Syria's Disappeared: The Case Against Assad

These are torture champers, full stop.

I'm a career servant

in the field of international criminal justice.

I worked at the Yugoslavia Tribunal, Rwanda Tribunal,

I was the first investigator

at the International Criminal Court.

This will be the final act in my career.

Bill Wiley

and his team of war crimes investigators

have been smuggling material out of Syria

to a secret location in Europe.

- We've extracted about 600,000 pages

of regime documentation.

- A wealth of potential evidence

abandoned by the Syrian regime

that could help build the case for a criminal prosecution.

- The King or Queen, if you will, of evidence

in any international criminal investigation

is always documentation.

It isn't really easily cross-examined,

because it's factual, it's truth.

In the cache of papers,

investigators found thousands of internal communications

relating to mass arrests.

With tens of thousands of Syrians disappeared

in detention since 2011

and allegations of abuse,

Bill's team wanted to find out

whether the arrests were part of a systematic policy.

We're trying to lay the foundations

for a prosecution along the Nuremburg lines,

where the prosecutors can lead

with heavy, heavy, irrefutable documentary material.

Stephen Rapp has prosecuted

some of worst mass atrocity crimes in recent history.

He's working with Bill Wiley on the case.

- It was said in Nuremburg that the Nazis were, you know,

largely convicted on their own documentary evidence.

You have a country that's like the Germans,

they document mad.

They document things that even implicate themselves.

We didn't set out to build a case

against President Assad or any other individual,

we went where the documents took us.

- The paper trail first led the investigators

to the protests that began in Syria in 2011

and to the fate of those who took to the streets.

Mazen came from a left-wing,

middle class family who had been targeted

by the Syrian regime for decades

for wanting democratic change.

They opposed the authoritarian rule of the Assad family,

who had governed Syria with a repressive military

and security apparatus for over 40 years.

Then in 2011 the Arab Spring

swept across Syria.

- Mariam Hallak, a head teacher from Damascus,

was a supporter of the regime

and a member of President Assad's ruling Ba'ath Party.

But her youngest son, Ayham, a dentistry graduate,

joined the protests.

Although Mariam opposed

the demonstrations at first,

she was won over by her son's enthusiasm.

From the outset,

President Assad's forces responded by shooting protesters,

killing scores of people.

The regime's violent repression

just brought more protesters to the streets.

As the regime looked like

it was losing control,

it issued an order to arrest people

on an unprecedented scale.

War crimes investigators have pieced together

what happened behind the scenes.

Among the 600,000 pages of smuggled

Syrian intelligence documents, they discovered this.

This is the key document,

which sets out the policy of the regime

after several months of protests.

It sets out the categories of persons

to be detained for interrogation.

So in particular, financiers of demonstrations,

persons who instigate demonstrations,

and persons who communicate with foreign media,

or international organizations,

whom, as it says here, tarnish the image of Syria.

The order was from the top

of the Syrian regime,

from a body akin to a war cabinet

established to deal with the protests.

The investigators have thousands of documents

showing it was passed all the way down the chain of command.

- The regime was hammering peaceful protesters.

- The security forces made mass arrests.

And the regime created more detention facilities

to cope with the influx of detainees.

Hospitals became part of this system.

One of them was Tishreen Military Hospital in Damascus.

Mohamad al-Hamoud worked at the hospital for the regime.

He's a defector.

He headed an emergency department

and was there when some of the first protesters

were brought in by the security forces.

Over 200,000 people

were arrested in a matter of months.

Mariam's son, Ayham, started working

for a Syrian human rights group

documenting the disappearances.

- The first time I met Ayham, I was in my office,

he was coming to me joking

and he was, like, smiling, he has, like, a special smile.

I thought he was funny and he was very nice.

Mansour al-Omari and Ayham

had only been working at the

human rights organization for a month

when their offices were raided by the security forces.

- Soldiers were coming in like they were in a battlefield.

They were carrying rifles, pointing at us their rifles.

We were all shocked.

- The Air Force Intelligence Branch

at Mezze Military Airport in Damascus,

where Ayham, Mansour and their colleagues were taken,

is the site of one of most

notorious detention facilities in Syria.

Some of us were destroyed.

We were, of course, scared and,

Ayham was different, really, he was, like, smiling.

Trying to make us smile.

He sang.

He wanted us to sing with him all the time.

After a month,

Mansour and Ayham were moved to another detention facility.

- Because Ayham is a doctor, they were beating him more.

It was like that.

They used to come, the soldiers used to come down

and ask, "Where is the doctor?"

That's what they say.

So each time he came in, he had two or three open wounds

and the other, the rest of his body, is red or blue.

He changed.

He was silent all the time.

Maybe because of that, of the beating he was getting,

because he suffered so much.

I don't know how he handled it.

Meanwhile, Mazen too

had come to the attention of the security forces

for organizing protests in his hometown.

He fled to Damascus to evade capture.

Investigators have thousands of arrest lists

of who was wanted by the regime.

We asked them to search for Mazen's name in the documents.

Okay, so we've got a hit here.

It's Mazen Hamada.

What's been logged here is a note dated January 2012,

indicating that a certain Mazen Al Hamada

and indeed certain of his associates should be picked up

or detained if they come across him.

What effectively they're saying is,

we're looking for him

and if you come across him, arrest him.

In March 2012,

Mazen was in a cafe with his nephews,

after they had helped supply baby formula

to a besieged area.

And how do you feel

about the people who did that to you?

- In a secret location in Europe,

Bill Wiley's investigators are building a criminal case

against the Syrian regime.

Using their cache of smuggled intelligence documents,

they have interviewed hundreds of people

whose names appear on the regime's

arrest lists and interrogation notes.

The treatment of detainees

in different parts of the country

did not differ in any substantive way.

Too many people have been physically abused,

too many people have been psychologically abused,

too many people have died in detention

of unnatural causes to say that there's anything else

but a widespread and, indeed, systematic practice of abuse.

Witnesses say the abuses

weren't confined to the detention centers.

Even when they were sent to hospital for treatment,

the torture continued.

Mazen says he was so severely beaten

in detention he was urinating blood.

He was taken to a military hospital

close to the detention facility, Hospital 601.