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The Unfathomable Toll of the Syrian Civil War

How to make sense of the 13-year conflict?

An aerial photo shows crowds of Syrians raising a giant independence-era flag, used by the opposition since the uprising began in 2011, as they celebrate the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s rule earlier this week at the central Umayyad Square in Damascus on 2024.

This essay is adapted from Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution (Simon & Schuster).

No one knows how many people were killed in Syria during the civil war. Local human rights organizations estimate that, by mid-2013, more than one hundred thousand people died, a figure that is almost certainly a gross undercount. Most of the dead were likely civilians, the vast majority killed by the Assad regime and its allies. The killing was targeted and systematic, a government policy designed to quell the rebellion.

This slaughter came in three forms. There was the house-to-house variety, the hulking men in bandoliers burning people alive, raping women—of which there exist many recorded instances, like Monk Farm in 2013, spanning multiple provinces. Such massacres require boots on the ground, though, which proved a challenge for the regime when swathes of the country fell under rebel control. So the second variety of killing came from bombers and helicopters; in some corners of Syria, bombing raids became so common-place that locals, upon overcoming the shock that their own government was dropping explosives on them, cobbled together an early-warning system for approaching aircraft by stationing spotters near air bases.

The third mode of death occurred in the dozens of detention centers strung across the country, some no larger than a few cells, others housed in sprawling military compounds. We know something of the inner workings of such repression due to regime defectors, who smuggled tens of thousands of government documents out of Syria. These files, which include communiqués between branches of the security services, detail a govern-ment policy, drawn up in 2011, to crush the protests by targeting categories of people, such as demonstration organizers and those who “tarnish the image of Syria in the foreign media.”

It’s unclear how many people passed through this gulag archipelago, though some estimates suggest over one hundred thousand. In the early days, most detainees were released after confessing under torture, but as the rebellion spread, the torture grew more sadistic, and growing numbers of prisoners never returned home.

The regime catalogued these deaths, photographing the corpses, presumably so jailers could report their progress to superiors. In August 2013, an employee at Military Hospital 601 in Damascus, code-named Caesar, stuffed into his socks flash drives containing nearly fifty thousand images of bodies and fled the country. Caesar’s photos provide the clearest evidence of the charnel house that was the Syrian prison system: naked corpses, faces battered beyond recognition, eyes gouged. The victims showed signs of severe malnutrition, their skin furrowed at the rib cage, limbs like twigs. They lay with an alien grimace, in the ghastly repose of the dead of a concentration camp.

For many Syrians, the scale of the horror unfolding in their country, orchestrated by such cold bureaucratic machinery, conjured one word: genocide. Yet according to the Genocide........

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