Middle East
Syrian’s Photos Spur Outrage, but Not Action
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~WASHINGTON
— Wearing a blue hood to shield his identity, a former Syrian police
photographer briefed a congressional committee over the summer on the
photos he had smuggled out of the country to document the deaths of
thousands of prisoners killed in President Bashar al-Assad’s
jails. At a White House meeting, President Obama’s senior aides
welcomed him as a man of uncommon courage who had revealed unspeakable
atrocities.
But
now the Syrian government’s most celebrated defector, who uses the
pseudonym Caesar, is no longer optimistic that the United States has the
will to stop the abuses that have shocked the conscience of the world.
His photographs
have generated outrage but no fresh action against the Assad
government. And instead of intervening militarily to support opponents
of Mr. Assad, Mr. Obama is mounting airstrikes to defend Kurds, Yazidis
and Turkmen in Syria and Iraq from the Islamic State.
“I
completely understand how he came to the defense of two American
victims killed by the extremist ISIS terror group,” Caesar said in a
message earlier this month from an undisclosed location in Europe that
was conveyed by the Coalition for Democratic Syria,
a Syrian-American organization that sponsored his trip to Washington.
“But I and millions of Syrians feel depressed when we see that the
killer of thousands of prisoners is left unchecked,” he added. “I
believe my cause demands action and a clear position by the president of
the United States.”
Graphic
Areas Under ISIS Control
A visual guide to the crisis in Iraq and Syria.
Caesar’s
complaint reflects a broader discontent within the moderate Syrian
opposition that is posing a new challenge for the Obama administration’s
strategy to counter the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or
ISIL. While ruling out United States military intervention against Mr.
Assad, the administration has committed to training thousands of
opposition fighters in Saudi Arabia and Turkey so they can eventually
defend territory in Syria that is wrested from the Islamic State’s
control. But those fighters must come from the same constituency that
has been increasingly troubled by the American reluctance to act more
forcefully against Mr. Assad.
“There
is a sense that there is discrimination against them, that the
atrocities they are suffering at the hands of Assad are somehow less
deserving than what is befalling other communities,” said Emile Hokayem,
an expert on Middle East affairs at the International Institute for
Strategic Studies. “For most of these rebels, Assad is the greatest
evil, not ISIL. For the U.S., it is the opposite,” he said.
Robert S. Ford,
a former American ambassador to Syria and a senior fellow at the Middle
East Institute, said the administration’s twin policies of carrying out
airstrikes to protect the Kurdish community in Syria while refraining
from direct military support for Arab opponents of Mr. Assad might
backfire.
“It
will make recruiting harder for an American-trained force, and indeed,
in the short term, might help ISIL gain recruits by helping it pose,
however falsely, as defenders of Sunni Arabs,” Mr. Ford said.
The
White House appears sensitive to the importance of Caesar’s role.
Answering a letter Caesar sent in late July to the president, Mr.
Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Benjamin J. Rhodes, wrote last
week that the aim of the American program to train moderate opposition
was to help it not only contend with the “barbaric threat of the Islamic
State” but also to defend itself “from the brutality of the Assad
regime.”
No
one has done more to expose that brutality than Caesar. Described as
mild-mannered and not particularly political, he has become a compelling
element of the Syrian narrative because he emerged from the darkest
side of the Assad government.
Caesar
was photographing accident scenes for the military police when the
Syrian conflict erupted. He and several fellow photographers soon found
themselves photographing dozens of bodies a day, many of which displayed
signs of torture.............................................
Convinced
that he was documenting war crimes, Caesar downloaded copies of the
photos on thumb drives, sneaked them out of his office and transferred
them to a hard drive, keeping a grisly record of the deaths for more
than two years. But when asked to train a successor, he became alarmed
that the government might be on to him, and he defected, taking a hard
drive that he says documents more than 10,000 deaths.
Senior American officials say his account and the photographic record he has provided are credible.
“You
see the evidence of broken bones, of the use of chemicals, of
strangulation, of evisceration, of eye-gouging, of starvation,” said
Stephen J. Rapp, who serves as the State Department’s ambassador at
large for issues involving war crimes. “And it is all being done in a
state security system.”
