Inside Bashar Assad's torture chambers

By Michael Isikoff9 hours agoYahoo News

The State Department has obtained 27,000 photographs showing the emaciated, bruised and burned bodies of Syrian torture victims — gruesome images that a top official told Yahoo News constitute "smoking gun" evidence that can be used to bring war-crimes charges against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The photos are "horrific — some of them put you in visceral pain," said Stephen J. Rapp, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, in an interview. "This is some of the strongest evidence we've seen in the area of proof of the commission of mass atrocities."

The photos — a small number of which will be put on public display for the first time on Wednesday at the U.S. Holocaust Museum — were smuggled out of Syria by an official regime photographer who has since defected and is known only by his code name, Caesar.

They were shown at a closed-door session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in July where Caesar, wearing a hood, testified. They are now being analyzed at Rapp's request by the FBI in part as an effort to determine whether any U.S. citizens may have been among the victims — a finding that could be the basis to bring criminal charges in the U.S. against officials of the Assad regime.

The Syrian government has officially denounced the photos as fakes and suggested many of the corpses seen are actually of militants who died in battle.

While FBI agents are still reviewing the photos, Rapp said that bureau officials have already "informally" told him "they think it is impossible they could be forgeries. There is no evidence of doctoring."

(A bureau spokesman confirmed only the review of the photos, adding: "It will take some time to complete the authentication process.")

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Syrian Army defector Caesar, (in a blue hooded jacket) who has smuggled out of Syria more than 50,000 photographs …

But by the summer of 2013, Caesar has told investigators, he was so sickened by what he was seeing that he made contact with Syrian rebels. "I can't do this anymore," he told them, according to David Crane, a former war-crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone who spent hours interviewing Caesar as part of a separate review of the photos commissioned by the government of Qatar.

Caesar began smuggling his photos to the rebels, providing them with thumb drives concealed in his shoes, Crane said. To protect his family, Caesar faked his death, staging an elaborate funeral, before he escaped from Syria in August 2013. He is now in hiding in Europe.

The photos, according to Crane, document "an industrial killing machine not seen since the Holocaust." They show corpses, some of them lined up in a warehouse, many appearing to be victims of starvation, their ribs protruding from emaciated bodies.

Some show men whose eyes were gouged out; others had bruises and lacerations consistent with beatings and in some cases strangulation, according to a report that Crane co-wrote about the photos released in January.

Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who had called Caesar as a witness at the closed-door hearing in July, said that when he first saw the photos he thought of his father. As a member of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, “my father had taken photos at Dachau when it was liberated, of the bodies stacked up at the ovens. This is eerily reminiscent. It's absolutely appalling.”

What's also noteworthy about the photos, according to Crane, was the methodical nature of the enterprise: Each photo includes tags with numbers and letters that identify each of the victims as well as the detention center where they were imprisoned. One purpose: so military officials who ordered their deaths could have proof "their orders were carried out," said Crane.

Crane — who, as a war-crimes prosecutor for an international tribunal, brought the indictment against former Liberian President Charles Taylor — originally reviewed the photos along with two other international war-crimes prosecutors on behalf of a London law firm hired by the Qatari government.

He then presented the photos for two hours at a session of the U.N. Security Council in support of a French-sponsored resolution authorizing an international war-crimes tribunal for Syria in April.

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Syrian Army defector Caesar, (in a blue hooded jacket) who has smuggled out of Syria more than 50,000 photographs …

But the French resolution was vetoed by the Russian and Chinese representatives. That has left Rapp with what he acknowledges are "jurisdictional challenges" in bringing war-crimes charges against the regime officials responsible for the dead bodies. (A finding that U.S. nationals are among the victims could help overcome some of those challenges by allowing a Justice Department prosecution in U.S. courts.)

But Rapp said he is not deterred. His office is working with an international team of investigators — under the direction of a private group called the Syria Justice and Accountability Project — to collect documents and other witness testimony that can be used to corroborate the photos. (The U.S. is also supporting a separate team of investigators developing evidence of war crimes by the Islamic State militant group.)

The U.S. government has contributed $1 million to the effort to investigate the Assad regime's abuses. And already, Rapp said, some documents showing orders to arrest particular detainees have been uncovered. Investigators are seeking to determine if those orders can be matched up with the bodies of detainees seen in the photographs.

