DAMASCUS: He waited for his brother-in-law to cross the front line smuggling documents stolen from the Syrian dictatorship’s archives. Detection could mean dismemberment or death, but they were committed to exposing the industrial-scale violence used to keep President Bashar Assad in power.
Ussama Uthman, now 59, was building a vast record of the brutality — photographs that showed Assad’s government was engaging in systematic torture and extrajudicial killings.
Now, safely in exile in France and with Assad having fallen in a surprise offensive last year, Uthman is sharing how he, his wife and her brother teamed up to smuggle evidence of the horrific crimes out from under Syria’s infamous surveillance apparatus as war tore the country apart.
BACKGROUND
When news broke that first year of a massacre in Hama, Uthman, a construction engineer from the Damascus suburb of Al-Tall, swore he’d help topple Assad.
The photos of broken bodies and torture sites — records were apparently kept to show orders were being followed — began appearing online in 2014.
They spurred US sanctions, and are being used to prosecute suspected war crimes and help Syrians find out what happened to family members who disappeared.
“We have hundreds of thousands of mothers waiting for news of their loved ones,” said Uthman.
During a recent interview at a secret location in northern France the only time Uthman’s voice broke was when he recounted sending a woman photos of a brutalized body and asking if she recognized her son.
“I send her five snapshots of her son’s body, torn under Bashar Assad’s whips, and she rejoices. She says, ‘Thank God, I have confirmed that he is dead,’” he recalled. “This sadness should have kept our flags at half-staff in Syria for years.”
With the Arab Spring sweeping through the Middle East in 2011, protests in the southern city of Daraa inspired demonstrations throughout Syria. The government responded with force, but rather than crushing the demonstrations, the brutality sparked a civil war that spurred foreign intervention and pitted a patchwork of rebel groups against the armor and air power of the military and Assad’s allies.
When news broke that first year of a massacre in Hama, Uthman, a construction engineer from the Damascus suburb of Al-Tall, swore he’d help topple Assad.
He didn’t know how until he got a call from his wife’s brother Farid Al-Mazhan, a military police officer who asked him to meet in person — electronic communications were too risky.
Al-Mazhan showed Uthman gory images taken by photographers in the military forensic pathology department that he helped run. He said he could access more.
The two launched a secret operation that would eventually smuggle more than 53,000 photographs out of Syria showing evidence of torture, disease and starvation in the country’s lockups.
As an officer, Al-Mazhan could pass government-run checkpoints; his connections in the opposition-held town where he lived and eventually Uthman’s secret coordination with rebels enabled him to cross checkpoints staffed by their fighters.
He would then secretly pass CDs, hard drives and USB sticks containing photos and other documents to Uthman. He also slipped them to his sister, Khawla Al-Mazhan, who is married to Uthman. She was the first to suggest using the photos to try to topple Assad.
“Why don’t we use these images to bring down the regime?” Uthman recalled her saying.
Uthman adopted the nom de guerre Sami. Farid Al-Mazhan took Caesar. Their operation would become known as the Caesar Files.
Deciding to escape Syria — an estimated 6 million people fled during the war — the team uploaded 55 gigabytes of photos and documents dating from May 2011 to August 2014 to a foreign server. They then began furtively moving their extended families to neighboring countries. Diplomats eventually helped Uthman’s family settle in France in 2014.
Once safely out of Syria, they began publishing the material, sparking immediate and widespread condemnation of Assad.
As families scoured the ghastly archive for signs of what happened to their loved ones, the team gave copies to European prosecutors. Authorities in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland have arrested or initiated legal proceedings against former Syrian officials accused of torture and killings.
