman Al-Wasl" website, former detainee Mazen Al-Hamada returned to Damascus airport from Berlin last Saturday, after contacting the Assad embassy there, to arrive at night and be taken immediately to an unknown destination. Mazen al-Hamada had appeared on many occasions to expose the torture practiced on detainees in Syria, including human rights and parliamentary bodies, and he is one of the survivors of the fate of the detainees who died under torture within what became known as the Caesar file.

There is no information yet about the details of what happened, except for the affirmation of those who know them "through their pages on social media" that he was not balanced in the recent period, especially, and he was taking drugs because of his severe psychological crisis. Regardless of the negativity that the drug abuse issue might raise among some, what is certain is that the aforementioned was not in a state of equilibrium that would qualify him to make a rational decision, and it is clear that one of Assad's agents in Europe has caught a valuable catch and was able to influence him in some way to bring him back to this As.

"It is expected that Assad's intelligence services will exploit Mazen's return," article continues, put him on TV to recant his earlier claims, and then they would likely kill him. But then, the author admits it's not clear even if he was forced back into jail, and it seemed not: a suicidal impulse was likely at work.

Perhaps the best characterization of Mazen's return decision is that at some degree of consciousness, or subconscious, he decided to commit suicide. He does not belong to a class of the opposition that falls under the temptation of power to seek a desire for gain, and his memory and body are well preserved with the effects of previous torture, so that he is not deluded by a different reception. He has lost family members under torture, and he knows that his deliverance from the same fate only came about by chance, and that delivering from these monsters is not written to a person twice. However, he probably was not able to commit suicide in the Netherlands, where he was staying, unable to understand his desire and implement it on his own, and he found in his old executioner the perfect tool for tragic suicide without taking care of its dimensions that exceed what is personal.

Those are some pretty deep thoughts that make you just hate Assad for so ingeniously warping people.

Informed sources. The complex circumstances of the return of the refugee who spoke openly of "al-Khazuk" in Assad's detention camps
https://www.zamanalwsl.net/news/article/121360/

Sources close to the case of former detainee "Mazen al-Hammada" said that the return of the man to the lap of the regime recently is complex and intertwined circumstances, interspersed with material difficulties and psychological pressures as well as temptations presented by the regime through intermediaries.
These sources stressed that the process of returning "al-Hammada" is not the beginning of the hour as many who are not familiar with the status of the man who was a refugee in the Netherlands years ago, but it is a process that began almost since the end of 2018, when al-Hammada reviewed the embassy of the regime in Berlin, asking them to return as a "Syrian citizen" and But they insisted that his situation be "settled" so that he could return.

Al-Hammada visited the regime's embassy in Berlin again, and then a third time, the last time he stayed in Berlin for nearly a week, before boarding a plane to Beirut and then to Damascus.
All of this was preceded by a rumor that he was returning to Syria, which prompted Al-Hammada to appear in a live broadcast denying the rumor, but at the same time he wondered what the surprise of this rumor if true, he is in the end a Syrian citizen and has the right to return to Syria.
The sources reported that during the past years he was talking about the difficulties and problems he encounters publicly through his profile, including the decrease in the balance in his account and the flow of irregularities on him, which strained him financially, and sometimes pushed him to attack the Dutch government calling on him to return him to Syria.
The sources suggested that the "hamda" was subjected in the Netherlands to a psychological trauma added to the trauma he had previously received from the experience of his bitter detention in Assad's prisons, and this "Dutch" shock, so to speak, is not the work of the government, but is the result of the imagination of "al-Hammada" to receive preferential treatment that distinguishes him from the rest of the Refugees, in fact, are known to be treated equally in the Netherlands and across Europe, particularly financially.
Al-Hammada's sense of alienation and need for preferential treatment seems to have been further highlighted by the media and human rights organizations, even as he imagined that he was at the centre of the Syrian issue, especially after he was hosted in the United States.
In all, al-Hammada's image has clearly swelled, and he does not hesitate to broadcast this inflation in his speech, such as his talk that he is the one who stopped the regime's bombing of Deir ez-Zor, and that the coalition will use his expertise to manage the oil fields in eastern Syria.
The sources pointed out that the crisis of the psychological and financial "al-Hammada" was a major impetus in his return to the regime, and supported it and apparently accelerated it, and the authorities of officers from the city of "Mohassan" who are still serving in the army of the regime, who decorated the former detainee returning to his executioner.
Al-Hammada was one of the most prominent and most important Syrian detainees who trusted the voice and image of their testimonies about the detention in Assad's cells, where he spoke boldly and clearly about sexual torture and rape by al-Khazuk, as well as the killings and liquidations at the Al-Mazzah military hospital.

Alaa Ghazal
https://www.facebook.com/1175259951/posts/10218440477141305/?d=n
I'm avoiding talking about #mazen _ Hamada
But there are things in my opinion that can't be overlooked
After the video "Abu Jafar Sifter" (...) a friend and close to him, he started using the term that the Syrian regime kidnapped mazen from Germany to Damascus!!
Away from my opinion with his balance, his statements, his actions, his mental state and his return to Syria...
But the conversion of mazen to kidnapped! This is denied!. Denied to fake things by turning "any opposition / opposition" to a victim!!
We have seen a lot of things and we have lost our credibility in a lot of topics …
"...about the kidnapping in which abu jafar came out with the video and got it! With the same video says Abu Jafar
Minute 9:17: Mazen came to me and said I want to go down to Syria, the opposition is dirty.. I told him that the regime will throw you if you come back.. then convinced
Minute 9:50: when he came back from America He came back to tell me that the Dutch are not giving me a visa to enter Syria I told him baby you are a political refugee The Dutch State cannot give you approval to go down to Syria and you are wanted in Syria
Minute 15:07: I have evidence and evidence that "Mazen" has made a lot of requests to the refugee assistance office in the Netherlands that he wants to come down to Syria and refuse.. and the people who are around him know this topic exactly that they rejected the first time And the second time and the third time and even try "Mazen" to work and communicate with the red cross, red crescent and blackhead we, Syria is an internationally known country that it is not safe, we are selling you as a refugee and you have a Dutch residence
Minute 16:57: why are you going down on deir EZ-Zor? He said I have a political solution I want to offer to the system and stop killing and beating
Minute 18:17: Mazen is a sick person and the patient is possible in two words to laugh at him like the embassy laughed at him and pulled him and kidnapped him. So Mazen was kidnapped and not mazen will be on Syria
Minute 07:44 Mazen from Berlin Airport: I'm going down on Syria

Mzahem_Alsaloum
The [confirmed] info so far, that Mazen Humada calls his natives and told them that he arrives to Damascus, but nothing proves that except his appearance. Mazen attacks me a lot before, but I feel bad and sad for him, he have had deal with his psychological situation by taking..2.
https://twitter.com/Mzahem_Alsaloum/status/1231662791133626368

..2.taking drugs, which the worse way to handle such a situation, I feel very unfortunate for him, and I hope nothing bad would happens to him, and he will be able to find the peace even if it was at the regime held.
#Syria
@SaraAfshar
@1962Wren
https://twitter.com/Mzahem_Alsaloum/status/1231662796443734016


Background videos (just found on the way)

https://twitter.com/ayoubi31/status/1232040450858635265
This is # Mazen Al Hamada, and he incites the Kurds on Al Jazeera previously

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x8WAe5Lgao
The full video of a Syrian opposition figure Mazen Hamadeh on the history of the Kurds 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKFMM7WzZO0
Mazen al-Hamada and the meeting with Musa Al-Omar, was he seconded in favor of the regime in the West and what is the secret of returning to the bosom of the homeland?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z_DzVxnRqk
2015 A message from the heart to the detainee released from the prisons of Al-Assad, the free Mazen Al-Hamada

On the Layla Shweikani Issue

December 29, 2018

In late November, news broke that a dual US-Syrian citizen was killed in detention in a Syrian prison, some two years earlier. Layla Shweikani (Arabic: ليلى شويكاني ) was a U.S.-born Chicago native, educated as a software engineer. But she went to Syria in 2015, ostensibly, to help displaced people in the Damascus suburbs of Eastern Ghouta.

