Massacre Files from Syria -Part Five

Syrian military victims

Top-secret documents tie Bashar

regime to mass annihilation.

Selected from a shocking report investigation published by New Yorker

The investigation starts narrating the continuous brave triers inside Syria, to collect several documents of torturing and brutal executions inside Bashar administration and his direct ties on them.

Part Five

THE INVESTIGATORS

One day in October, 2011, while Bill Wiley was visiting a Libyan exile in Niger, he received a phone call from a friend, relaying a request from the British government: as the crisis in Syria spiralled into civil war, it was looking for someone to train activists to document human-rights violations. Wiley told the caller that plenty of groups were already cataloguing the abuses. But he had a counter-proposal: he could train Syrians to collect the type of evidence that would better serve a prosecution, tracing criminal culpability up as high as it went. It was a novel approach—instead of raising awareness of crimes, he intended to pin them on state actors, whether or not the international community sanctioned the investigation. The British government approved of the idea.

Wiley’s career had intersected with a resurgence of the field of international criminal law; since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, there had been no major international investigations until the atrocities in the Balkans, in the nineteen-nineties, led to the Yugoslavia tribunal. Wiley, who had completed a Ph.D. in international criminal law at York University while serving in the Canadian Army—he wrote his dissertation on war crimes and the evolution of international humanitarian law—became an analyst at the tribunal. In 2002, he traveled to Kigali to investigate war crimes in Rwanda, and the following year he moved to the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he was the first investigator retained by the International Criminal Court.

Wiley, who considers himself “a field guy, not an office guy,” is tall, with reddish-blond hair, and handles the considerable stress of his profession with Cuban cigarillos, gallows humor, and exercise. (At the age of fifty-two, he bench-presses more than three hundred and fifty pounds.) While working for the I.C.C., he came to believe that the international court system was often afflicted by upper-management “incompetence.” Since its launch, in 2002, the I.C.C. has opened nine investigations, spent more than a billion dollars, and secured convictions against three men: two warlords and a former politician, all from Congo. After two years, Wiley became disillusioned, and he applied to become a human-rights monitor for the United Nations, in Iraq.

On October 19, 2005, Wiley sat in a hangar at a military base in Amman, Jordan, awaiting transport to Baghdad. A television showed Saddam Hussein in a heated exchange with a judge, insisting that he was still the President of Iraq. It was the former dictator’s first day on trial. “I paid no attention to it whatsoever,” Wiley recalled. The multinational coalition had established a special tribunal, staffed by Iraqi judges and prosecutors, to hold legal proceedings in accordance with international standards. But the Iraqi government replaced judges who seemed sympathetic to the defense, and, days after Saddam’s lawyers appeared in news broadcasts, two of them were assassinated.

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Massacre Files from Syria -Part Four

mass destruction in Syria 

Top-secret documents tie Bashar regime to mass
annihilation.

Selected from a shocking report investigation published by New Yorker

The investigation starts narrating the continuous brave triers inside Syria, to collect several documents of torturing and brutal executions inside Bashar administration and his direct ties on them.

Part Four

On March 30, 2011, Assad addressed the nation from the rotunda of the Syrian parliament building. He had just sacked his cabinet, and many people expected him to announce liberalizing reforms. Instead, he declared his intention to suppress dissent in the brutal tradition of his father, Hafez al-Assad. “Syria is facing a great conspiracy, whose tentacles extend” to foreign powers that were plotting to destroy the country, he said. “There is no conspiracy theory,” he added. “There is aconspiracy.” He closed with an ominous directive: “Burying sedition is a national, moral, and religious duty, and all those who can contribute to burying it and do not are part of it.” He emphasized, “There is no compromise or middle way in this.”

Two days later, protests across the country grew larger. Assad had already formed a secret security committee, called the Central Crisis Management Cell, to coördinate a crackdown. Its chairman was Mohammad Said Bekheitan, the highest-ranking official in the ruling Baath Party, after Assad; the other members—who were all Assad-dynasty confidants—were routinely shuffled among the top positions in the military, the ministries, and the security-intelligence apparatus.

Every night, the Crisis Cell met in a drab office on the first floor of the Baath Party Regional Command, in central Damascus, and discussed strategies for crushing dissent. This required detailed information about each protest, so the cell requested reports from security committees and intelligence agents in the most rebellious provinces. The group decided to hire someone to process all the paperwork.

One of the applicants was Abdelmajid Barakat, a twenty-four-year-old with slicked-back hair. Barakat, who had recently finished a master’s degree in international relations, was working for the education ministry. At his interview, in April, a high-level official named Salaheddine al-Naimi examined his résumé and asked whether he could use a computer. Next, Naimi asked how he would resolve the developing crisis. Barakat replied that, in order to avoid an armed response, the government should make some concessions and enact moderate reforms.

Barakat was surprised to be hired. In college, he had been questioned by military-intelligence agents about suspicions that he and his friends were involved in anti-government political activities. Early in the unrest, he had joined one of Syria’s first organized revolutionary bodies. Now, in the regime’s haste to make the Crisis Cell more efficient, it was employing a member of the opposition to process confidential security memos from all over the country. On most days, more than a hundred and fifty pages arrived at Barakat’s desk, cataloguing the minutiae of perceived threats to Assad’s rule—graffiti, Facebook posts, protests—and, eventually, actual threats, like the existence of armed groups. Barakat read everything and drafted summaries, which Naimi delivered to the members of the Crisis Cell to guide each meeting.

Barakat was never allowed into the meeting room, but he saw the members walk in, and Naimi kept detailed minutes on Baath Party letterhead. Occasional guests of the group included high-ranking Baathist officials, Syria’s Vice-President, and Assad’s younger brother, Maher, a short-tempered military commander, whom the European Union identified in a sanctions list as the “principal overseer of violence against demonstrators.”

At the end of each meeting, the Crisis Cell agreed on a plan for every security issue. Then Bekheitan, the chairman, signed the minutes, and a courier delivered them to Assad at the Presidential palace. Barakat learned that Assad reviewed the proposals, signed them, and returned them to the Crisis Cell for implementation. Sometimes he made revisions, crossing out directives and adding new ones. He also issued decrees without consulting the Crisis Cell. Barakat was certain that no security decision, no matter how small, was made without Assad’s approval.

Shortly after Barakat began working for the Crisis Cell, he started leaking documents. Though the regime publicly claimed that it was allowing peaceful demonstrations, security memos showed that intelligence agents were targeting protesters and media activists, and shooting at them indiscriminately. Barakat photographed the memos in the bathroom, and sent the pictures to contacts in the Syrian opposition, who forwarded them to Arabic news organizations. His plan was to steal as much information as possible and then leave the country. But each leak heightened suspicion within the office, increasing the chances that, sooner or later, the regime would discover that he was the mole...

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Massacre Files from Syria

Top-secret documents tie Bashar's regime to mass annihilation.

Part one

shocking documents on Syria

Selected from a shocking report investigation published by New Yorker

The investigation starts narrating the continuous brave triers inside Syria, collecting several documents of torturing and brutal executions inside Bashar Assad's prisons and his direct ties on them.

He stars his reviling by:

 "Some half a million people have been killed in Syria’s civil war. An additional five million have fled, emptying the country.

The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes.

He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and one confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new checkpoints. Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring country waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking high-level Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.

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