The new photographs could provide more information to family members about the fates of missing loved ones, and more undeniable evidence to the rest of the world about the crimes against humanity and war crimes carried out by the Assad regime, which used detention and torture to instil widespread fear and maintain control.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/JIND74EXARGHJPOY6CR3S7QCZA.jpg\")
A family member holds a photo of Abdullah Hussein Al-Akhras with his children before he was imprisoned. Photograph: Sally Hayden <\/p>\n
They were kept on a hard drive by a former colonel in Syria<\/a>\u2019s military police. The man, who spoke under the condition that he is not named, leaked them to German broadcaster NDR, which shared the photographs with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists<\/a> (ICIJ), of which The Irish Times is a partner.<\/p>\n The Irish Times became aware of the existence of the leaked photographs in October and has advocated for consulting victims\u2019 families regarding their release.<\/p>\n The data is also in the possession of the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research, a non-governmental organisation which is led by Syrian human rights lawyer Anwar al-Bunni, as well as the German Federal General Prosecutor. Germany has universal jurisdiction, meaning it can prosecute certain serious crimes carried out anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n The ICIJ has also gained access to tens of thousands of files leaked from Syrian intelligence agencies. It is not clear whether Syrian authorities have the photographs and documents or how they will get them. A list of more than 1,500 names of people who are dead or whose arrests were recorded has been shared with the UN\u2019s Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, and survivors-led initiative Ta\u2019afi.<\/p>\n The full number of photographs is significantly larger than the amount smuggled out by a military defector code-named Caesar, the existence of which became known<\/a> in January 2014, prompting a global outcry.<\/p>\n More than 33,000 photographs of former detainees are included in the new leak, with more than 70,000 photographs in total, and <\/b>are mostly believed to have been taken in 2015-2024. At least 10,212 detainees are pictured, according to an analysis by journalists. The majority are not identified with names but with numbers on white paper or material affixed to their bodies.<\/p>\n WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT. Leak of Assad torture photos reveals fate of thousands. Video: The Irish Times <\/p>\n Many of the bodies bear clear signs of torture, including emaciation, bruising, bloodied and swollen faces, bloodied body parts, bandaged limbs, visible lacerations and missing teeth. Nearly half of the bodies are naked and about three-quarters show signs of starvation, according to an analysis of more than 540 photographs by journalists from NDR, German newspaper S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ. Two-thirds show signs of physical harm.<\/p>\n The man who supplied the photographs led the \u201cEvidence Preservation Unit\u201d of the military police in Damascus in 2020 until December 2024. In an interview with NDR he said he was leaking the data \u2013 which had been stored on a hard-drive in his possession \u2013 because he finally had the opportunity to do so when the regime fell. \u201cThere are matters that people have to know. Dead people, their families have to know where they are. Missing people.\u201d<\/p>\n His department\u2019s role, he said, was \u201cdocumentation\u201d: recording \u201cevery incident that happens in Damascus and the countryside of Damascus in pictures\u201d. That included taking photographs of dead \u201csecurity detainees\u201d, usually in Harasta hospital. \u201cEverything is official,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Reporters from the ICIJ believe the photographs include victims from at least six different security branches. The numbers on the bodies appear to indicate both a branch code and a death sequence number. The photographs also include metadata, including a date and time, though it is not clear if this is always accurate.<\/p>\n Many of those photographed in clothes have their trousers and underwear pulled down and their T-shirts pulled up, to expose their torsos. Some were photographed with someone else\u2019s feet touching their head (it is not clear if this was to steady them, or meant as a sign of disrespect). Some were photographed with other corpses visible beside them, with photographs of different bodies taken seconds apart, according to the metadata.