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Since 2012, the regime has routinely conducted airstrikes and artillery strikes in dense urban centers, including with barrel bombs, improvised unguided bombs, which are sometimes described as air-dropped IEDs. The Assad regime systemically targeted eastern Aleppo’s hospitals in multiple strikes, killing patients and medical professionals. (Coughs.) Excuse me.
In addition to airstrikes, the regime continues to systematically abduct and torture civilian detainees, often beating, electrocuting, and raping these victims. A former regime photo-documentarian working under the name Caesar has shared more than 10,000 photos of Assad’s victims with the international community. According to numerous NGOs, the regime has abducted and detained between 65,000 and 117,000 people between 2011 and 2015.
Moreover, the regime has also authorized the extrajudicial killings of thousands of detainees using mass hangings at the Saydnaya military prison. Saydnaya is a 45-minute drive outside of Damascus and is one of Syria’s largest and most secure prison complexes. Saydnaya is but one of many detention facilities where prisoners are being held and abused. Others include the Mezzeh airport detention facility and Military Security Branches 215, 227, 235, 248, and 291, which are all located throughout Syria.
The regime holds as many as 70 prisoners in Saydnaya in cells that have a five-person capacity. And according to multiple sources, the regime is responsible for killing as many as 50 detainees per day at Saydnaya. Credible sources have believed that many of the bodies have been disposed in mass graves. We now believe that the Syrian regime has installed a crematorium in the Saydnaya prison complex which could dispose of detainees’ remains with little evidence.
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Obama understands that the decision he made to step back from air strikes, and to allow the violation of a red line he himself had drawn to go unpunished, will be interrogated mercilessly by historians. But today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him.
“I’m very proud of this moment,” he told me. “The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America’s credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America’s interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I’ve made—and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make.”