The
photos are important for another reason. Russia’s veto power in the
United Nations Security Council has prevented war crimes allegations
against Mr. Assad from being referred by that body to the International
Criminal Court. But if any of the victims in the photos can be
identified as Syrians who also hold American or other foreign
citizenship, that would make it easier for the United States or other
governments to hold Syrian officials accountable in their legal systems.
According
to a written agreement between the Caesar team and the State
Department, the defector provided in April 26,948 photographs of people
who had died in the Syrian government’s custody. In return, the F.B.I.
was to analyze the authenticity of the photos and provide assessments of
its findings.
The
pace of that work, however, has become another source of friction.
Mouaz Moustafa, the representative for Caesar in Washington, said that
Caesar’s team wants to pursue legal cases against members of the Assad
government in European countries and believes the F.B.I.’s efforts to
identify any American and foreign citizens among the victims has been
moving too slowly.
Reflecting
its unhappiness, Caesar’s team has yet to give the United States the
rest of the 55,000 photos and says it may seek the help of photo
analysts in other governments or nongovernmental agencies. A senior
American law enforcement official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss
the issue, said that authenticating the photos was complex and
painstaking and that there was no timetable for completing the work.
American
officials have culled about 4,800 photos from the nearly 27,000 the
F.B.I. received and compared them against visa and passport photos in
the State Department’s database and with photos in a separate terrorism
database. Representative Ed Royce, the California Republican who serves
as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and who also shares
concerns about the methodical pace of the work on the photos, said that
American officials had identified at least seven likely matches, though
it is not clear whether any are foreign citizens.
Caesar,
however, has looked to the United States for more than evidence for a
possible war crimes trial. When he visited Washington last summer, he
was hoping that his trip would lead to more forceful American action.
Besides
testifying before Mr. Royce’s panel, Caesar sought a meeting with Susan
E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, his aides say. Told she
was not available, he scribbled a note in Arabic to Mr. Obama, which he
gave to Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United
Nations, at an emotional meeting at the State Department.
“I
have risked my life and the life of my immediate family, and even
exposed my relatives to extreme danger, in order to stop the systematic
torture that is practiced by the regime against prisoners,” Caesar
wrote. “What is it that you can possibly do to prevent the killing,
especially since there are more than 150,000 prisoners in the jails of
the regime awaiting this black fate?”
The
White House did not want Caesar to leave Washington without a meeting,
and one was organized with Mr. Rhodes and Jake Sullivan, who was serving
then as the national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden
Jr........................................................
Explaining
that he was speaking on behalf of the president, Mr. Rhodes praised
Caesar’s courage and voiced the hope that Caesar’s photos would shame
others not to help the regime.
Emad
ad-Din al-Rashid, a former assistant dean at a college in Damascus who
attended the meeting with Caesar, told the White House officials it
would be painful if the United States joined forces with Mr. Assad to
combat the Islamic State. Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Sullivan were adamant that
the administration had no such intention.
But the meeting also underscored the differing expectations about the role the United States should play.
Though
Mr. Rhodes mentioned the humanitarian aid the United States has
provided and alluded to the effort to train moderate Syrian rebels, Mr.
Rashid said he had told the White House that it risked losing the
support of the Syrian public if it did not stop the Assad government
from dropping barrel bombs on Syrian cities.
“The
Syrian people are slowly coming to a realization that the United States
does not value their lives,” Mr. Rashid recalled warning the White
House aides.
In
his Oct. 20 letter, which came nearly three months after Caesar’s
letter to the president, Mr. Rhodes reaffirmed that the Pentagon would
“train and equip Syria’s moderate opposition.” But his response still
fell short of the sort of action Caesar had sought.
“Your
letter mentions that more than 150,000 people are still in Assad’s
custody,” Mr. Rhodes wrote. “The United States Government has
consistently condemned the regime’s failures to grant independent
monitors access to detainees. We will continue to push for full access
to all detainees in Syria, just as we will push to bring the
perpetrators of atrocities in Syria to justice.”~~~~~
---{=@
Hickok
Cara Mia, Mine
The Promise
No comments:
Post a Comment