His brother was disappeared by the Assad regime. 13 years later, leaked photos confirm how he died
Leaked files lay bare scale of torture in Syria, including severe injuries and signs of malnutrition
نسخة باللغة العربية عن الموضوع نفسه من موقع راديو كندا الدولي
Read this story in Arabic on Radio-Canada International.
WARNING: This story contains images of dead bodies and graphic physical injuries.
Thaer al-Najjar and his family had searched for his brother Imad in vain for 13 years, ever since he was violently arrested in 2012 by the security forces of Syria's former Assad regime.
After the government was overthrown in December 2024 and dictator Bashar al-Assad fled, Najjar even made multiple trips with one of his sons to a notorious prison outside Damascus where the regime murdered thousands of captives. They hoped they might find some trace of Imad.
"We went to the cells inside," Najjar said. "Imad was a painter and he used to paint on walls, so we were looking at the walls, hoping that we could find any of his paintings."
After all that time and all that searching, Najjar, a 57-year-old blacksmith, was now holding a piece of paper given to him by a reporter that confirmed what he'd feared. One of tens of thousands of records and photographs from the Assad regime leaked to journalists, it was a death certificate containing three lines of typed Arabic text.
"While providing treatment to the detainee, Imad Saeed al-Najjar, in the emergency department, he did not respond to resuscitation, despite the continued attempt for 30 minutes until the moment of death," it read. It was dated Aug. 14, 2012 — 10 days after Imad was hauled away by Assad's security forces, Thaer al-Najjar said. Imad had participated in peaceful protests as part of the revolution that broke out the year before against Syria's dictatorship.
As he read those lines in the basement office of a Damascus hotel in September, Najjar's face crumpled and he started to sob. He rushed out of the room, his cries echoing down the corridor.
The murder of Imad al-Najjar is one of thousands committed by Assad's forces that are captured in a huge compilation of government files and photos known as the Damascus dossier.
The 134,000 Syrian security and intelligence records were obtained by German public broadcaster NDR, which shared them with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its global network of media partners, including CBC News.
The leaked records include 70,000 images — many of them gruesome photos of torture victims' bodies taken and catalogued by Syrian military police — as well as 64,000 files from Syrian intelligence agencies, including many death certificates and arrest reports.
Journalists who analyzed the photos were able to count 10,212 bodies of detainees. The images mostly range from 2015 through 2024. Until now, the Syrian public did not know about the existence of the photos.
‘Bureaucracy of torture’
During Syria's 13-year civil war, the Assad regime detained, tortured and killed thousands of the country’s citizens, aiming to extinguish all signs of dissent. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that more than 150,000 people were arrested and "forcibly disappeared" by Assad's forces since the war began in 2011.
When the regime finally collapsed, thousands of people like Thaer al-Najjar renewed their search for their missing loved ones. They flocked to prisons, hospitals and mass grave sites; they rummaged through strewn paperwork and examined bodies in hospital morgues, hoping to find long-lost family members or, at least, a sense of closure about their fates.
But many thousands of Syrians found nothing, and whatever hope they had turned to agony as they feared they might never learn what the government had done to their family members.
The Damascus dossier finally tells the story of what happened to many of those people. It's a very important discovery, says René Provost, a law professor at McGill University in Montreal whose research focuses on the protection of victims of armed conflict.
"Families of people who were disappeared by the Assad regime [may] finally know what's happened to their loved ones," he said.
Provost said the leaked files and photos could also prove invaluable for criminal investigations and potentially prosecutions against officials of the Assad regime.
"Here, we see that a true system was put into place, a true bureaucracy of torture and execution, and such a bureaucracy can only be put into place with the knowledge and consent of those at the very top of the Syrian regime," he said.
Syrian officer compiled photos
The photos in the Damascus dossier were originally compiled by a former Syrian officer who served as the head of the Evidence Preservation Unit of the military police in Damascus between 2020 and 2024, who provided the images to a source who then shared them with NDR. Other records from intelligence agencies were separately leaked to NDR.
"There are things people need to know," the officer said in an interview with NDR. "There are people whose families need to know where they are and what happened to them."
