AS U.S. SANCTIONS CALLED THE ‘CAESAR ACT’ WENT INTO EFFECT IN JUNE, HERE IS WHAT’S HAPPENING.

In the year 2014, a photographer, code named “Caesar”, fled Syria armed with a thumb drive of over 55,000 images of war crime atrocities being perpetrated in Syrian prisons by the Bashar al Assad Regime. These images found their way to the floor of the U.S. Congress and Senate that eventually, in a bipartisan vote, passed a bill of sanctions against Assad and his government called, the ‘Caesar Act’.

Earlier this year, U.S. President Trump signed The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, also known as the Caesar Act into law. This legislation places sanctions on the Syrian government, including Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, for war crimes against the Syrian population.

A number of Syrian operated industries, including those related to infrastructure, military maintenance and energy production, are targeted. The bill also targets individuals and businesses who provide funding or assistance to the president of Syria. Iranian and Russian entities are addressed for their governments’ support of Assad in the Syrian Civil War. The legislation imposes fresh sanctions on entities conducting business with the Syrian government and its military and intelligence agencies. It also aims to encourage negotiations by allowing the President of the United States to waive sanctions if the parties are engaged in meaningful negotiations and the violence against civilians has ceased.

When the law came into effect in mid-June, 2020 the regime and their Iranian and Russian allies were ready to deal with it; not to accept the limitations it would have on them and their continued criminal operations but to pass the effects of the sanctions on to the already unbearable suffering of the Syrian people.

The regime took every paragraph of this law and used it as a crushing rational to further starve and displace more Syrian citizens. They devised a campaign to try and convince the average citizen that the U.S. and this law is the cause their hunger, torment and pain. They try to portray this act as a Siege upon the Syrian people while all the while Assad and his cronies try to remain untouched and unaffected by the restrictions the act is intended to place upon them.

The Assad government is calling on the people’s patience and endurance as they pass the hardships of currency devaluations and skyrocketing prices onto their backs. The regime cares nothing about the cause or reason for these sanctions mentions nothing about Caesar and his pictures that show proof of the atrocities and war crimes that exist in the regime prisons / concentration camps and that ignited interest in the U.S. Congress and Senate to pass this law. Quite the opposite actually. Assad and his minions continue to deny the existence of torture, beatings, rape and starvation in his prisons calling the 55,000+ Caesar images fabricated while all the while these images stand as a testament to the horrors that the Syrian people have endured for over eight years.

No one knows how much longer the Syrian regime under Assad will remain in power but millions of Syrians dream of the day that he and his holocaust accomplices will leave, lifting the pain, suffering and fear off their backs.

 

If the Dead Could Speak is a Photographic Display of evidence that includes many of Caesar’s images that can be viewed at the United States Holocaust Museum and at the United Nations.

The author’s name of this article remains anonymous to protect the identity.