Containing 1.3 million documents, The Times reveals archive detailing Assad regime's 'atrocities'

A report published by the British newspaper The Times revealed an archive of 1.3 million official documents detailing the systematic "atrocities" and crimes committed by the regime of ousted President Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad against the Syrians.

The archive, compiled over 13 years by Canadian lawyer and war crimes investigator Bill Wiley with the help of a team of Syrians, is central to achieving justice and accountability for the systematic abuses that continue to unfold in Syria, the report says.

The documents were smuggled by the kilograms out of the country to a European city that the report did not identify, to be digitally photographed and analyzed by Wiley's organization, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, with support from the British, American and German governments.

To obtain the materials, the 43 Syrian team members disguised themselves as shepherds and traders, using everything from trucks to helicopters to transport entire vaults of papers through checkpoints.

The regime killed one of the team members, while another was injured and a third was kidnapped, and some of them were forced to leave papers in their hideouts because of the risks involved in transporting them.

CIJA documents have already been used in 13 cases around the world against regime officials.

Bashar al-Assad the commander

Wiley said the documents prove beyond doubt that Bashar al-Assad was not just a figurehead president, but that he was running things, citing minutes from the central crisis management cell that Assad established in March 2011 to deal with the revolution.

This cell met almost every night and discussed strategies to crush the opposition, according to the report. The administration was also in contact with the security committees and intelligence elements in each governorate, receiving from them the latest results of the systematic methods of repression and sending them new orders.

Wiley confirmed Assad's central role in the operation, as "the minutes were taken to his personal office and an employee would wait for him while he reviewed them, and we would see evidence of that in the margins, orders saying do this and that, don't do that, and then we realized that he was not just a figurehead."

"bureaucracy of death"

The Assad regime has documented widespread torture, executions, the use of chemical weapons, and mass disappearances, and a chain of command headed by Assad has overseen this “bureaucracy of death,” as some in the report put it.

"This is the most well-documented repression in history," Wiley said, pointing to the 406 boxes of files containing war crimes by the ousted Baath Party. "It's like Nazis with computers."

The Wiley Commission intensified its efforts after the fall of the government, especially since the speed of the collapse of the regime did not allow it to destroy the paper evidence, and it appointed 10 additional researchers in the previous days. The investigator confirmed: “We are living in a historically rare situation, like Germany in 1945, Iraq in 2003, and Central and Eastern Europe between 1990 and 1991, when it is possible to collect material from primary sources.”

The Baath Party's arms are deeper than Nuremberg

The report listed the individuals involved in the "crimes" of the Assad regime, noting their large number, as there are thousands of officers and security personnel who have fled to escape accountability.

The report singled out Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and commander of the Fourth Division, who is responsible for the policy of “brutal repression” and Captagon smuggling; Ali Mamlouk, the former head of the National Security Bureau and one of the most prominent leaders of the security services; and Jamil Hassan, head of Air Force Intelligence, who is accused of managing widespread torture and murder.

Wiley's archive shows the sheer number of people involved, and he commented that "in Syria it's about 50 years of state-sponsored terrorism, a lot of people killed and tortured, and that requires a huge security, military and intelligence structure."

"The Syria file will be much bigger than the Nuremberg trial," he added, the historic trial that was dedicated to holding Nazi leaders accountable.

The report noted that the security that Russia has given to Bashar and his family will not last long. Russia, as Wiley mentioned, may sacrifice Assad and hand him over to achieve its strategic interests with any new Syrian government, as it did previously with other dictators such as Charles Taylor (from Liberia) and Laurent Gbagbo (from Ivory Coast), and his extradition will not take more than 3 years.

Source: Times