The area was run by Saudi-backed hardline Islamists Jaish Al-Islam, who apparently approved of her work. Other women activists there, like Razan Zaitouneh, have been arrested and killed by JaI for challenging their harsh policies. But it seems Shweikani was arrested by the Syrian authorities instead, and is believed by most to have been executed following on torture, and surely for no real crime except trying to help the Syrian people.

Since I don't follow the news closely, my first view happened to be via Tony Cartalucci at Land Destroyer on December 15, panning "a particularly scurrilous op-ed appeared in the pages of the Washington Post" two days earlier which, he argues, lacked "any actual evidence" for the allegations. He also considers a report in the UK Independent, which featured more explicit evidence. But as he accurately put it, the source for that was "dubious activists relying on second and even third-hand accounts."

- Washington Post article by Jason Rezaian (soon arrested in Iran, tried, and convicted for espionage, as noted).
- The Independent article by Richard Hall

In this post, I'll offer a reasoned rundown of what we supposedly know, and what we don't really know, and what possibilities exist.

The first 33 months of silence
Activists are pressing president Trump, with apparent futility, to impose penalties, and shaming the public and media for supposedly ignoring the crime. For example, rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) told WaPo's Rezaian in early December “It’s disheartening that there not only has been no outrage over the murder of an American by the Assad regime, but that there has been little to no coverage on her story by our national media.” The story had by then been making limited rounds for perhaps two weeks, with little evidence yet and, as it turns out, emerging from the blue with zero preludes or prior reports.

As people are guilt-tripped for silence over this crime, it should be noted everyone including her family, her government, and Syrian activist groups failed to make any public mention of the case in nearly three years since her reported arrest in February, 2016. WaPo: "She was being held in solitary confinement with no contact with the outside world." For some reason , even the people who knew she was in there didn't make one-way contact possible by speaking of her case.

Opposition records often give clues, and my primary source is the databases of the Center for Documentation of Violations (or VDC). It's pretty exhaustive up to a point, but never got a report of her as detained or killed. This seems to be the proper spelling of the fairly rare name in question: شويكاني
The VDC lists 2 men of this name killed, a civilian in 2014, a militant in 2015, both from Mleha, E. Ghouta. No women or children appear. For detainees, they list just 4 men, 3 in mid-2012 and one in late 2013 (one is from Daraya, the rest from Mleha). None since, no Shweikani women. (there's also a database for missing, which lists zero Shweikanis.)

So she didn't make it into this source. Nor did her father, nor probably her fiance. A decent internet search suggests no one else anywhere reported her arrest or detention or worries, prior to the recent news. On Twitter, I found Tweets featuring her name in Arabic first appear, just barely, on November 26 of this year, come in heavy in the following days, and sporadically since. It seems no one spoke of her prior to that.

I don't what this means, if anything, but it's odd. Detained activists are usually named as heroes and supported with protests, petitions, hashtag campaigns, etc. But here, a U.S. citizen activist and some family members are detained February 2016, contact was made with U.S. Government help 10 months later (see below), execution should have seemed likely or imminent (see below), and then contact was lost for two years, apparently with no clarification from Damascus ... and still no public note or complaint of the missing U.S. citizen, the detained activist facing execution, perhaps already killed.

But the Syrian government just now (sometime in November) confirmed her death, on December 28, 2016, through an update to its civil registry. It doesn't say she was executed, or was even in jail, just that she died. Other information might well clarify that, but that information might be untrue, in whole or part.

Then, suddenly everybody knows just when and where she died, and were able to speak about it. The explanation they'd give is they knew where she was and how she would have died if she had. But since the regime cruelly refused to confirm the killing, uncertainty over her fate and perhaps some kind of threats made them keep quiet about it (like maybe they would kill her as soon as anyone spoke up). In that case, perhaps a Syrian affirmation of hear death was taken as credible proof of something they highly suspected, and was enough to shake their tongues free.

That's entirely possible, but I suspect the abnormal quiet is some kind of a clue to the hidden truth of this story. For now, it's just worth noting.

Anyway, considering everyone else's silence for nearly three years,  I don't feel so slow in catching the story and following up with this starter post that winds up just missing the mark of two years since her death, and one month after the first anyone heard of her.

How we know she was in jail
My main question in general with tortured detainees is whether they ever were prisoners of the Syrian government, rather than of opposition groups with their own genocide plans (see Fail Caesar part 6 for well-founded doubts even in those cases that have supposed photo proof). But here, it seems Layla Shweikani was held in Syrian prison, and did presumably die there, possibly in an execution. So the usual line of questioning is - barring a surprise revelation - out the window.

Since Washington withdrew its meddling, hostile "ambassador" to Syria, Robert Ford, early in the engineered conflict, the U.S. pursued Shweikani's case through the Czech ambassador to Damascus, Eva Filipi. As the Independent reported, "ten months after she was first detained, on 18 December 2016, Filipi visited Shweikani in Adra prison on behalf of the US government."

It's a logical possibility that ambassador Filipi fabricated this visit to help sow a false story of the detained American activist - especially considering the case of Robert Ford. But it's surely not an accusation I'm making. As a professional politician outside the Jihadist deception network (alleged inmates at the prison, etc. are always suspect), she's presumably trustworthy - on basic facts like this anyway.

The government officials and reporters passing on news of her meeting are probably doing it correctly enough. Important context is probably left off, but  I presume this visit was real, and so: Ms. Shweikani was held at Adra prison as of December 18, and the Syrian government acknowledged that fact by granting the visit that proved it. And unless she was released in the interim (which seems unlikely) the same authorities' claim she died somewhere, somehow, ten days later, means she died in prison. Execution is obviously one way that happens.

In his report, Tony Cartalucci added some questioning of the WaPo journalist Josh Rogin, who acknowledged "we don't know the specifics of Layla's death ... Thank you for that caution. ... But the regime is responsible for her death, in their custody." From this, we can say Rogin is pretty sure she was in jail when she died, and can only claim general responsibility based on that. And that's probably accurate enough while the rest is, in fact, hearsay. And there's been a lot of that regarding Syria, that either goes untested or fails a test.

The charges and Shweikani's uncertain fate
Without explaining how this was known, the article claims the prisoner admitted to the leveled charges, but only after "Shweikani had been threatened by Syrian authorities that they would harm her family if she did not confess to the ambassador to the crimes she had been accused of, which she then did."

If this is true, she said in the meeting that she was guilty. The claim that this was extracted under threat is suspect; there's little reason to know what happens inside torture chambers at Adra prison. Was this just a guess? 

What were the charges? Most sources are vague, saying it was related to "terrorism." But Richard Hall wrote for the Independent how Layla was arrested sometime in February, 2016, "along with her father and her fiancé. She was charged with planning to assassinate members of the Syrian government."

