{"id":107602,"date":"2018-03-19T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-03-19T12:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=107602"},"modified":"2018-03-16T20:02:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-16T20:02:02","slug":"as-syrian-war-crimes-tribunals-are-readied-qassim-soleimani-instructs-assad-and-irans-militia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/03\/as-syrian-war-crimes-tribunals-are-readied-qassim-soleimani-instructs-assad-and-irans-militia\/","title":{"rendered":"As Syrian War Crimes Tribunals Are Readied, Qassim Soleimani Instructs Assad and Iran\u2019s Militia:"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cNo terrorist bodies; no evidence; no evidence; no crime; no crime; no Tribunals. <\/em>Disappear terrorist bodies!\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

15 Mar 2018 – <\/em>At the site of one of more than two dozen Syrian government\u2019s secret \u2018slaughterhouse\u2019 prison body dump sites. This one in Najha, Syria, ten miles south of Damascus Syria and approximately 50 yards north of the burial site of East Ghouta\u2019s\u00a0conjoined twins Nawras & Mou\u2019az Al-Hashash<\/p>\n

One of Bashar al-Assad\u2019s\u2019\u00a0Vladimir\u00a0Putin\u2019s\u2019\u00a0and Iran\u2019s \u201cSupreme Leader\u201d Ali Khamenei\u2019s growing problems is that an assortment of Syrian War Crimes Tribunals\u00a0are finalizing\u00a0their cases, sooner than many of us thought\u00a0probable,\u00a0is the fact that millions of vetted documents gathered from countless sources within the Syrian government are being prepared for trial including several hundred Syrian and Iranian war crimes cases.\u00a0Unlike many\u00a0previous\u00a0International War Crimes Tribunals once jurisdiction is passed to a body like the ICC or a Special International Tribunal for Syria (SITS), the approaching trials can proceed quite quickly because of all the preparatory work that has been done and there will not be the need for\u00a0such\u00a0\u00a0long case preparation lag time as in the past.<\/p>\n

U.S. and European officials allege that Assad\u2019s regime and its allies have committed war crimes on an industrial scale. They contend that rarely in the annals of international justice has the evidence of such actions been as voluminous.\u00a0\u00a0 These invaluable photographic and documental resources in addition to more than a dozen other current reliable professional forensic evidence gathering undertakings constitute a massive amount of probative evidence. Once Syria\u2019s\u00a0 Hobbesian nightmare of massive crimes against humanity dissipates somewhat, and the day of justice draws near, the\u00a0prosecuting global community will have much\u00a0more dispositive\u00a0evidence to secure convictions than we\u2019ve had anywhere or at any time since Nuremberg.<\/p>\n

For reasons perhaps known only to Assad and his inner circle, hospital functionaries, working closely with Syrian intelligence agents, have been carefully documenting the regime\u2019s handiwork, using a distinctive numbering scheme to track victims and keep records of the killings that contain fictitious death certificates.\u00a0The paper trail shows that Assad himself \u201creviewed the proposals [of the cell], signed them, and returned them for implementation,\u201d\u00a0according to the\u00a0New Yorker<\/a><\/em>, adding: \u201cSometimes he made revisions, crossing out directives and adding new ones.\u201d<\/p>\n

One regime investigator,\u00a0Mr.\u00a0Salem Barak (assume\u00a0name\u00a0to protect his family in Syria) reported to investigators in Europe that he\u00a0was \u201ccertain that no security decision, no matter how small, was made without Assad\u2019s approval.\u201d<\/p>\n

One group of highly experienced specialized international war crimes lawyers has already drafted a 400-hundred page legal-brief, which traces the systematic torture and murder of tens of thousands of Syrians to a written policy approved by President Bashar al-Assad, coordinated among his security-intelligence agencies, and implemented by regime operatives, who reported on the success of their campaign to their superiors in Damascus. Acts of torture, murder, and detention under inhumane conditions in Syria have been widely reported by survivors but never linked to signed orders by Bashar al-Assad. Now they have been.<\/p>\n

Many of these documents come from Syrian government security and intelligence facilities taken over by government defectors or anti-Assad groups. Other documents were\u00a0stolen by others who\u00a0worked as moles\u00a0within Assad\u2019s top security committee\u00a0and secreted scores of thousands of documents out of Syria to investigators.<\/p>\n

The most striking evidence concerns Assad\u2019s response to the mass protests his rule that swept Syria from 2011 onwards.\u00a0He appointed a \u201cCentral Crisis Management Cell\u201d and gave the security chiefs on this committee supreme responsibility for suppressing the unrest.<\/p>\n

Amnesty International, working on this case with a former government employee of the Al-Assad appointed\u00a0\u201cCentral Management Crisis Cell.\u201d\u00a0The cell held daily meetings in Damascus, chaired by\u00a0Mohammad Said Bekheitan, the second most senior member of the ruling Ba\u2019ath party. The government employee\u00a0reported that an average of 20 to 50 people\u00a0were\u00a0hanged each week at the Sednaya military prison north of Damascus. Between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed at Sednaya in a four-year period since a popular uprising descended into war. Today the number has been estimated to total more than 50,000.<\/p>\n

