Thousands of graphic photos reveal the fate of loved ones tortured, disappeared under Assad regime

WARNING: This story contains images of dead bodies and graphic physical injuries.

Thaer al-Najjar and his family had searched for his brother Imad in vain for 13 years, ever since he was violently arrested in 2012 by the security forces of Syria's former Assad regime.

After the government was overthrown in December 2024 and dictator Bashar al-Assad fled, Najjar even made multiple trips with one of his sons to a notorious prison outside Damascus where the regime murdered thousands of captives. They hoped they might find some trace of Imad.

"We went to the cells inside," Najjar said. "Imad was a painter and he used to paint on walls, so we were looking at the walls, hoping that we could find any of his paintings."

After all that time and all that searching, Najjar, a 57-year-old blacksmith, was now holding a piece of paper given to him by a reporter that confirmed what he'd feared. One of tens of thousands of records and photographs from the Assad regime leaked to journalists, it was a death certificate containing three lines of typed Arabic text.

"While providing treatment to the detainee, Imad Saeed al-Najjar, in the emergency department, he did not respond to resuscitation, despite the continued attempt for 30 minutes until the moment of death," it read. It was dated Aug. 14, 2012 — 10 days after Imad was hauled away by Assad's security forces, Thaer al-Najjar said. Imad had participated in peaceful protests as part of the revolution that broke out the year before against Syria's dictatorship.

As he read those lines in the basement office of a Damascus hotel in September, Najjar's face crumpled and he started to sob. He rushed out of the room, his cries echoing down the corridor.

The murder of Imad al-Najjar is one of thousands committed by Assad's forces that are captured in a huge compilation of government files and photos known as the Damascus dossier.

The 134,000 Syrian security and intelligence records were obtained by German public broadcaster NDR, which shared them with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its global network of media partners, including CBC News.

The leaked records include 70,000 images — many of them gruesome photos of torture victims' bodies taken and catalogued by Syrian military police — as well as 64,000 files from Syrian intelligence agencies, including many death certificates and arrest reports.

Journalists who analyzed the photos were able to count 10,212 bodies of detainees. The images mostly range from 2015 through 2024. Until now, the Syrian public did not know about the existence of the photos.

During Syria's 13-year civil war, the Assad regime detained, tortured and killed thousands of the country’s citizens, aiming to extinguish all signs of dissent. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that more than 150,000 people were arrested and "forcibly disappeared" by Assad's forces since the war began in 2011.

When the regime finally collapsed, thousands of people like Thaer al-Najjar renewed their search for their missing loved ones. They flocked to prisons, hospitals and mass grave sites; they rummaged through strewn paperwork and examined bodies in hospital morgues, hoping to find long-lost family members or, at least, a sense of closure about their fates.

But many thousands of Syrians found nothing, and whatever hope they had turned to agony as they feared they might never learn what the government had done to their family members.