First off, Hall can't know what the charges actually were - his activist source almost surely filled in this detail, as he did for most relevant details. And as we'll discuss next, he doesn't seem very trustworthy. But if this is the charge - and it should be the one she claimed to be guilty of, before an ambassador and a judge, if so - it would probably be known early on; her family probably learned of it from or before the December 18 meeting with ambassador Filipi. It's surely a death penalty crime, and execution should be expected with little delay, justified or otherwise. And at some point, as I'll explain next, they learned she had been sentenced to death in a December 26 trial that lasted 30 seconds. Yet, as the Independent reports, until the 2018 confirmation...

"Since there was no official confirmation of her death at that time, Shweikani’s family still held out hope that she was alive, and that she would be released. From the time they lost contact with her at the end of 2016, the Czech ambassador continued to make enquiries about her with the Syrian government and the case was followed by the then US envoy to Syria, Michael Ratney." 

That sounds like it's missing something. The Americans must have been given no clear answer? Why would Damascus deny a supposedly valid execution for terrorism? Did they actually send an answer but the Americans - for example - "misplaced" it, in order to maintain the illusion of a horrible injustice and cause for yet more "pressure on Damascus"? There are open questions here.

Another way of looking at it; a US citizen was allegedly involved in assassination plots in Syria - and no one mentions her detention, least of all the U.S. government, until Damascus brings up her name first in 2018. That could be coincidence, or might help clarify what caused that unusual silence.

Qutaiba Idlibi's "Research"
Alleged threats behind Shweikani's confession to ambassador Filipi were mentioned above. It's not clear how these were learned of, but that's presumably some of the prolific detective work by "Qutaiba Idlbi​, a researcher who works with the relatives of Syrian detainees," as cited for the Independent, not in the WaPo piece. After stumbling on his Twitter account (first tweet mentioning her case - Nov. 27, 2018) I asked him about that finding in particular: "Are you the source for that claim? How was it learned of?" (awaiting a response...)

Based on info he gathered (when?), Hall at the Independent would report:

"What happened next was discovered by Idlbi through testimony of other inmates at Adra prison, where she was held, and contact with Syrian officials after the fact."

"...Eight days later [Dec. 26], Shweikani was taken from Adra prison to a military court, where she was asked to answer to the charges against her. “The trial is basically one question: ‘Do you admit to the accusations?’ Layla said yes, due to the threats on her family’s life,” says Idlbi.  “Through an official, we found out that a judge sentenced her to execution for terrorism. The trial lasted 30 seconds.”

The trial part would be internal. It would almost require a functioning insider to witness it or know a witness. Luckily, Idlibi claims, there was an unnamed official sympathetic to the opposition who knew of these details and leaked them to this researcher. It's not clear when he pulled this convenient trick, but presumably well after the fact. These details would make her death pretty certain, as they seem to do now. Yet for years, this info was apparently not available as "Shweikani’s family still held out hope that she was alive, and that she would be released."

I suspect this 'sympathetic insider' only 'stepped forward' in November 2018, as if to bolster the government's new listing, as if he had no clue before, or maybe had just forgotten until the registry update jogged his memory. But it seems likely he only handed over these long-quiet details, to support more opposition claims, in the days before Idlibi would finally 'reveal' his own ongoing research.

Otherwise, this "researcher" Idlibi relies - as many other opposition propagandists do - on alleged prisoners who saw detainees here and there, and bring this up upon their alleged release. In this case, I suspect all such source were 'released' suddenly in late November, 2018, just as that official came out to help Idlibi with his big debut as a world-stage research guy.

Here's another little puzzle - following a trial on December 26, as Richard Hall heard it:

"According to Idlbi, Shweikani was then transferred to the infamous Saydnaya prison, just outside of the capital. “Since then our assumption is that she was definitely killed. Because usually you are executed within 48 hours [of a verdict],” he says."  

So it was illogically that "Shweikani’s family still held out hope that she was alive" - at least, once this presumption was formed (just when is unclear - when someone who saw it was allegedly released?) And from that point forward, this outlandish fantasy somehow underpinned their continued public silence, until the regime finally admitted it on their own.

Furthermore, the presumed date, known since whenever, happens to match exactly what they Syrian government had just confirmed - December 28 (transferred Dec. 26, usually killed within 48 hours). Are they really that predictable, or is this a fake prediction fitted to the revelation after-the-fact? The latter option remains open anyway, since Idlibi waited two years for this regime confirmation before raising any public complaints.

In support, the article notes how the Syrian Network for Human Rights also "believes she was executed on 28 December 2016." The SNHR is a western-funded pro-regime change front propaganda group, as Cartalucci notes. It's also the more shrill, partisan propagandist cousin of the widely-cited Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, from which it branched off following an early dispute. The SNHR, not the SOHR, endorse the claims brought by Mr. Idlibi, which means nothing. It blames Assad, so they agree. (that's not to say the western-funded SOHR would NOT endorse the story...)

As Cartalucci notes, Idlibi's status as an opposition member means he lacks neutrality as a witness and further, he might be repaying favors to a hostile state; "Qutaiba Idlbi lives in the United States after receiving a scholarship to study at Columbia University," as Cartalucci found with a bit of his own research. I can add it says Columbia student right on his Twitter profile. More research on this chap may be in order. But even as I'm sure Idlibi is researching me now (as if that matters), I probably won't bother much. My questions are those raised here, and digging around won't answer them. Some discussion with him might provide clues, however. I am going to pursue that.

What Remains
Idlibi's research might still be partly or totally true. I doubt that, but doubt is just what it is. Otherwise, there are other possibilities for the few solid facts here:

1. she was executed legitimately, for a serious crime she was guilty of (or reasonably considered guilty)
2. she was executed illegitimately, on false charges (I take it as my job to question such claims, not rule them out absent a very good reason)
3. She died of natural causes, illness, etc. It happens in jails and prisons everywhere. (but that would mean her charges, confessions, and perhaps trial and sentencing to death at the same time are coincidental)

There are also standing questions over the government's actions. At least as the stories imply, her family was never informed, obviously not given her body. Washington and the Czech ambassador pursued the case, we hear. They must have been misled/uninformed over the execution. I'm not convinced that's the reality, but it could well be. There are different possible reasons, some of them reasonable, why Damascus might stay quiet on this execution in particular. But certainly that secrecy would feed into narratives like those circulating now.

And let's consider the troubling precedents and prior allegations that make these stories seem likely enough most won't even bother with specific evidence. What we think we know about Assad's secret prison killing machine includes mass arrests of innocents, inhumane conditions, routine torture, false confessions, and mass executions, thought to have been ramped up lately. This is; all alleged, with the allegations widely credited. Like most, Layla is said to have been killed at Sednaya prison, the "human slaughterhouse" as decried by Amnesty International in a report I considered here.

It's widely accepted there must be a system to this mass killing, some order for it coming from on high. There probably should be, if it's real. In fact anti-Syria investigators have gathered close to a million pages of top secret documents seized from overrun government facilities, etc. But despite the public bluster, these "Assad Files" apparently reveal no such orders. The best examples they can find to even suggest it note some beatings and some torture have occurred in Syrian prisons. But officials are only seen - talking candidly and secretly between themselves - calling these "mistakes" and ordering that it be stopped. Oversight is proposed. Some deaths by disease are also noted; officials secretly suggested more attention to cleanliness to minimize that. (see here) The orders TO starve, neglect and mass exterminate the prisoners ... yet to be found, just like the orders to shoot or arrest peaceful protesters.