In another\u00a0“Crimes Documentation Center”, for two years, as Syria\u2019s civil war became ever deadlier, one government employee, later using the code name, \u201cCaesar\u201d downloaded thousands of high-resolution photographs\u00a0onto flash drives, he snuck into the empty office of his boss and took cell-phone pictures of the papers on the man\u2019s desk. Among them were execution orders and directives to falsify death certificates and dispose of bodies. Armed with as much evidence as he could safely carry, the photographer fled Syria country for Europe.<\/p>\n

The Syrian intelligence images that Caesar secreted out of Syria continue to be thoroughly studied by western specialists and intelligence agencies and judged to be indictable evidence of massive war crimes. The photos, most of them taken in Syrian military hospitals, show corpses photographed at close range\u2014one at a time as well as in small groupings. Virtually all the tens of thousands of bodies show clear signs of torture: gouged eyes; mangled genitals; bruises and dried blood from beatings; acid and electric burns; emaciation; and marks from strangulation. \u201cCaesar\u201d took a number of these pictures, working with roughly a dozen other photographers assigned to the same military-police unit, at the\u00a0Damascus area \u201cHorror Hospitals\u201d Tisreen,\u00a0Messeh\u00a0(\u201cHospital 601\u201d) where, in addition to three other Syrian hospitals this observer visited when searching for\u00a0conjoined twins Nawras & Mou\u2019az Al-Hashash in late summer 2016. Both \u201chospitals\u201d seemed \u201cnormal\u201d to me with friendly doctors, smiling nurses and busy arrival and departure hospital lobbies. I never gave of thought about what might be happening several floors down.<\/p>\n

Some Relevant Key Dates<\/strong><\/p>\n

August 2013, Syrian police photographer \u201cCaesar\u201d presented clear evidence to the global community of the Syrian regimes war crimes. \u201cCaesar\u201d smuggled out more than 57,000 photographs, most of them taken in Syrian military hospitals Tisreen and\u00a0Messeh\u00a0(Hospital 601) among other locals. Both Mezzeh and Tishreen are run by Syria\u2019s Military Medical Services. The authenticated photos show corpses photographed by \u201cCaesar\u201d and his colleagues at close range with all of the bodies show signing of torture: gouged eyes; mangled genitals; bruises and dried blood from beatings; acid and electric burns; emaciation; and marks from strangulation. \u201cCaesar\u201d worked with roughly a dozen other photographers assigned to the same military-police unit.<\/p>\n

Mid-2015\u00a0and forward,\u00a0more than 600,000 documents exposing crimes against humanity and war crimes by the government of Syria, some bearing the stamp and signature of Bashar al-Assad are smuggled out of Syria and transported to\u00a0the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) for analysis and trial preparation.<\/p>\n

May of 2017. Based on\u00a0US\u00a0and EU monitoring of Sednaya prison north of Damascus, the Trump administration announced that the Al-Assad regime has set up many crematoria and is incinerating thousands of corpses in order to destroy evidence that could be used to prosecute war crimes.\u00a0\u00a0Some Syrian opposition supporters asked why, if the US had satellite pictures suggesting the existence of the Syrian crematoria why they were only now being made public. Others accused the Obama administration\u00a0for\u00a0sitting on the satellite images.<\/p>\n

3\/15\/2018\u00a0and continuing and indeed intensifying, are Syrian, regional and international crimes against humanity evidence collection campaigns documenting in detail, often with consultation from specialized international criminal lawyers, the massive accelerating war crimes in Syria these past nearly eight years. This painstaking evidence gathering became a major secret project in late 1212. Today it is dramatically intensifying with the increased involvement of former and current government employees including Baath party officials, current high-ranking members of the military, security services, and reportedly includes members of the regimes inner circle.<\/p>\n

8\/24\/2016).\u00a0Death of conjoined\u00a0twins Nawras\u00a0& Mou\u2019az Al-Hashash.<\/p>\n

8\/29\/ 2016.\u00a0Graveyard sleepover by this observer with the boys and the chance witnessing body dumping at the government military cemetery at Najha, 10 miles south of Damascus.<\/p>\n

Dear\u00a0reader may have seen earlier reports by this observer the past couple of years from Syria about the short life and homicide\u00a0of East Ghouta conjoined twins,\u00a0Nawras and Moaz Al-Hashash. Link:\u00a0\u00a0Why Conjoined Syrian Twins Nawras and Mou\u2019az Were Condemned to Death<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0September,\u00a016, 1916.<\/p>\n

A few days after the\u00a0boys\u00a0death, I was allowed by the Syrian government to visit their gravesite and add a stone but no name.\u00a0Next\u00a0to the boy\u2019s small concrete slab, the Meals for Syrian Refugee Children Lebanon (MSRCL) left the boys, their grieving family and the Syrian public a copy of the original one drawn by Syrian artist Akram Abo Alfoz.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u200bTwo plants placed by MSRCL on either side of the twins grave which this observer was honored to plant and water.
(Image by Franklin P. Lamb) Permission Details DMCA<\/p><\/div>\n

