Over decades, ghastly, chilling images from Syria have cemented the Assad family’s legacy of savagely oppressing the country’s population.
In 1982, photos showed the pulverized central city of Hama after the regime bombed and bulldozed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising, leaving up to 20,000 people dead.
In 2013, images emerged of hundreds of ghostly pale bodies in a rebellious Damascus suburb, victims of one of the government’s chemical weapons attacks. Many of the dead were children.
That same year, a former military photographer smuggled thousands of photographs out of Syria documenting how political prisoners had been starved, beaten and subjected to brutal torture — their eyes gouged out or their genitals mangled.
“These people did not care; the leadership cared nothing about the Syrian people,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former U.S. government official on security issues. “They launched Scud missiles against their own people — who does that? — while the chemical weapons were a sign of just how far they would go to hold on to power.”
Syrians sometimes said the Assads were like the fictional Corleone crime family, but with secret police networks attached — a ruthless clan of brothers and cousins who dominated the political system, the military, the economy and even the exports of illegal drugs. Much of the country lived in fear.
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