The torture part of Layla's tale might be a specific from Idlibi's supposed insider, or simply inferred from the record of allegations and the supposed proof in the "Caesar photos," said to show "torture." Tony Cartalucci noted this:

"Part of [WaPo reporter Josh] Rogin’s diversions included references to the 2013 “Caesar photographs,” which Rogin would claim were “verified” by the FBI. US Representative Kinzinger is also fond of invoking the photographs which were allegedly smuggled out of Syria and reportedly depict Syrians "tortured then executed" by the Syrian government. "

"What Rogin failed to mention was that the photographs were “verified” only as undoctored by the FBI who never once stepped foot in Syria to investigate or verify the identities of or circumstances surrounding those depicted in the photographs."

This is true and well-put. They are genuine photos, mostly or all taken at an official location in Damascus near Assad's palace. But where did these thousands of real and emaciated bodies come from? I've made a huge project of analyzing these photos (not all published, but a lot of work is collected here). For a nine month span, the bodies came thorough at a rate of about 1,000/month. This is a huge crime. The circumstances deserve careful consideration, not the easily-convinced, almost kneejerk Assad blame they were greeted with.

Some photo evidence and considerable logic suggest those thousands of men and boys (and one woman) were prisoners of the local terrorists (see again FC6). Most likely, that would be the same Jaish Al-Islam that freely kidnaps non-Sunni civilians and uses them how it sees fit (see Fail Caesar part 8), and also seemingly approved of Layla Shewikani's work with "displaced people." Knowing they had a sympathetic insider at the morgue end ("Caesar"), I think they killed off most of the huge number of prisoners they held, forged "regime prisoner" numbers on the bodies they dumped for the government to process as unknown. Then, I suspect, the insider "confirmed" those numbers with his own unofficial morgue photos of the victims, to make it all look official.  Even many opposition sources support my hunch that most of the victims are captured Syrian army soldiers and the like (allegedly, they had "tried to defect" - see here).

So there's little documented reason to be sure this torture-killing of innocents by the "Assad regime"  is a real thing, let alone the obvious explanation for Ms. Shweikani's fate. We should still be applying some skepticism to the specific evidence and, as we see above, finding it doesn't hold much weight on its own. It needs these precedents to be real, but they probably aren't.

Remember Nabil Sharbaji
At least some detainee stories seem to be simply made up, or grossly embellished. Consider the case of Nabil Sharbaji, arrested at the uprising's start in March, 2011, but quickly released, detained again in Feb. 2012 for helping start an opposition newspaper, and held for longer. In late 2012, he allegedly wrote down the names and details of some 82 cellmates at Adra prison - in blood and rust with a chicken bone, on scraps of rough cloth, and seemingly illegible - as highlighted in a presentation and documentary film sponsored by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Then he was arrested a third time at the end of January, 2013. That last arrest is suspicious, going ignored by most sources, and following on an even more-ignored release. He may have been in real jail before, was released twice, and was then kidnapped into a terrorist dungeon for the final and fatal stretch. (see my analysis for this and the following details). It should be noted he, like most highlighted over such fates, was always opposed to violence and Islamism. If anyone had a reason to kill him, it would be the violent Islamists taking over his neighborhood. And yet it was the cruel Assad regime, we hear, arrested everyone nice, forcing the rebellion to turn violent and Islamist...

As it happens the 82-names list - some pile of cloth - was allegedly hidden in the cuffs and collar of one shirt and smuggled out by Mansour Al-Omari, who also ran the VDC's detainee database (that never listed Layla). According to this man and that database, Sharbaji was never released after the second arrest; he kept sending out notes from the regime prisons (mostly with ink and paper and smuggled in unspecified ways) long enough to disprove rumors he was killed in April. The notes continued up to August, 2013, with sightings and an alleged prison visit in October, 3013. But then there's no news I could find for over three years before, in late 2016, the same Mansour Al-Omari revealed how his friend Nabil had been killed two years earlier; "He died in the Saydnaya military prison after a jailer kicked him in the chest" on May 3, 2015.

This would have happened two months after Sharbaji  was reliably identified (March, 2015 - see second VDC martyr's entry) in a "Caesar photo" looking like he died of suffocation. But it's dated February, 2013, and no Caesar photos show bodies later than mid-August of that year. (Alleged sightings continue into October - just long enough to 'clarify' he lived past the photo collection.) But that really looks like him, and timeline analysis supports this is the right basic time for that body number to pass through, probably about two weeks after that murky third arrest. Unless the ID is wrong, he was dead before most of the smuggled notes attributed to him, and some of the alleged sightings. He might still have written that famous 82-names list before he died, but you know ... I just don't buy that either. I find that evidence almost ludicrous in and of itself.

It's worth remembering Nabil at this time, and wondering how widely this kind of embellishment happens. Maybe something of the like plays into the stories about Layla Shweikani's death for no crime, under systematic torture ordered by the brutal Assad regime.

Assad Files 2018, Part 2

Assad Files 2018, Part 2
3 More nails in the Coffin
September 8, 2018

In part 1 I considered what Channel 4's latest (on Youtube) calls "perhaps the biggest breakthrough of all" - a memo that SEEMS to refer to a detainee or "terrorist" who dies and is given the number 2668, and that turns up in the Caesar photos at the right basic time. But with 95% redacted, someone's translation of the rest intervening, and whatever question there is to original authenticity … it's hard to really say how the  lines up - but not to CIJA's Bill Wiley.

But that was just the most potentially helpful part of what they shared, with three other documents raised to illustrate their case as strongly as possible.

Other New Evidence of the Systematic Abuse

Orders to NOT Abuse Detainees

The program cites one memo, from August 27, 2013, that "stresses how the detainees shouldn’t be beaten, humiliated or detained arbitrarily." Is that meant to be read sarcastically, or written in code? Maybe not; "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.), emphasising the imperative of averting these issues.” Note the ellipses (…) suggesting other errors were noted, but they were more boring. These are the worst they included in this top-secret internal document. There are a heck of a lot of alleged abuses - mass starvation, neglect, bizarre tortures, deliberate mass extermination of thousands, etc. - not included there as "errors." Depending on the reality of events, these abuses could be:
- done right (not an error)
- Made up, including maybe with a lot of faked photographs (no)
- Done by someone else, to people not even in the government's jails

Anyway, they might be talking in indecipherable code you can guess your own meaning for, but on August 27, 2013, the "genocidal regime" sent out these guidelines, as the select translation says...

This is one more example of at least two found of abuses acknowledged, and in both cases the abuse is denounced and ordered to end. An order to not even beat up the detainees, highlighted as evidence of the cold plan ... TO abuse and in fact systematically exterminate all their innocent prisoners (see below). Or, as Wiley is quick to clarify, such "mistakes" cannot be just mistakes. In a police state like Assad's, they must have been ordered - somehow, he presumes. And these documented efforts to "correct" the "errors" were just too little too late anyway. The arbitrary intensity they ordered a stop and no start to is enough to classify as war crimes, Wiley smirks.

Note that this memo, on August 27, comes about a week after "Caesar" says he faked his death and fled with his trove of morgue photos. Were they worried he was alive, and would leak their secret torture system? Or that he would leak and misrepresent all those terrorism victims they'd been documenting but keeping quiet about? For good measure, or in a coincidence, they sent out these guidelines at this time.

