Prisoners were freed from the notorious Saydnaya Prison in December when rebels overran Damascus [Ashley Chan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty]
The individual who documented serious human rights abuses in Syria which led to the US passing the Caesar Act will soon reveal their identity, a former Syrian parliamentarian has said.
Mohammad Barmo, a former lawmaker who defected from the ousted regime, gave new details about the person known as “Caesar” to the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya news channel.
Washington named The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act after the individual who has kept their identity hidden.
Signed by US President Donald Trump in 2019 during his first term in office, the legislation which imposed heavy sanctions on the toppled Assad regime came into force in June 2020.
Caesar is from the Houran region in southern Syria, said Barmo, and worked as an assistant officer in the former regime’s military police, as well as head of the Judicial Evidence Department in Damascus.
Barmo, who did not give further details on when “Caesar” will reveal themselves, said he had gotten to know the latter when he defected to Jordan in 2013.
“Our mission and meetings were very secret for fear of being persecuted by [former president Bashar] al-Assad,” Barmo said, noting that the US kept the identities of the “Caesar” team secret.
“The Americans were shocked by the pictures of torture in Assad’s prisons,” Barmo added, noting that the Caesar case contains 8,000 photos of victims of torture and 27,000 other snapshots proving torture and other human rights abuses.
Only six people were aware of the Caesar case, Barmo told Al-Arabiya, as he said Barack Obama and his administration must bear responsibility for ignoring the case when he was US president.
Transferring images abroad showing the abuses in Assad’s prisons was “a dangerous and complex task,” said Barmo, adding that “Caesar” had to return to Damascus at one point for 12 days to collect further evidence of torture.
During their lightning offensive, Syrian rebels – now the country’s interim authorities – broke into several prisons, releasing thousands of detainees.
The infamous Saydnaya prison in Damacus was opened when the rebels toppled Assad on 8 December.
Having become a symbol of the rights abuses of the Assad clan, Saydnaya was the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances.
Syrian and foreign workers spent days looking for possible underground tunnels in the prison, where people – dead or alive – may have been kept.