But there is still much more work to be done. Because many of the photos had to be compressed by Caesar to get them to fit on thumb drives, crucial metadata — which would yield the precise date and time that each image was recorded — was lost. Confirming the deaths of detainees shown in the photos with family members who are still inside Syria is also a problem.

Still, Rapp said, "we are laying the foundation for the day when there will be accountability. This is the kind of evidence that can support prosecution of people all the way to the top."

U.S. has 'smoking gun' evidence against Assad

Thanks to a defector code-named "Caesar," Syria's president may one day face war crimes charges.
27K graphic, 'horrific' images

WASHINGTON -- The Islamic State militant group may possess chemical weapons that it has already used to extend its self-proclaimed caliphate, according to photos taken by Kurdish activists and examined by Israeli researchers.

The group, making gains in Iraq and Syria, may have captured chemical agents in Iraq in June and used them in July to kill three Kurdish fighters in the strategically important region of Kobani in northwest Syria, suggests a report released Sunday by the Global Research in International Affairs Center, a branch of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.

If verified, Islamic State's possession of unconventional weapons could make international efforts against it more urgent, and bolster claims that the world has not responded quickly or powerfully enough to the threat. The group, also known as ISIS, has intensified its effort to conquer Kobani over the past month, and battles there have attracted global attention as the region's defenders -- both Kurds and U.S.-backed rebels -- have urged international help.

Jonathan Spyer, author of the report, uses photographic evidence provided by Kurds in Kobani and a 2007 CIA report about the Iraqi chemical weapons production facility captured by ISIS in July to suggest that "on at least one occasion, Islamic State forces did employ some form of chemical agent, acquired from somewhere, against the [Syrian Kurdish forces] in Kobani." He said Israeli chemical weapons experts examined the Kurds' photographs. In response to questions from The Huffington Post, he declined to give their names.

"The probable possession by the Islamic State of a [chemical weapons] capability is for obvious reasons a matter of the gravest concern, and should be the urgent subject of further attention and investigation," Spyer says.

The report accuses the Islamic State of using chemical weapons in a July 12 battle in an eastern part of Kobani during a previous offensive into the Kurdish enclave. The site of the battle is now controlled by ISIS. Spyer cites signs of a chemical weapons attack mentioned by the health minister of Kobani to the Lebanese online news outlet Al-Modon four days after the attack. In Spyer's telling, the minister said that the corpses of three Kurdish fighters exhibited "burns and white spots … [that] indicated the use of chemicals, which led to deaths without any visible wounds or external bleeding." The bodies had not been hit by bullets, the minister added.

Spyer's report includes gruesome photographs of the bodies now circulating on social media alongside appeals for more help for the Syrian Kurds in Kobani.

In emails to The Huffington Post, Spyer said he had been given the pictures by Kurds in Kobani, whose identities he could not reveal. He said he takes them seriously because they were provided to him weeks ago -- not to boost the case for international help to Kobani, but to spur an investigation by international authorities.

A reported chemical weapons attack by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Asaad received broad international attention last year. Despite an international deal to destroy Asaad's weapons, the regime revealed recently that it still has previously undisclosed chemical weapons facilities.

"Because the area in question is now controlled by [the Islamic State], and the Kurdish enclave in Kobani may itself shortly cease to exist, we decided that this goal [of an international investigation] was no longer feasible and so decided to publish the pictures," Spyer wrote to The Huffington Post.

A key question is whether the alarm could have been raised earlier. Iraq informed the international community that ISIS had captured a massive former chemical weapons facility at Muthanna, northwest of Baghdad, almost a month after the event. The country's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohamed Ali Alhakim, flagged two bunkers at the complex -- one containing sarin-filled rockets, the second with mustard-contamined artillery shells.

Speaking about the Islamic State's attack on the facility, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said over the summer that the two bunkers "don't include intact chemical weapons ... and would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely use this for military purposes or, frankly, to move it."

Spyer writes that a CIA investigation of the facility in 2007 suggested the presence of materials that ISIS could move to its capital of Raqqa.

The State Department did not immediately respond to The Huffington Post's request for comment on the new report.