Keeping Clean, Saving Lives

They have more! A third document is cited so:

A memo of one meeting of Military Intelligence officers in 2013 reiterates how detainees should be treated: “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.”

Wiley is salivating at an admission of deaths in prison - plural - and a number that was rising. Was it from 1 or 2 a month previously up to 5 or 10? Or more like 1,000 a month? Unclear. He seizes on their desire to "minimize" deaths rather than "eliminate" them. But jails here with no terrorist insurgency running don't even maintain a 0% inmate death rate, and would hardly bother trying for it. People die, some of them in custody. It's an issue you try to minimize within reason.

We're supposed to compare these nicey-nice words to the Caesar photos, having already linked them to this system in our minds, and be aghast at the sick contrast of words and reality. Let's go ahead and compare, but ask - do they even refer to the same things in the first place? Did these thousands of men and boys really die in the jails these guys have some deaths in? You're supposed to presume they did, not wonder about it. But let's go ahead and wonder.

If these are the prisoners they talk about, ...Did they think to maybe feed them food? There's no order to starve them mentioned as found, and otherwise, most people understand you're on the hook to at least feed someone you've locked up. Yet the vast majority of prisoners come in to the morgue photos starved-looking to some degree, and often severe. Did they think to let the detainees bathe, ever? Or have any access to medicine? Many illnesses will contribute to such wasting, but did that many get that ill? Many have the sunken eyes and vanishing teeth and pale gums of scurvy and advanced malnutrition. They appear badly dehydrated as well, perhaps even denied drinking water. And they look horribly neglected, with unkept hair, various open sores, etc. People are left for long periods tied up by the rotting feet, most of them seemingly hanging upside down in their last moments as many of them clearly coughed up mucous and blood across their faces for still-mysterious reasons, suffered corrosive skin damage, and developed red, damaged eyes with strange yellow crust in the corners. …

It may not be true, but it is alleged this happened in regime prisons, often in accounts reflecting the photos, as if they really witnessed that all happening - or just saw the photos.

For example, "Marwan, Abu Anas" says in a VDC report he was detained at Branch 215 where "[the prisoners] didn't look like human; they were walking skeletons. Ulcerations were all over their bodies. Those who were thrown on the floor were swimming in a pool of blood and pus that ooze out of their bodies due to the lack of sanitizers and hygienic conditions." Baby-faced Mansour al-Omari swears he was covered in bugs and sores, and maybe even starved down, while he shared a cell with Nabil Sharbaji. That didn't keep them from the ridiculous 82-names list adventure, and Nabil's letters continuing well past his death ...luckily for the history books and holocaust museums...

Mazen Hamada told the New Yorker how in early 2013, after nearly a year of detention, an infection in his eye was dripping pus. The skin on his legs was gangrenous," and he was "urinating blood" before he was finally transferred to Military hospital 601, which was even worse - a "slaughterhouse" Many activists and supposed survivors have in fact claimed Hospital 601 really was a slaughterhouse inside, people shackled in filth, rotting away just inside before they were dragged out to document. In fact it could be these people are laboring to explain all the things we see in the photos - "yep, I saw that - had that - a guy died from that - "

As The Inquisitr noted, even the supposedly neutral United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry credits such claims:

"According to the United Nations Commission of Enquiry, since 2011 at least five branches of the Syrian security forces have operated wards inside Hospital 601. It was the commission’s opinion that many patients had been tortured to death within the facility." They heard the worst guard in accounts was nicknamed "Azrael, also known as the Angel of Death. He carried a stick laced with razor blades and used this on selected prisoners … took a lighter to a plastic bag and melted it, drop by drop, onto a prisoner’s face until he died." Mazen Hamada says he saw a boy burned in the neck with a blowtorch until he died, just because the boy was from Daraya.

The photos agree horrible abuses happened on a massive scale, and occasionally even things that look like those burning episodes. It would be somewhere in the Damascus-Ghouta, area or within body-driving distance of Military Hospital 601. The victims look more like they were held in a medieval dungeon, or a dungeon run by medieval-thinking people. Any of those known to be around?

Some fun things seen in the Al-Tawba prison run by the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam ("Army of Islam") in nearby Douma (use and meaning not clear) …
https://twitter.com/ShehabiFares/status/1000889222721671168

Among untold thousands taken prisoner by Jaish al-Islam and held in such places, an SAA colonel among the few eventually released from their prisons in April, 2018.
https://twitter.com/Syria_Protector/status/983706971680460802

"Abdul Rauf" told the VDC about his time in the regime's prisons, not Jaish al-Islam's. He describes starvation, swollen legs and chronic skin diseases, and this: "one of the detainees who had been tortured severely till his skin was disintegrated, then they put him in the garbage barrel for many hours, and then they throw in the bathrooms corridor "toilet" and his skin was so much rotten with a bad smell out of his wounds , and soon he was dead.  … the smell of rotten human flesh because of sores and prevalent diseases and the temperature was very high. ...  I think that the number of those who die as a result of the disease is equal to or slightly higher than the number of those who are dying under of torture ."

And here the memo says let's keep it clean, keep it healthy, and limit the deaths - the very nerve! Sick sarcasm all throughout … if we're reading it all right.

Side-Notes on Jailed SAA "Defectors"

A related thought: In all the prison stories, I still hear no word on the kind of uniforms used. Usually prisons have uniforms. I hear some wore shirts they could spare, torn into scraps to write 82 peoples' names and addresses on with blood and a chicken bone, and they were able to sew this pile of scraps into the collars and cuffs of one of their other shirts, and walk out in it. Uniforms usually get handed back in on release. So it's suggested the relevant prisons killing these thousands just didn't bother with uniforms.

I've looked at perhaps all the 6,700 photos, and catalogued about 95-97% of them. All the people I've seen are seen naked or in underwear, usually pulled down by Caesar and his crew, or left in street clothes. Or military uniforms, like these two prisoners of different branches both killed in or before March, 2013. Not appearing starved, these may be recent captures.

Is this FSA? Like, rival of no Islamists FSA? Or is this the regime jailing its own Syrian Arab Army fighters, like the Army of Islam does? In 3 years to do it, still no one has identified these two … defectors? Maybe attempted defectors of the kind FSA guys often found dead after they "refused to shoot protesters"?

Marwan Abu Anas (a claimed civilian) says he was jailed June 5, 2013 at branch 248 with "nine "soldiers" in their military uniforms and who had been charged with "attempting to defect", and who assured me that they had not had a shower for more than a month." He says he was then taken to another cell with "about 36 people; most of us were either defected soldiers, or those who had been trying to defect." That's from a hard-hitting VDC report that also cites "Abdul Rauf ...with reservation on the detention and release dates and full name for security reasons" This one says he was jammed into a huge cell that had "an area of about 15 x 4 meters and contained about one thousand detainees. Most of the detainees were soldiers and officers, who were charged with "defecting", and their number is more of the civilians, but civilians were mostly charged with demonstrating and vandalism, and possession of arms in fewer cases."

Those scare quotes suggest even these opposition guys know those soldiers never did succeed in defecting, probably didn't even try, and in fact may have loyally fought off the Islamists to their last bullet. And still, these soldiers wind up arrested, in some inhumane dungeon, as a large percentage of people held there... how can this happen, if not the way these Abu-Adbul guys describe?