The photos have already been independently shared with German authorities, who have been at the forefront of prosecuting crimes against former members of the Assad regime, and the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research, a German NGO that works to expose Syrian human rights violations and defend victims of such crimes.
Where detainees’ names were included in the photos, journalists from NDR and the ICIJ extracted those names, and NDR shared them with four entities: the United Nations’ Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria; the Syrian Network for Human Rights; Ta’afi, an initiative that provides resources to Syrian victims of detention and torture; and the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research.
Photos provided proof orders were carried out
It's not the first time someone within the Syrian government snuck out a huge set of evidence of the regime's brutality.
A military defector codenamed Caesar provided 55,000 images of emaciated and mutilated corpses, bodies with eyes missing or showing signs of electrocution or strangulation, to Assad's opponents before fleeing the country more than a decade ago. That set off a series of international prosecutions and sanctions against the Syrian government.
The leaker, Caesar, who revealed his identity earlier this year, explained that military officers were tasked with photographing bodies to prove that orders of murder had been carried out.
"The officers in the regime, soldiers, et cetera, needed to prove to their higher command that they were actually fulfilling the orders of killing and torturing civilians in these horrific ways," he told CBC's The Fifth Estate in a 2017 interview.
"[It]'s important to remember that they don't see a consequence for actions that they do, so even in documenting these things they believe that they are above international law."
The new collection of images shows the severity and magnitude at which Syrian authorities continued the killings for 11 more years after the Caesar files end, as well as the macabre process of photographing and categorizing the prisoners’ bodies.
Starved, naked and beaten
To better understand the realities captured in leaked photos, a team of reporters from ICIJ, NDR, and the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung conducted an analysis of a randomized sample of 540 photographs, showing 565 bodies, and found that three in four of the victims bore signs of starvation and nearly two-thirds showed signs of physical harm.
Almost half of the bodies were naked — left exposed on the floor or a metal surface.
The Damascus dossier images show that as each prisoner died, he or she was transported, photographed and catalogued.
In almost all cases the person's detainee number was written on a white card placed on their body, written in marker on their arm, leg, torso or forehead, or superimposed on the photo. A military photographer, wearing rubber boots or surgical covers on his feet, snapped photos of the body from multiple angles and then filed the images in meticulously organized digital folders.
The images are carefully titled to include information on the inmate’s number, the first name of the photographer, the date the photo was taken and, in many cases, the security branch that arrested the prisoner, including Military Police, the Air Force Intelligence Directorate and the General Intelligence Directorate.
Syria's intelligence services have faced wide-ranging sanctions in Canada, United States and Europe amid concerns about their brutality, which included torture and sexual violence.
Bruised body of prominent activist
In total, NDR and the ICIJ interviewed seven families whose loved ones’ deaths are verified in the Damascus dossier records. In some cases, like Najjar's, the records were the first evidence the families received that their relatives had died.
Among the relatives journalists spoke to was the family of activist Mazen al-Hamada, whose body was found after the fall of the Assad regime.
He is shown in the photos lying in his prison uniform atop a marble floor, the imprint of restraints on his wrists. His bare feet are bruised. His body is labelled as detainee number 1174.
Hamada escaped to the Netherlands in 2013 and spent the next seven years speaking out about the horrors he had both witnessed and endured in prison, hoping to convince world leaders to bring Assad to justice.
Finally, in 2020, he returned home in desperation hoping he could convince Syrian authorities to liberate those still trapped behind bars, including his own nephew.
But he was detained immediately upon arrival at the airport in Damascus, and his loved ones never saw or heard from him again — until the discovery of his body last December.
"We got rid of the tyrannical regime that was in place, and enjoy to some extent an atmosphere of freedom and relief from a great nightmare on the Syrian people. And it was through the sacrifices of Mazen and the martyrs," his brother Fawzi al-Hamada said.
"We, at least, have found his body, whereas there are thousands of families who still know nothing."
With files from Zach Dubinsky, Frédéric Zalac and Sheena Goodyear, as well as David Kenner, Nicole Sadek and Karrie Kehoe of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists