Who is assad killing

The evidence is hard to watch but it should be seen. Many risked their lives to tell this story so that — even if Assad is never arrested — he will be, forever, handcuffed to the truth. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did this. These are civilians of a Damascus suburb called Ghouta. In , ghouta was held by rebels so the Syrian army shelled the neighborhood with internationally banned nerve gas. Assad had chosen to meet the popular uprising against him not with diplomacy, not with war among soldiers, but with terrorism without restraint.

Stephen Rapp is helping to build cases against Assad and his regime. Rapp prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and Sierra Leone and served as U. Stephen Rapp: I'm an optimistic American. I've seen other situations that we thought were pretty hopeless, where nobody thought there'd ever be justice where we succeeded. The possibilities are there and one of the ways that we build toward that is get the solid evidence now. Much of what he calls solid evidence was abandoned in the warzone.

More than , government documents have been smuggled out and archived by the Independent Commission for International Justice and Accountability. The commission is funded, in part, by the U. Stephen Rapp is the commission's chair. Scott Pelley: Do the documents that have been collected so far lead all the way to President Assad? Stephen Rapp: There's no question they lead all the way to President Assad.

I mean, this is a top down, organized effort. There are documents with his name on it. Clearly he organizes this strategy. Then we see orders down through the system to pick people up. We see reports back. We see reports back about well, we've got a real problem here, there are too many corpses stacking up.

Among the corpses is Ahmad al-Musalmani, a year-old who was last seen on a bus headed to his mother's funeral. His family told human rights watch that Assad's military stopped the bus and found a protest song on Ahmad's phone.

His family next saw his face, two years later, when an image of his tortured body was smuggled out by the man concealed in the blue windbreaker. Caesar: Our job became solely to take photographs of the bodies of dead human beings that had been tortured to death or killed in the different intelligence branches. We spoke to him with the translation help of Mouaz Moustafa, of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which works to protect civilians.

Caesar had been a military photographer for 13 years. In , he was ordered to make a record at morgues that received the dead from Assad's secret prisons. We added a masking effect because his images are too horrific for television. By the time the agreement had unraveled and Assad was back to using chemical weapons against Syrian citizens, the public no longer cared and Obama was busy discussing his foreign policy legacy.

He seems to prefer a smaller U. His reaction to the Khan Sheikhoun attack a year ago aligned with these preferences: He abhorred the attack and spoke with uncharacteristic humanity about the children killed by Assad, and ordered a pointed but limited response. For Assad, there is utility in such a feint, and no real risk. In , he and the rest of the region braced in fear for an expected American response, which was widely expected to jolt the regional state of affairs. Assad has learned his lessons since then.

No meaningful American response will be forthcoming, no matter how hideous the war crime. America remains deep in strategic drift, unsure of why it continues to engage in the Middle East, and prone to spasms of hyperactivity rather than sustained attention.

March 15 marks the seventh year of the Syrian uprising , which at its start resembled other protests across the Middle East known then as the Arab Spring. A harsh crackdown by the Syrian regime transformed those student-led demonstrations into an armed uprising that has left hundreds of thousands dead, with some estimates as high as half a million.

Millions more have been displaced from their homes and country. Several times it appeared as though Assad could lose his grip on power.

This matters as we enter peace talks for Syria. All efforts at stopping the violence will fail unless we understand where it is coming from. The story of the data is unarguable — if we want to stop the killing of civilians in Syria we have to address the brutality of the government of Bashar Al-Assad and its allies. Have a look at the data from the Syrian Network for Human Rights :. Moussa, 15, [ as told to Save The Children ].

Noureddine Hashim, Saoud, Idlib [ as told to the New York Times ].