Here's 215-3669, and 215-3670, killed side by side before July 7, 2013.The latter at least was also shot, at least twice in the arm, before he was detained at branch 215 and starved down, and finally killed. The tattoo between the bullet holes may be of a relevant man in a suit, but it's not clear who. Both men have tattoos suggesting they were Shia (Shi'ite). Did we have many Shi'ite or Alawite or Christian soldiers defecting to the Sunni-Islamist-dominated "FSA" in 2013, and putting up this fierce of a fight before the regime got their hands back on them? No, we didn't. But there are signs of several of them in the "Caesar photos," this one 3670 getting a bit scrambled somehow. There could be many more we don't see the signs of.

Even those possible loyal soldiers were not allowed to bathe or have clean clothes. These were washed at the end, but that probably has other reasons, related to their spitting blood despite a lack of fresh bodily injuries... Many will have been sent deeper into neglect and starvation that marks the vast majority of seen victims.

But Keep Me Updated...

A third new document shared in Channel 4's latest:

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…”

Wiley enthused: “This is a fantastic piece of evidence because it shows that the Head of Military Intelligence was briefed on every single death of an individual in his custody. He was, at his own request, consistently put on notice of the deaths of detainees for which he in law was ultimately responsible.” Dated December 18. Here's the text as animated on the video:

But the killing was routine, systematic, and apparently total. 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). This is a representative stretch of processed images in my branch 227 folder. Alleged prisoner numbers from 2638 to 2713 are all but a few accounted for, nice and sequential (first in a July 7 folder, then a "000" one, then later in August 14, and it's chronological like this running back to late 2012.). The body discussed in part 1 is included here, highlighted in blue on the right side.

I'm still missing a couple of entries, and maybe a few prisoners were spared too? But nearly every number slot filled with a body. As noted in part 1, sources disagree - Caesar and his closest associates and some witnesses claim this is the prisoner number, assigned on arrest or transfer to the branch. This doesn't hold up on analysis, but it's the allegation. The SAFMCD "Caesar" entrusted the photos with, says all these consecutive and chronological detainee numbers appearing on the dead "confirms the systematic murder process of the detainees." Others, including Carter-Ruck and Human Rights Watch, decided on their own, or heard from some limited sources, that it's an order-of-death number, and improve on the allegations by deciding that.

And whatever to make of the numbering of bodies, the volumetric number of them was undeniably massive. That's the main point here, and it's more acute than you hear - 11,000 bodies from March 2011 to August, 2013 sounds terrible but plausible for a steady killing machine trying to nip a rebellion in the bud - but the first 18 months saw relatively few of these bodies, 2,000 or so total - taking off horribly, nine-fold, as that bud was not full nipped and started to blossom, in the last 1/3 of the span. From November 2012 to August 2013, a further 9,000 or so bodies passed through this system, or about 1,000 bodies a month. That's from mapping a couple hundred seen hospital numbers matched to victim folder dates - here's a rough graphic for that:

The intel chief's request of December 18, 2012 came just about as this surge of bodies was starting. And he might know of the plan to increase the killing further in the coming months - if it were a plan hatched by his side. Did he really want an average of 30+ updates a day, all marked urgent top secret, to explain the story of each detainee that was killed as planned? How many of these alerts did the commission find? In part one, we reviewed one, then another, and heard there are at least "several." There should be thousands of these alone. Finding one shouldn't be considered a "breakthrough," as that one was.

No, this order makes more sense with occasional deaths that weren't planned, and not even of prisoners, necessarily. I mean, IF ya dead or almost-dead bod were to appear, who would take "custody" of them? If there are many, and it has some military-security importance, and requires logging as a war crime, identification, investigation, bulk cases... Military intelligence.

But he refers only to the detainees here, not to any of these alarmingly numerous unidentified bodies. I propose he was referring to real prisons run by the Syrian government, not the terrorist dungeons the photo victims were held in. He expected to hear about maybe a few a month or less. An order to keep up on all deaths doesn't prove that option, But it sure as hell doesn't prove the less logical conclusion Wiley et al. have drawn.

Summary

These three new documents add to our picture of what the regime was saying to its own, in candid, top-secret memos never meant to be seen. In particular, these orders for evil are added:

• don't arbitrarily arrest innocents
• don't beat, torture, or otherwise abuse the detainees
• implicitly, do not systematically exterminate them
• keep up the cleanliness and medical care, prevent unnecessary illness and death
• implicitly, do not toss them in pits to rot and die unseen
• keep deaths low and alert the boss of every case where efforts failed,
• implicitly, they did not want to hear about an average of 30+ killed each day.

With years of searching for the best available evidence of a systematic abuse, torture, starvation, neglect, and systematic extermination of mostly innocent people at a rate of 30+ a day, they have found those supports. This adds to what was publicized already, which was … a bit more of about the same thing. They have all these top secret papers, but they seem to be written in code that hides the stuff they really need. Because we can see the machinery of death, perhaps, being shut down here and there, pretending it's unapproved. But we still don't get to see any sign of it being started up or maintained. 

In fact, from everything we still don't see in these discussions, it's most reasonable to conclude that this long-claimed government extermination system is a fiction, perpetuated to demonize the Syrian state and obscure the true nature of this huge crime against that state and its people.

Tortured Detainee Denials

Fail Caesar, Part 11: 
Tortured Detainee Denials
September 2, 2018

rough, incomplete

They Blame Heart Attack, Illness... Terrorists... Torture
The hospital number was to cover-up the systematic murder, and link to a false death report blaming - universally - heart attack or breathing stopped. Sometimes they're said to blame a preventable illness. But they never blame neglect or abuse leading to the natural deaths, and they never credit torture or mass execution. After all, they always acknowledge the people WERE held in THEIR jails … or so it's implied.

2011 Heart Attack. Caused by Torture

The two earliest entries in the Caesar photos are in the May, 2011 folder - the only two to show how just weeks into the "peaceful protests" and "brutal crackdown", Assad's forces were already torturing detainees. One is a young man - AF intel prisoner j-201 from 5-2011. He's been identified as Zaher Ahmad Mubaied, 21, arrested at a checkpoint near Daraya and badly tortured, shown dead on opposition video (wisely, after he was seen in government hands) VDC says he died 2011-06-01 by Detention - Torture, and it lasted over a month. Notes:  "He was arrested on one of the security checkpoint on 28-4-2011 while he was going back from Somariah to Daraya, he was torture to death." Interestingly, the only thing we see of his custody is a "Caesar photo" of his body in the government's hospital, with heart testing electrodes (clearly the same lash marks, photo setting). They were checking if he was alive, maybe because they didn't know much about the apparently dead body found and processed - perhaps the first unknown body of the conflict found in the Damascus area.

The other of the two is the elderly (72?) Mahmoud al-Zoubi from Daraa is included as AF intel prisoner #j-000, at Hospital 601 presumably, in May, 2011 folder. This is not the former Prime Minister of Syria Mahmoud al-Zoubi from Daraa, who died almost exactly 11 years earlier, but they may be related. Below, that photo (right) compared to his appearance in a video (left). I made this ID myself from that, and remain totally confident of it. 

The forehead tape is blurred in the Caesar photos, in a shape matching the area of writing visible in the video. This - apparently - shows he was unidentified body #7, of at least 28 found, after murky events late on April 29 - (the day after Zaher's alleged arrest, as it happens, but in a different area). For some reason this was altered to- maybe just to obscure the implication of unidentified body? The mess here - best anyone can decipher - is a bizarre reading of his alleged death date, May 23, 2011 - after nearly a month of torturous detention. 

But really, he probably died on the a month earlier, and his body was left near the military housing compound near Saida, Daraa, along with famous boy victim Hamza al-Khatib.  