I personally failed the boys. Surely there was more this observer could have done to help save them. And\u00a0as Syria\u2019s civil war enters its 8th<\/sup>\u00a0year, without any end in sight, another generation of Syrian children faces\u00a0ever increasing\u00a0ruin, with child deaths doubling last year and the number of child soldiers tripling since 2015. A new report by\u00a0UNICEF<\/a><\/em>\u00a0found 2017 was the worst yet of the war for young Syrians, with more than 1,100 killed this past year that has taken a vastly disproportionate toll on the country\u2019s most vulnerable people.<\/p>\n

Near the end of my visit with the boys and sitting at their gravesite and telling them about Gulliver\u2019s Travels, it began to get dark. A security guard approached and warned me that the area was not safe at night and that I should leave quickly. Only later was I to learn his real motive. After singing softly to the boys, \u201cTwinkle Twinkle Little Star\u201d which I like to think is their\u00a0favorite\u00a0song, I told them another story and planning to return to Damascus, I dozed off instead after a long day.<\/p>\n

\u200bThe time was approximately 3 a.m. on 9\/14\/2016 when I was awakened by the sound of a roaring dump truck entering the large field perhaps 50 yards behind the boys\u2019 grave site. (See photo below).\u00a0\u00a0I had no idea what it was doing and tried to ignore the noise.\u00a0\u00a0When it did not leave for about half an hour and I heard yelling, I carefully looked up and was shocked to see what looked like bodies being pulled from the truck and then dragged and thrown into a large freshly dug pit.\u00a0\u00a0I wondered what that was about but then recalled having been told that the area of Najha was considered\u00a0my\u00a0locals as \u201cthe land of government cemeteries given the air force cemetery complex a few miles north including this one. When it started to get\u00a0light,\u00a0I\u00a0spoke\u00a0with the boys for a few minutes and headed back to Damascus.<\/p>\n

\u200bThe shown gentlemen below work at the burying site.\u200b\u00a0The open pit body dump from Senayda and other prisons is in the area above several hundred square meters behind the power line shown just North of\u00a0Nawras and Moaz Al-Hashash\u2019s\u00a0gravesite.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u200b(Image by Franklin P. Lamb) Permission Details DMCA<\/p><\/div>\n

At this\u00a0point\u00a0I had heard gossip and\u00a0rumors\u00a0but I knew little of the regimes \u2018horror hospitals\u201d, \u201cslaughterhouses\u201d or crematoria but upon learning more I reported what I saw and was assured that the site would be monitored by UN specialized agencies to acquire evidence of war crimes and crime against humanity.\u00a0\u00a0A week later I was informed that given the disclosure of events at the Najha cemetery that no bodies would likely be removed from or added to the site on orders from Soleimani or Al-Assad but if any were they would be photographed via satellites and drones and would be available for examination by the relevant UN agencies pursuant to criminal indictment and prosecution of all concerned.<\/p>\n

Conclusion\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mr.\u00a0Solemani and those he instructs with respect to \u201cno bodies, no evidence, equals no crimes\u201d misses the point and methodology of forensic investigations. In addition\u00a0of\u00a0thousands of bodies, the governments will not be able to locate and \u201cdisappear\u201d there are countless additional sources of proof of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Syria over the now past eight years.<\/p>\n

Not least of which being literally hundreds of thousands of eye-witnesses including thousands from within the higher echelons of the Assad regime and increasing numbers of regime loyalists defect. Many are gathering probative, relevant, material and admissible evidence which is not a major problem and Soleimani\u2019s instructions to \u2018disappear\u201d damaged terrorist bodies\u2019 will not solve the Al-Assad regimes legal problems before the approaching Special Tribunal for Syria (STS).<\/p>\n

______________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Franklin P. Lamb, LLB, LLM, Ph.D. is a Fellow at Oxford University-UK, Law Professor, Legal Adviser to the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program, Shatila <\/em>Camp\u00a0 (SSSP-lb.com<\/a>), and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>.\u00a0 As a volunteer with\u00a0the Palestine Civil <\/em>Rights Campaign, Beirut and Washington, DC he is committed to help <\/em>achieving\u00a0the Right to Work and the Right to Home Ownership for every <\/em>Palestinian Refugee in Lebanon. Lamb\u2019s recent book, <\/em>Syria\u2019s Endangered Heritage: An international Responsibility to Protect and Preserve, is <\/em>available on Amazon and other ebook outlets as well as at www.syrian-heritage.com <\/a>. For Syria Heritage updates, please visit: www.syrian-heritage.com<\/a>. To provide a meal to a Syrian refugee child in Lebanon please visit: <\/em>http:\/\/mealsforsyrianrefugeechildrenlebanon.com<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. Lamb is reachable c\/o <\/em>franklin.lamb@hmc.ox.ac.uk<\/strong><\/a> or fplamb@gmail.com<\/a><\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Meals for Syrian Refugee Children in Lebanon<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNo terrorist bodies; no evidence; no evidence; no crime; no crime; no Tribunals. Disappear terrorist bodies!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":107603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}