<\/p>\n \u2018He didn\u2019t harm anyone\u2019<\/p>\n In a humble home in the Syrian town of Ghabagheb, in Daraa, Akhras\u2019s family flinched in horror as they recognised him in the photographs, which they had never seen before.<\/p>\n His sister, Mariam al-Akhras (35), began to cry. \u201cHe was really a very kind person, he didn\u2019t harm anyone in his life,\u201d she said. Other family members immediately asked whether there were more pictures of other people: they have other missing relatives and are desperate for information about them too.<\/p>\n Akhras \u2013 a former conscript turned military defector, born in 1992 \u2013 was arrested and imprisoned <\/b>by the regime <\/b>in September 2023. Shortly before, he was caught in Turkey attempting to find a route to Europe and deported to Syria. His father and wife visited him six times in the notorious Sednaya prison<\/a>, but those visits lasted minutes and the jailers stood right beside him, recalled Marwa Jamal el-Ali (32). <\/p>\n When she asked her husband how he was, he could just say \u201ceverything is okay\u201d but he looked \u201ctired\u201d and asked for medicines.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Sally Hayden goes inside Syria\u2019s Sednaya prisonOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I met him for the last time he was in a very bad health condition, he was not able to stand,\u201d said his father, Hussein al-Akhras (64). <\/p>\n Akhras\u2019s family sold property to pay bribes, realising this might be the only way to save his life: his father estimates they paid at least 65,000,000 Syrian pounds in total. Yet his son died shortly after their last visit. Chaker Moussa Alhboes (38), a neighbour who was imprisoned in Sednaya at the same time, said all detainees were starved and beaten, and Akhras was denied medical care.<\/p>\n Unlike many other families, Akhras\u2019s were informed he had died and were allowed to collect his body. They believe this was because they had paid so much money in bribes and his case was still going through an official legal process. When they received his body there was no trace of the code it had been officially photographed with.<\/p>\n Now they are calling for accountability and justice, as well as help and assistance for the family.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone who took money\u201d should be held accountable, said Marwa. \u201cThe smugglers who took money, the judges, the soldiers …\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe need trials for everyone who was in this failed corrupt state,\u201d said her brother, Ahmad Jamal el-Ali.<\/p>\n The Caesar photos<\/p>\n The Caesar photos \u2013 which documented the deaths of about 6,786 people \u2013 were taken in May 2011-August 2013 of detainees mostly held by five intelligence branches in Damascus. Their existence became public in early 2014, after military photographer Farid Al-Madhan risked his life to smuggle them out.<\/p>\n Al-Madhan would later testify anonymously in front of the UN Security Council and the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, while the photographs were displayed in locations including the United States Holocaust Memorial museum and the United Nations headquarters<\/a> in New York. <\/p>\n They prompted a wave of sanctions, named after Caesar, which were passed into law in the US in late 2019. Al-Madhan only revealed his real identity in February this year, following the regime\u2019s fall.<\/p>\n Much of the shocked response to the Caesar photographs was tied to the realisation that the regime itself was documenting and indexing its crimes, with apparent certainty that it could operate with total impunity.<\/p>\n The new photographs are likely to raise more horror that this continued for another decade, and big questions about how much more should have been done to make this system of state-controlled torture and abuse stop much earlier.<\/p>\n Among the photographs are previously unseen pictures of Mazen Hamada, the Syrian human rights <\/b>activist who became a symbol of his country\u2019s suffering.<\/p>\n Hamada escaped to the Netherlands, but he returned to Syria in 2020 and immediately disappeared. His body was discovered when the Assad regime fell, and he was given a funeral days later. He appears to be wearing the same clothes in the photographs found in the database and those taken when his body was eventually found.<\/p>\n If accurate, the metadata from the leaked photographs mean he was dead by September 28th, 2024, rather than dying in the days before the regime fell in early December 2024, as was previously reported.