Activists claimed Hamza, Mahmoud, and several others were arrested on the 29th from a peaceful protest that was ambushed at Saida. Most or all were order to pray to Assad about a month in, but refused and were killed, then handed back to family the same day. But despite the stories, their bodies as seen on video (nine cases analyzed) clearly suggest they had spent about a month dead, slowly decaying in deep refrigeration.

The government detention-torture stories must be untrue. Or, is there some other logical reason for what we see, some "green torso torture?" At right is Hamza on May 25, half-green on the day they say he was killed, compared to a clearly false claim about Hamza's heroic last act earlier that day, from a very dubious alleged witness.

Anyway, Hamza is not included in the Caesar photos, nor is any of the other 9 victims I recognize, aside from the oldest one, Mahmoud. He's claimed as a tortured detainee with the rest. A video released at that time shows his body, which is one of two that's not so clear on advanced decay (it's possible he died later, or it's just not as evident). The video hosts related helpfully how the sheikh was killed for refusing to accept Bashar Assad as his god.

And they show an official paper related to his death, perhaps an unauthorized copy, dated May 23. The decay issue is less clear in his case, but this is probably the date of body release, not of death. It's a date activist wanted to emphasize, judging by the forehead writing. But the paper cites the prior autopsy findings (which should be from the end of April, if he's truly part of the event with Hamza, as alleged, rather than tacked-on later). Date aside, it says:

    سبب الوفاة توقف القلب (الناتج): التالي لشدة نفسية ناجمة عن العنف والتعذيب

Heart attack due to psychological distress caused by violence and "torture". 

This is apparently taken as an admission of the detention-torture story that the general decay of the victims proves is untrue. But this probably refers to "torture" by the "terrorists" who must have killed him - and perhaps Hamza, and the others. Reports at the time seemed unsure if Hamza was killed in the gun battle at the housing compound, or in another way, and labored to deny any signs of torture (perhaps wrongly). If they did see or note torture on him or any of the others, they would have to conclude it was the terrorists, who then dumped their victims, stripped of ID and probably naked, for the government to process as unknowns, numbered 1-28.

2013, Qatana: Worries, Rumors, Acknowledgments

This VDC report on 2013 admissions or alerts of alleged death of Branch 227 prisoners from the was interesting reading. In total, four incidents in the Damascus area are covered, in mostly-chronological order. For effect, we'll do it a bit different, with special focus on the second episode. As listed by the same group, and well-informed in a sense, these cover 66 men with murky ends - several who may well be included in the "Caesar photos" as well, and one that definitely is. 

March 24, 2013: Heart Attack, NOT Torture
14 victims identified -apparently without family help - and their families were alerted. "Members of the leadership of the military police in Kaboun handed over a list containing the names of fourteen martyrs of the sons of the city of Qatana - Damascus, died under torture in the Branch – 227 of military security." As if the list itself said that. 

But surprise, "When the families went to Kaboun they inquired about the cause of death, but the members of the military police responded that the causes of death were different, including heart attack, angina, and denied that any of them had died under torture." Those tricky devils.  "When families asked about the whereabouts of the bodies to receive and bury, members said and literally "they are in Tishren Military Hospital, go search for them there" It's not clear if they did so, or just how much of that is true. 

VDC lists 14 names, Qatana torture deaths 3-24-2013, 
- 2 named Buqaee, 
- 2 named Awad  (displaced by someone, from Golan), 
- Basher Esam Shuqer (detained Feb. 8 - see below)
- Ayham Ahmad Omran was identified in 2015 in the Caesar photos as 227-415 (1-11-2012). "a 25 year old single Petroleum Engineer, who was in prison before under accusation of humiliating the national feeling and conspiring to overthrow the ruling regime."
"About his arresting circumstances, al-Qatanani mentioned that a sergeant in the military security branch in the town of Qatana
known as Abo Saeed called Ayham for a matter and arrested him for no clear reason, and his death’s news reached to Qatana, but
al-Qatanani was not sure about the photo of his body."  (Zaman al-Wasl)

June 5-20, 2013: Some Illness

In June, there were notes citing as unspecified disease caught in the 227 prison, Jdaidet Artuz area many similar cases were recorded in Branch 227, including a number of Christians and Palestinians, Activist "Abu Asi" a member of a Jdaidat Artouz coordination said in his testimony to VDC." He says "the last time on 06/20/2013 municipality delivered some of the names to mayor "Ibrahim Adarir", the info "included in addition to the names of the victims, a number of the body, and also the cause of death of alleged to be some diseases in Branch 227 - Damascus." 

VDC lists 10 share a note to this effect, listed June 5, 6, and 20, all from the Jdaidet Artuz area. They weren't fooled by the disease talk, and list them as dying from torture. Two are named Marbia, one a taxi driver and the other probably not. This happens frequently. It's not clear how, but perhaps the mobile one is caught first, and the other is taken in only after a phone call to bring cash quickly... It's said the bodies were not handed over, just their things. 

Side-Notes on Artuz, Christians, Taxi Drivers, Brothers

VDC has 10 Christians listed that way and also as tortured martyrs. In Jdaidet Artuz, two such, working as workers somewhere, were killed or listed the same day in this span, 2013-05-18: Fadi Yousef Lutfy, 32 and Eid Nizar Tarben, 36. Not much detail given. They're not on the above list as dying from illness, and the branch isn't specified. 

Also listed, out of our scope but interesting: Emad Anton Khabazeh, a Christian taxi driver up in Aleppo was listed in July 2013 as "martyred under torture in the Political Security branch in Aleppo after his arrest on charges of cooperation with the FSA / / / Christian" That's how solid the Christians were against Assad. And the guy was tough. They tortured and tortured, but never did get any info on who he was helping to sneak across the Turkish border - voluntarily of course. 

Consider a Zaman al-Wasl (Lebanon) report on Ahmad Shehadeh Shanwan, a taxi driver from Damascus area, taken and killed by Air Force intelligence, on an unclear trip between Homs, the Jordanian border, and the Shia-majority Damascus suburb of Sayida Zainab - "voluntarily as is its custom in late 2011." It sounds like he was detained closest to Sayida Zainab, which is near Daraya, Artuz, these other areas around the west fringes of Damascus we're considering. The VDC apparently doesn't list him or any relatives as detained or killed (I tried for Arabic, different spellings, areas, etc. and even found a near-matching clan, Shahin, but their Ahmed seems to younger, and an "FSA" fighter), but Zaman al-Wasl ran the pic, got an ID, and lists 2 brothers also detained. The photo they published for Ahmed appears in the Caesar photos as "anonymous (unknown) branch" 648 1-7-2012. Analysis suggests he has no known prisoner number, and is unidentified body #648.


Back to the VDC report: one man they heard from claims he was one of those taken in then from Jdaidet Artouz in these days Abdul Rauf, 26, "with reservation on the detention and release dates and full name for security reasons," related all about the horrors at a couple of different prisons: "everyone was standing on his feet, and we slept while standing. ... Beatings was on a daily basis, especially beating on legs "Falaka"... swollen legs and chronic skin diseases, … one of the detainees who had been tortured severely till his skin was disintegrated, then they put him in the garbage barrel for many hours, and then they throw in the bathrooms corridor "toilet" and his skin was so much rotten with a bad smell out of his wounds , and soon he was dead.  … the smell of rotten human flesh because of sores and prevalent diseases and the temperature was very high. ...  I think that the number of those who die as a result of the disease is equal to or slightly higher than the number of those who are dying under of torture ."  

