Thousands of documents and interviews with Assad-era officials reveal how the Syrian regime worked to conceal evidence of its atrocities during the civil war, according to a report published by The New York Times.
The heads of the security agencies arrived in convoys of black SUVs to Bashar al-Assad’s presidential palace, a maze of marble and stone on a hillside overlooking Damascus.
Leaks about his regime’s mass graves and torture facilities were mounting and top Syrian leaders wanted them to stop.
So, in the fall of 2018, they summoned Assad’s feared security chiefs to discuss how to cover their tracks better, according to two people briefed on the meeting.
One of the security officials proposed scrubbing the identities of Syrians who died in secret prisons from their records, the two people said, recalling what participants in the meeting had told them.
That way there would be no paper trail. Assad’s top security chief, Ali Mamlouk, agreed to consider the suggestion.
Forging evidence
Months after that meeting, security agencies began interfering with evidence of the regime’s crimes, an investigation by The New York Times found.
Some security officials doctored paperwork so deaths of detainees could not be traced back to the security branch in which they were imprisoned and died.
Some omitted details like the number of the branch and the detainee’s identification number. And top government officials ordered security agencies to forge confessions of prisoners who had died in their custody.
Written confessions, they reasoned, would give the government some legal cover for the mass deaths of detainees.
Top secret memos
The Times reviewed thousands of pages of internal Syrian documents, including memos marked “Top Secret,” many of which we photographed inside Syria’s most notorious security branches.
The newspaper also interviewed more than 50 security and political officials, interrogators, prison guards, forensic doctors, mass-grave workers and others government employees, many of whom helped verify the documents.
Taken collectively, the documents and accounts provide the most comprehensive picture to date of the regime’s efforts to evade accountability for its industrial-scale system of repression. They also offer a rare look at how a secretive dictatorship responded in real time to growing international isolation and pressure.
Under Assad’s rule, more than 100,000 people disappeared, according to the United Nations, more than in any other regime since the Nazis.
The documents show that the government went to elaborate, sometimes tedious lengths to cover it up. Officials held meetings to discuss public-relations messaging. They strategized about how to handle families whose loved ones had been imprisoned. They worried about paperwork that might be used against them if they ever faced prosecution.
From documentation to threats
Early in the war, security agencies kept meticulous records of their activities, and the Syrians who vanished in their custody. Every interrogation was transcribed, every death noted, every corpse photographed.
Then the records became a liability. In January 2014, images of more than 6,000 bodies from secret prisons, some bearing signs of torture, were smuggled out of the country by a Syrian military photographer, code-named Caesar.
The photos were the first detailed evidence of torture and executions by the Assad government since the war began. Months later, France submitted the images to the United Nations Security Council, which lent them greater legitimacy and raised the prospect that the regime would be charged with war crimes.
The Syrian security apparatus decided to mount a defense.
In August 2014, senior military, political and intelligence officials met with Syrian legal scholars to discuss their strategy, according to a memo viewed by The Times that described a meeting of the National Security Bureau, the coordinating hub for Syria’s intelligence and security agencies.
The Times verified the deliberations laid out in the memo with two former officials who were briefed on the discussions.
Over two days, according to the memo, the senior officials plotted to discredit the images. Because there were no names connected to the photos, they could argue that only a handful were of political prisoners and that many were opposition fighters killed in battle or petty criminals, the memo said.
The officials also advised others in the government to “avoid going into detail and avoid attempts to prove or deny any facts,” the memo said. They urged them instead to “undermine the credibility” of the leaker, Caesar.
The mass grave
Some of the most damning evidence of the regime’s crimes were the mass graves where it dumped prisoners’ bodies during the civil war.
The mass-grave operation in the capital was overseen by Col. Mazen Ismandar, who organized teams to pick up bodies from military hospitals in Damascus and then bury them in sites around the city, according to three of his former colleagues.
Ismandar was ordered to move all of the bodies to a new site, two of his former colleagues said.
That operation, which Reuters first reported in October, was carried out over the next two years. The team used excavators to dig up bodies, piled them into dump trucks and drove them to a site in the Dhumair desert, northeast of Damascus.
“There were civilians, people in military clothes, old people with white beards, people who were naked,” said Ahmad Ghazal, a mechanic in Dhumair city who frequently repaired the trucks and eventually got to know the drivers.
He often tried to get a look at the bodies, he said, in the hope of finding the remains of two cousins who disappeared in 2015. He never found them.
The downfall
When the United States passed the Caesar Act in late 2019, many hailed the sanctions as a step toward justice for the victims of war crimes by the Assad government.
But the sanctions appeared to have little deterrent effect.
Interrogators in two agencies, Branch 248 and the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, said that they and their colleagues had become still more ruthless with prisoners, because they were angry about the plummeting value of their salaries as the economy weakened, in part from sanctions.
Despite the cover-up efforts, by 2023 the regime’s crimes were catching up with it.
In April 2023, French criminal investigative judges issued arrest warrants for three senior Assad officials, including Mamlouk, for the torture, enforced disappearance and death of two Syrian French nationals.
Then, in December 2024, the regime quickly came crashing down.
The opposition coalition led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the Syrian president, swept into Damascus in a lightning advance.
Assad, Mamlouk, Hassan and other top officials fled to Russia.
Ismandar, the official in charge of the mass-grave operations, also fled. The night the fighters arrived, he pulled a wooden box from the locked cabinet behind his desk in his office, according to one of his aides. Inside were the identification cards of Syrian civilians who had died in custody or been executed. He handed out the IDs to some of his staff, believing they might help them escape, the aide said.
Ismandar remains at large.
