Syrian behind the Caesar Assad regime killing and torture pictures reveals his identity

Caesar, who took thousands of photos of tortured bodies in Syrian detention centers and prisons, has revealed his identity and face for the first time, in a television interview that comes two months after the fall of the Assad regime.

“I’m First Lieutenant Farid Al Madhan, head of the forensic evidence department of the military police in Damascus, known as Caesar, son of free Syria… I am from the city of Dara’a, the cradle of the Syrian revolution,” said a man with a light gray beard, wearing a formal suit and white shirt.

“I worked in the city of Damascus, the military police command, and I lived in the city of al Tall in the Damascus countryside”.

He pointed out that after the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011, his mission became photographing the bodies of victims of arrest, including elderly men, women and children, who were arrested at military and security checkpoints in Damascus, and from the protest squares that called for freedom and dignity.

He continued, “They are arrested, tortured and killed in systematic, bloody ways, and their bodies are transferred to military morgues to be photographed and transported to mass graves”.

The former officer, who defected in 2014 with 55,000 photos documenting the brutality of practices in Syrian prisons during the period of suppression of the protests that erupted in 2011.

He explained that he had decided to defect from this criminal regime, as it was a fateful decision “Either I would be with this murderous, criminal regime and become an accomplice in the killing, or I would defect from it and disavow its criminal actions and bear the consequences of my decision to defect, which is persecution, pursuit, and death threats”.

He explained that he postponed his step to be able to collect the largest number of photos that document and condemn the Syrian regime’s apparatuses for committing crimes against humanity against detainees”.

Farid Al Madhan explained that he had smuggled the photos via a flash memory card through security checkpoints, sometimes putting them in his socks or a loaf of bread, and using them to pass through checkpoints of government forces or opposition factions that controlled the area where he lived.

Al Mudhan, who currently resides in France, was overcome with emotion during the 50-minute interview, and confirmed that he had fled first to Jordan and then to Qatar.

In 2020, the US Caesar Act, named after the revelations of the whistleblower, came into effect, imposing a series of economic measures against the Syrian authorities.

Caesar called for lifting these sanctions after the fall of Assad… He said, “We appeal and demand that the US government lift the Caesar sanctions because the reason for the sanctions has been removed with the fall of the criminal Assad regime… Today, the Syrian people and the Syrian government are in dire need of international and regional support to build our free, prosperous state open to the world”.