June 9, 2013: Biological Warfare Massacre Averted?

In another case on June 9, families were invited to claim somehow identified bodies, but the VDC heard the bodies were "rotten and contagious because of the disease spread among the detainees so the families were afraid to go there because of that disease and the [fear] of getting detained , the bodies are still there and we don’t know what happened to them." (for this they list 20 men from a few families from Qadam). 

An Official Acknowledgement?

An official letter said to relate to this is shown in the VDC report. Local Coordinating Committees logo on the photo of it. The header date looks strange, but seems reasonable: 201_/d/m, filled in 3/6/6. As cited in the report, it says:

“No objection to handing the dead body of the arrested (name is hidden) who died on 20th 11 2012... with body No.(hidden) by the intelligence department /Branch 227, due to the letter from the aforementioned Branch and in case of burial, to give his family a legal letter of death”

Staff Colonel Ra’eif Abdulsalam: Head of Investigation Department 

This letter makes no mention of disease, torture, or anything as to cause of death, but they do seem to know the death date. And it refers to a "detainee." (I don't suppose the word used can be ambiguous?) The letter says they have "no objection" to returning the bodies, but somehow this didn't always happen. In these cases, it never seems to.

May 31, 2013: The True Story?

But interesting as all that is, the second cited case at the end of May stands out. About a week before  the letter cited above was sent around, again in Qatana, news surfaced of 19 locals killed, allegedly under torture in the 227 branch. Citing activist "Khal Abu Ahmed" the report states:

“Two days or three before the second list of names, news leaked among the families that there is a new list contains many of names of martyrs who have died under torture, and the detachment of military security in the Katana is the source of this leakage, but the families did not take it seriously, where they thought they only broadcast terror in the hearts of activists." 

Were the officials really the primary source for these rumors? That's presumed, but other parties might be slipping tidbits they shouldn't know, themselves having some interest in terrorizing some people in their areas of attempted control. Right? 

But as the report says, a couple days later, on May 31, that new list appeared. A letter was sent from Qaboun "to the Municipal Council of Qatana "containing the names of 19 martyrs and asked them [families?] to also go to the leadership of the military police in Kaboun to receive their stuff." "Among the names of the victims there were many persons from Golan south of Syria, who fled to the city." The VDC eventually got 22 names for Qatana, 5-31-2013 torture deaths noted so:

"Martyred in the regime's military police's branch 227 (district branch), the families were informed of the prisoner's death through the municipal office by the military police members, the martyr's personal stuff and ID were handed to them, but the bodies are not yet received by the family."

So they got them to come in, and said "sorry, those guys we arrested just got sick, or died of "heart failure" right? This is how we're told the system worked. But in this case, the report explains:

Families went the detachment of military security in the city asking about the reason for the death of their sons, the answer of detachment members was as follows: "You know the terrorist armed groups kidnaped them and killed them." 

This is something I can totally see them saying, something that I suspect is the truth. The Syrian side has been quite silent about the possible content of the photographs (see here), aside from an early statement by the Syrian Ministry of Justice that the photos showed "unidentified persons" killed in the foreign-backed violence. Some were militants killed in clashes, they said (few if any of those I've seen look like that), and others were "civilians and military personnel who were tortured and killed by the armed terrorist groups because of their support to the state." A vest majority of those I've seen do look like they could be just such people. 

But here we're considering bodies identified and offered back in 2013, not those hidden away and documented only secretly with the Caesar photos. Some of those listed:

- Six listed as displaced (by whom?) from Golan: Mahmoud Mousa Khames, Ahmad Ismael Khames (both from Golan, Hawadja tribe), Ammar al-Haj Tayser (photo), Omar Abdelbari al-Najjar, Mohammad Adel Basouneh, Mamoun Mohammad Al-Awad ("another source said his name is Mamon Mohammad Awad Sharabi" The 3-24 batch contained 2 men named Awad, both noted as Golanis as well)

- Jamal Abdo Hamoud: civilian like the rest ("another source said that he was an Army Officer") 

- Mahmoud al-Sheikh: age 68, photo. Notes: "Known as (Abo Abdo al-Mondalan),Arrested on 1/5/2013, he is the father of the martyr Rasheed al-Sheikh, Martyred in the regime's military police's branch 227..."

- Khaldoun Abdo Shuqear: Arrested on 1/10/2012). From the ID card and previously reported ID, I can be sure he's also included in Caesar photos, as disappeared detainee 227-663, 1-11-2012. He has (unidentified body?) number H#2538 (from another photo I have - no need to show here).

Zaman al-Wasl (Lebanon) reported in 2015 Even disabled die under torture in Assad’s prisons: Caesar’s photos. The man "called Khaldoon Abdo Shokair … suffered of difficulties in speaking and deformation in his face and legs which limited his movement, therefore he needed to used a small modified motorcycle to move in Qatana." As far as I can tell his mind was fine. He was "married and a father of one daughter," and got arrested by Assad's thugs from his work in a local bakery on October 1. (this useful article offers other photo matches from Qatana, which I'll be comparing to these early reports and adding to the post)

- Ziad Shuqair: an apparent relative (arrest date not noted)

- Asem Haytham Shuqaer: another apparent relative (Arrested on 1/12/2013 - a year later? no - mixed date formats. January 12.)

Recall another Shuqair was reported killed on March 24, just taken in in February. It's not clear how the authorities belatedly attained these four ID of men from the same family, other than from their relatives. But here, they know first and alert the families. Did someone who knew the case even better give them a belated tip?

- Majd al-Taki (Abo Ayman) is listed. In 2015, he would be identified as 227-1498 (3-2013) "...the second victim who had a sticker of number 1498 on his front. He was 38 years old, married and had two daughters, according to al-Qatanani.  Abo Ayman was a carpenter, arrested at one of regime’s barriers under accusation of distributing aid. “I know him in person, he was a good and respected man, his death under torture was a shock for us” al-Qatanani said. (Zaman al-Wasl)

- A Husam Doha is listed. An Ammar Idnan Doha would be listed on June 20 an in 2015. 227-410 (1-11-2012) was identified as Adham Dhoha, 26, dentistry student. "Al-Qatanani mentioned that Dhoha was arrested because of medical equipment were found in his field , and his death was announce a month after arresting." (Zaman al-Wasl)

conclusion…

Now consider the above cases in light of this list, from observation, of who among the Syrian people terrorists might kidnap, kill, and perhaps torture along the way:

- soldiers, police, all forces of order, on or off-duty

- non-Sunnis

- non-Salafist Sunnis

- Informers, anyone who opposes them, supports the government

- people who wouldn't make good fighter anyway

- people who would make great fighters, but refuse

- victims of robbery and witnesses to other crimes (including people who bring ransom money for someone else)

Those they'd like to have "Assad" seen as killing, and so might kill for little or no other reason:

- the above, if possible, especially:

- those Syria has championed; Palestinians, Golanis: this shows the Islamist uprising and global jihad are their salvations, not outmoded secular regimes

- peaceful, promising, known activists who reject Islamism and militancy: this keeps the Islamist militants off the hook, and makes the turn to violent Islamism that favors them seem to be "Assad's fault."

- young, old, chubby, disabled: no threat, but killed anyway. This proves the mindless evil the growing and decreasingly opposed armies of Islam are up against.

- gay people, the unborn, cats and dogs, ancient churches, anyone or anything someone out there loves and wants to protect