He waited for his brother-in-law to cross the front line smuggling documents stolen from the Syrian dictatorship’s archives. Detection could mean dismemberment or death, but they were committed to exposing the industrial-scale violence used to keep President Bashar Assad in power.
Ussama Uthman, now 59, was building a vast record of the brutality — photographs that showed Assad’s government was engaging in systematic torture and extrajudicial killings.
Now, safely in exile in France and with Assad having fallen in a surprise rebel offensive last year, Uthman is sharing how he, his wife and her brother teamed up to smuggle evidence of the horrific crimes out from under Syria’s infamous surveillance apparatus as war tore the country apart.
The photos of broken bodies and torture sites — records were apparently kept to show orders were being followed — began appearing online in 2014. They spurred U.S. sanctions, and are being used to prosecute suspected war crimes and help Syrians find out what happened to family members who disappeared.
“We have hundreds of thousands of mothers waiting for news of their loved ones,” said Uthman.
During a recent interview in northern France — The Associated Press agreed to withhold the exact location for security reasons — the only time Uthman’s voice broke was when he recounted sending a woman photos of a brutalized body and asking if she recognized her son.
“I send her five snapshots of her son’s body, torn under Bashar Assad’s whips, and she rejoices. She says, ‘Thank God, I have confirmed that he is dead,’” he recalled. “This sadness should have kept our flags at half-staff in Syria for years.”
Family secrets, risks and duty
With the Arab Spring sweeping through the Middle East in 2011, protests in the southern city of Daraa inspired demonstrations throughout Syria. The government responded with force, but rather than crushing the demonstrations, the brutality sparked a civil war that spurred foreign intervention and pitted a patchwork of rebel groups against the armor and air power of the military and Assad’s allies.
When news broke that first year of a massacre in Hama, Uthman, a construction engineer from the Damascus suburb of al-Tall, swore he’d help topple Assad. He didn’t know how until he got a call from his wife’s brother Farid al-Mazhan, a military police officer who asked him to meet in person — electronic communications were too risky.
Al-Mazhan showed Uthman gory images taken by photographers in the military forensic pathology department that he helped run. He said he could access more.
The two launched a secret operation that would eventually smuggle more than 53,000 photographs out of Syria showing evidence of torture, disease and starvation in the country’s lockups.
The operation was incredibly dangerous but straightforward.
As an officer, Al-Mazhan could pass government-run checkpoints; his connections in the rebel-held town where he lived and eventually Uthman’s secret coordination with rebels enabled him to cross checkpoints staffed by their fighters.
He would then secretly pass CDs, hard drives and USB sticks containing photos and other documents to Uthman. He also slipped them to his sister, Khawla al-Mazhan, who is married to Uthman. She was the first to suggest using the photos to try to topple Assad.
“Why don’t we use these images to bring down the regime?” Uthman recalled her saying.
Uthman adopted the nom de guerre Sami. Farid al-Mazhan took Caesar. Their operation would become known as the Caesar Files.
Justice for Syria, from exile
Deciding to escape Syria — an estimated 6 million people fled during the war — the team uploaded 55 gigabytes of photos and documents dating from May 2011 to August 2014 to a foreign server. They then began furtively moving their extended families to neighboring countries. Diplomats eventually helped Uthman’s family settle in France in 2014.
Once safely out of Syria, they began publishing the material, sparking immediate and widespread condemnation of Assad.
As families scoured the ghastly archive for signs of what happened to their loved ones, the team gave copies to European prosecutors. Authorities in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland have arrested or initiated legal proceedings against former Syrian officials accused of torture and killings.
The release of the files marked “a key point in Syria’s history,” said Kholoud Helmi, co-founder of the independent Syrian news site Enab Baladi. Both the international community and Syrians were faced with “striking proof” of the Assad government’s crimes.
“Almost nobody believed us — or thought we were exaggerating,” said Helmi, who fled during the war.
The Caesar Files team are heroes, said Lina Chawaf, editor-in-chief of Radio Rozana, an independent Syrian media outlet.
“You know the price that you will pay, but it will cost all of your family,” said Chawaf, who also fled Syria.
Hoping to plug the leak, Syrian authorities tightened their grip on their archive. Gradually, the team reorganized and grew to roughly 60 members both inside and outside of Syria. They built a second tranche of evidence, the Atlas Files, from 2014 until 2024.
Late last year, as they were starting to organize this new catalog — it’s nearly three times the size of the first — startling news broke: Rebels had seized Syria’s second-biggest city, Aleppo.
Accountability under a new regime
Within 10 days, rebel forces sprinted across government-held territory to take Damascus, forcing Assad to flee to Russia and ending his family’s nearly 54-year rule.
The sudden power vacuum bred chaos, with rebels flinging open the doors of the country’s most feared prisons.
Team members still in Syria and families of the missing rushed to the sites in search of information — more than 130,000 Syrians disappeared during the war, according to international bodies.
Helmi, of the Enab Baladi news site, considers her family lucky to have found proof of her brother Ahmad’s execution.
“They killed him 27 days after he was detained, and we’ve been waiting for him for 13 years,” said Helmi, who thinks the new government of President Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former rebel leader, hasn’t done enough to help families.
Uthman went further, saying so much evidence was lost in the immediate aftermath of Assad’s ouster that it was akin to the new authorities “destroying evidence, tampering with the crime scene.”
Documents lay scattered on rainy streets, psychologically shattered prisoners wandered out of broken jails, and wild dogs chewed on bones in mass graves, he said.
The government — which hopes the U.S. will permanently lift the sanctions imposed for the abuses exposed by the Caesar Files — says it is doing all it can to reckon with Assad’s bloody legacy. During Al-Sharaa’s visit to Washington on Monday, the Treasury announced a waiver of the sanctions had been renewed for another six months.
In a news conference last week in Damascus, Reda al-Jalakhi, who heads the government’s National Commission for the Missing, acknowledged that “in the first two days of the liberation, there was some chaos and a lot of documents were lost.”
But he said the authorities quickly took control of Assad’s old lockups and is preserving the remaining evidence. He thanked the Caesar Files team for providing some documentation to the commission, but he didn’t signal any plans for ongoing cooperation, saying the government would build a centralized database to find the missing.
With a defiant twinkle in his eyes, Uthman said his team’s work will continue to fight any impunity in Syria as fresh sectarian violence bloodies the country. The team dreams that one day Assad might face their evidence at trial.
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Associated Press reporter Ghaith Alsayed in Damascus contributed to this report.
