The Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad has been a ruthless dictatorship for 24 years, with no crime being too heinous for the Assads. His atrocities have left many inmates isolated and their families unaware of their fates. Caesar, a Syrian military police photographer, documented the bodies of Syrians executed or tortured to death in his prisons. Between March 2011 and August 2024, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) documented 157,634 people arrested between March 2011 and August 2024 who remained in custody. 5,274 children and 10,221 women were among the many forcibly disappeared.
Assad’s slaughter was not limited to prisons. He inherited his father’s chemical weapons program and used them against his own people. In 2013, Syrian forces fired rockets filled with sarin gas on Ghouta, a rural area east of Damascus that was held by the armed opposition. The attack killed an estimated 1,466 people, mostly women and children. Under threat of military intervention after then-U.S. President Barack Obama declared that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line,” Assad agreed to surrender his chemical weapons in September 2013. However, because chlorine has legitimate uses, the government was not required to eliminate its chlorine stockpiles. Between 2014 and 2018, the Syrian military periodically used chlorine as a chemical weapon, even though such use violates the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria had ratified.
Conventional bombing also played a role in the Syrian conflict. The Syrian air force dropped “barrel bombs” on residential neighborhoods in parts of the country controlled by the armed opposition, causing widespread destruction and death. When Russia joined the conflict in September 2015, the Syrian-Russian alliance attacked more precisely, targeting hospitals, schools, markets, and apartment buildings. Russian and Syrian government airstrikes have killed more than 100,000 Syrians since 2011, according to SNHR.
The government’s bombing and persecution forced over 14 million Syrians to flee their homes, half abroad and half within Syria, more than any other country. Assad also used starvation and deprivation to force opposition-held areas to surrender.