The man who exposed human rights abuses under the Assad government now calls for the lifting of sanctions on Syria
The Syrian whistleblower known as Caesar, who documented countless cases of human rights abuses during the time of the Bashar al-Assad government, revealed himself as First Lieutenant Farid al-Madhhan in an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday.
Madhhan, who originates from the southern city of Daraa, said he was the head of the Forensic Evidence Department of the Military Police in Damascus before fleeing his country with over 54,000 pictures of victims of torture, starvation, murder and other crimes in the Syrian government’s detention centres in 2024.
“The orders to photograph and document the crimes of Bashar al-Assad’s regime came from the highest levels of power to ensure that executions were carried out,” he said.
According to him, at the start of the anti-government protests in Syria in 2011, about 10 to 15 bodies would be brought into the security branches he worked in each day. By 2013, that number increased to 50 a day.
Most of these cases would have “cardiac arrest” as a listed cause for their death, which would later be known as a euphemism for death under torture.
Explaining how he smuggled out the images, Madhhan said he used “hidden memory cards inside his clothing and loaves of bread...
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