Previous efforts to refer Syria and its President Bashar Assad to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for possible prosecution for war crimes have failed, but that could now change with the discovery of new photo evidence of alleged Syrian torture of foreigners.
The U.S. State Department confirmed that a cache of thousands of photographs exposes brutal torture and deaths of civilians at the hands of Assad’s regime, including at least 10 foreigners from European nations. The European citizens were identified through FBI analysis of the photographs, which reportedly show the bodies of about 11,000 victims thought to have been killed between 2011 and 2013.
The digital images were smuggled out of Syria last year by a former military photographer who is being referred to as “Caesar.” The photos are described as horrific evidence of torture, starvation and deaths of civilians while in detention during Syria’s raging civil war in which hundreds of thousands have been killed.
Earlier this year, the United Nations put to a vote a resolution to refer Syria and Assad to the ICC for possible war crimes prosecution, but the measure was blocked by Russia and China.
“It’s incredibly important for the international community to treat the fact that Europeans were tortured to death by the Assad regime with the same seriousness that they treated the fact that two American journalists were beheaded for going inside Syria and covering the suffering of the Syrian people,” said Mouaz Moustafa, Executive Director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
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