Las torturas de El Asad en Siria salpican a la ONU
·25 min·2 clips
A colonel fled Damascus with a hard drive containing 33,000 photos of people who died in Assad's prisons.
The episode opens with a graphic description of photographs from the Damascus Dossier, showing emaciated and tortured bodies labeled with numbers. Correspondent Andrés Mourenza explains that this dossier consists of 64,000 internal documents and 33,000 photographs leaked by a Syrian military police colonel who fled with a hard drive. The photos depict 10,212 different people who died in regime prisons between 2015 and 2024, with analysis revealing widespread signs of hunger, injury, and torture. Mourenza describes how the regime used a bureaucratic system similar to the Nazis, with military photographers documenting each body from multiple angles in seconds. The corpses were then placed in garbage bags and transported to mass graves, sometimes moved to obscure traces. After the regime fell in December 2024, families searched prisons with little success, though the dossier has helped identify some victims, like Emad al-Najjar, whose death certificate was found after 15 years. The episode shifts to discuss Soruk, a security company that the UN contracted from 2014 to 2024 for protection in Syria. Investigation reveals Soruk was directly owned and controlled by the Syrian General Directorate of Intelligence, an apparatus implicated in torture and war crimes. Despite UN claims of due diligence, documents show the Syrian government benefited financially from these contracts through currency exchange mechanisms. Since the regime's fall, Soruk has rebranded and continues operating with approval from the new government. The episode concludes by questioning whether the leaked evidence can be used in international justice, noting precedents like the Caesar photos that led to sanctions, but acknowledging challenges with a fallen regime.
