WASHINGTON D.C: “Arrest, pursue and kill.” The orders were spelled out unambiguously in the official document that had once belonged to a branch of Syrian military intelligence in the city of Deraa in early 2012.
Those orders and a series of videos that showed an attempted cover-up of executions were leaked to researchers working for a non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C.
The Syrian Justice and Accountability Center analyzed the videos, dating back to 2012 and 2013, which showed bodies being burnt and transferred into mass graves in the southern province of Deraa, and crosschecked them with satellite imagery monitoring the trucks transporting the bodies.
Four videos depicted rows of bodies being doused in petrol and thrown into a burn pit outside a dusty village at a time when Syria was in the throes of a full-blown uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad.
“This process is repeated for every single body in the exact same order, indicating the systematic nature of the practice and suggesting that this may not be the only time this group of officials has carried out such an operation,” center officials said.
They believe the 15 bodies seen in the footage were those of civilian and army defectors killed by regime forces during a house raid in Deraa in December 2012.
The videos implicated the Syrian military intelligence branch in Al-Masmiyah in Deraa and senior officers of the 9th Division’s 34th Armored Brigade in the destruction of evidence of alleged mass killings of unarmed civilians.
Once the bodies were burned, an excavator belonging to the Syrian military was used to dig a mass grave not far from a military checkpoint. The perpetrators clearly believed no one outside of their circle would ever find out the crimes they had committed.
An intelligence officer, known as Abu Taher, filmed the abuse of the corpses and subsequent burning on apparent orders from above; senior officials who probably wanted confirmation that their instructions had been followed.
Another officer, identified as Maj. Fadi Al-Quzi, was filmed using his own digital camera to take pictures of the victims’ faces before their bodies were burned.
SJAC researchers said they received the video clips when rebels later ambushed a convoy carrying the Assad loyalists who were there.
Mohammad Al-Abdallah, the SJAC’s founding director, told Arab News that the videos provided strong visual evidence that the Syrian intelligence apparatus had in place a systemic process of documenting mass atrocities based on the commands of the senior leadership.
“It seems the documentation was systematically carried out by members of the intelligence. The systematic process of filming, the digital camera, the transfer of data to a central laptop, and the resentment of higher officers of the filming by their subordinates but unable to order them to stop filming, all these are clear indications that the filming was being ordered by higher officers.”
By revealing and analyzing these videos to the world, he hopes that a measure of closure can be provided to the families of the victims who were not even given bodies to mourn.
“Our analysis is that the filming aimed to document the identities of the victims primarily but also to provide evidence that the units had carried out the orders,” Al-Abdallah said.
“Documenting the identities of victims is a practice the Syrian intelligence followed in the case of victims of torture, for example. We have seen it in the Caesar photos.”
He was referring to a Syrian known as “Caesar,” who documented torture against civilians by the Assad regime in what became known as the 2014 Syrian detainee report or Caesar report.
The so-called burn-pit videos seemed to confirm the practice of documenting mass executions and attempted disposal of the bodies as part of a macabre bureaucratic policy instituted by various Syrian state security agencies.
The SJAC’s revelations of these latest videos have added to horrific evidence previously leaked by a former Syrian military intelligence photographer, codenamed Caesar, who escaped Syria with a thumb drive containing 1,000 photographs of executed detainees, with each victim provided a number and then surreptitiously disposed of.
Reports published in the New Lines Magazine and the UK’s Guardian newspaper in April implicated regime forces in the murders of dozens of people in 2013.
The most important piece of evidence was mobile phone footage depicting summary mass executions of civilians by Syrian military officers in Tadamon, a southern suburb of Damascus that had revolted against the regime.
Al-Abdallah noted that the videos from Deraa proved that there was a clear hierarchy commanding atrocities on a massive scale, and that the individuals carrying out these orders had become cruelly accustomed to the task.