<\/p>\n \u2018A system of state terror\u2019<\/p>\n About half a million people were killed over nearly 14 years of war in Syria \u2013 including more than 200,000 civilians<\/a> killed by the Assad regime \u2013 while more than 160,000 people<\/a> were forcibly disappeared by the regime between 2011 and last year, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.<\/p>\n By 2016 the United Nations Human Rights Council had already<\/a> determined that the Syrian regime had carried out \u201cthe crimes against humanity of extermination, murder, rape or other forms of sexual violence, torture, imprisonment, enforced disappearance and other inhuman acts\u201d regarding its treatment of detainees, along with war crimes.<\/p>\n \u201cWe really haven\u2019t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,\u201d said Stephen Rapp, a former US war crimes ambassador-at-large, about the Assad regime\u2019s crimes last year.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing. We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death.\u201d<\/p>\n In the days after the regime fell, tens of thousands of Syrians made their way to security branches, hospitals and the notorious Sednaya prison, searching for any trace of their missing loved ones.<\/p>\n Hundreds of posters were stuck to walls in central Damascus and other cities, bearing pictures of the missing and the phone numbers of relatives.<\/p>\n Mass graves also began to be discovered, with some family members even digging themselves in an attempt to find information about the fates of their loved ones. For many, there soon came the realisation that answers may not be forthcoming. Some of those affected may now find answers in the new photographs, though these are also certain to cause immeasurable suffering too.<\/p>\n Along with ousted president Bashar al-Assad, many former senior regime officials fled to Russia, and some to Lebanon, while others remain<\/a> unaccounted for.<\/p>\n There are questions about how the new authorities will deal with issues such as transitional justice, in a country still devastated by almost 14 years of war. One of those questions regards where all of the missing have been buried. When The Irish Times visited<\/a> the site of a mass grave in Damascus neighbourhood Tadamon, six months after the regime\u2019s fall, it had not been secured and human bones were visible on the ground.<\/p>\n Two new commissions have been set up, focused on transitional justice and the search for the missing. But some family members say they have been disappointed with the lack of engagement by the new authorities.<\/p>\n Seeking justice<\/p>\n One big difference is how the families of the missing can now come together and speak freely inside Syria. Members of the Caesar Families Association recently gathered in the organisation\u2019s new office in Damascus, to talk to The Irish Times.<\/p>\n![\"Defaced](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/6PTSFGTRB6CVBVQQ4VLXN4CZXE.jpg\")
Defaced portraits of ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad outside a municipal building in Aleppo, Syria, following the collapse of his regime in December 2024. Photograph: Ivor Prickett\/The New York Times
\n ![\"Images](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/KRLAFCXWF5E4DFSNMTRMTWI3SA.jpg\")
Images of detainees who perished in Assad-era prisons and detention facilities. Photograph: The Irish Times <\/p>\n![\"Abdullah's](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/X3ZULWFPARAEDI5PE4NHHTCJZY.jpg\")
Abdullah’s wife Marwa Jamal el-Ali stands with their daughter in Ghabaghib, southern Syria. Photograph: Sally Hayden <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/6QR6XW3DFJF4HAFHEZR3JA4XP4.jpg\")
A blurred image of the body of Abdullah Hussein Al-Akhras. This picture has been published with the consent of his family. <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/6RCXLDRVV5BQFH5B73TB2Z4CSM.jpg\")
A Syrian army police photographer defector known as ‘Caesar’ (blue jacket) at the hearings on Capitol Hill in 2014. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n![\"Family](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/O53GFQ5OCVFADNQFXMJEH4BMOY.jpg\")
Family members of missing people search inside Sednaya prison on December 9th, 2024. Photograph: Sally Hayden ![\"Posters](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/36E3EA5D22JXT2UWZCLFGH5UDU.jpg\")
Posters of missing people after the fall of the Assad government in Damascus, January 2025. Photograph: David Guttenfelder\/The New York Times<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/UYZNIWTIQ6JVLKB4DBV57V4CIU.jpg\")
A rebel fighter walks past a defaced picture of toppled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in a military base in Damascus 2024. Photograph: Sameer Al-Doumy\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n