Jean Pascal Zanders, a chemical weapons expert who runs the blog The Trench, argued in a recent post that it's unlikely that ISIS could use the chemical weapons residue it captured, because the sarin and mustard gas degrade over time.

Asked about that reasoning, Spyer said the Israeli experts who had seen the photographs believed the Kurdish victims had been exposed to mustard, which takes longer to degrade than sarin. Spyer added that it is impossible to reach a firm conclusion without further investigation.

RT, formerly known as Russia Today, showed the same pictures to a British chemical weapons expert, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon. Bretton-Gordon told the channel that if genuine, the photographs appear "consistent with a blister agent, like mustard."

Max Abrahms, a professor at Northeastern University who studies counterterrorism, told The Huffington Post chemical weapons may help ISIS enforce compliance among communities like the Syrian Kurds, and scare rival militant groups. He said the finding was unlikely to significantly change the White House calculus.

"If they wanted to use this as sort of a rallying cry for putting in U.S. troops on the ground, they might be able to," Abrahms said. "But I don’t think they want to."

(The Huffington Post)

Kurdish fighters battling Islamic State (IS) say they have recaptured a strategically important hilltop west of Kobane on Syria's border with Turkey.

The advances were made after a series of air strikes by the US-led coalition.

The hill, Tall Shair, was captured more than 10 days ago by IS militants, who have besieged the area for a month.

Later on Tuesday, US President Barack Obama will hold talks with military chiefs from more than 20 countries on how to combat IS in Syria and Iraq.

Correspondents say the meeting in Washington is the first time such high-ranking military officials from so many countries have come together since the US-led coalition was formed last month.

In a separate development, Turkish warplanes on Monday bombed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebel targets in Hakkari province near the Iraqi border, causing "heavy casualties", Turkish media report.

If confirmed, this would be the first major air raid by Turkey on the PKK since a ceasefire was reached in March in 2013.

The battle for Kobane, a predominantly Kurdish town, has emerged as a major test of whether the coalition's air campaign can push back IS.

Two weeks of air strikes against IS targets in and around Kobane have allowed Kurdish fighters to slow the jihadists' advance, but Turkish and Western leaders have warned that the town is still likely to fall.

Tens of thousands of Syrians, most of them Kurds, have fled Kobane in the past month

On Tuesday morning sources in the Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) told the BBC that they had regained control of Tall Shair hill-top, about 4km (2.5 miles) to the west and near an informal border crossing.

Heavy fighting was reported in the east and south of Kobane on Monday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based activist group, reported that IS carried out three separate suicide bomb attacks.

One fighter battling IS in Kobane: 'There is no time for sleep' (video)

One IS suicide bomber blew up an explosives-filled vehicle in the north of the town, near the border, while the second targeted an eastern area where the main police station and government offices were located, it said. Later, a third bomber attacked a YPG position in the north-east.

The Observatory said it believed IS now controlled about half of Kobane.

Capturing the town, from which more than 160,000 people have fled, would give the group unbroken control of a long stretch of the Syrian-Turkish border.

Iraq 'reprisals'

Hundreds of kilometres away in western Iraq, as many as 180,000 people have been displaced by fighting between IS militants and Iraqi forces in and around the city of Hit, according to the UN.

IS, which controls large swathes of territory across Syria and Iraq, captured Hit earlier this month in an advance across Anbar province.

Analysts say seizing Anbar would enable IS to establish a supply line to launch possible attacks on the capital, Baghdad.

Meanwhile, a report by campaign group Amnesty International saidShia militias in Iraq had kidnapped and killed scores of Sunni civilians in recent months in apparent revenge for IS attacks.

It said scores of unidentified bodies have been found in the cities of Baghdad, Samarra and Kirkuk, many still handcuffed and with gunshot wounds to the head, suggesting execution-style killings. Many others who disappeared remain unaccounted for, it added.

Shia militias have been at the forefront of the fight against IS in Iraq

Amnesty says the militias have taken advantage of an "atmosphere of lawlessness" but the Iraqi government "must act now to rein in the militias and establish the rule of law".

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who took office last month, has admitted to previous "excesses" by government forces and vowed to govern for all Iraqis.

(BBC News)