Kurdish family finds murdered relative among Caesar photos
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — A Kurdish family in the northeastern Syrian town of Amuda has learned the fate of their long-missing relative when they spotted his photo among the thousands of leaked images showing prisoners killed by the Syrian regime.
The family of Mohammed Rasho, who had gone missing seven years ago, now joins thousands of Syrians reliving the pain of lost relatives who disappeared before and during the conflict as thousands of photographs documenting abuses inside Syrian prisons have once again circulated on the internet.
"He was not a politician. He was not a troublemaker. He did not have problems with anyone," Mohammed's distraught brother Dibo Rasho told Rudaw on Monday.
The family said Mohammed went missing in June 2013 while doing construction work in Damascus, and they never heard from him again.
First published in 2014, the photos have resurfaced on this internet with the United States' passage of the Caesar Law, named after a former Syrian military photographer known by the pseudonym "Caesar" who fled the country in 2013, taking with him some 55,000 photographs documenting systematic torture and killing at Military Hospital 601 in Damascus.
The gruesome photos depict thousands of emaciated bodies with marks of torture, numbered with hand-written pieces of paper as their only identifier.
Mohammed Rasho's family waited seven years for news of whether he was alive or dead. After seeing the photograph online, they contacted Syrian NGOs, which confirmed the handwritten paper next to his body matched records for Rasho's surname.
Now that they have the closure of certainty, they plan to finally hold a funeral for him.
"We are 100 percent sure that this is him," Dibo said.
"All Mohammed cared about in his life was to go to the mosque and comeback home. He was not ready to give up on his work for any other thing," his brother Dibo said.
Rasho is survived by seven children.
Syria has been embroiled in war for much of the last nine years, ever since peaceful protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad escalated into a multi-sided conflict involving multiple countries.
Presently, the country is largely divided under the rule of the Syrian government, Kurdish-led militias, and anti-government militants, some of which are backed by Turkey.
Signed into law in early 2020, the Caesar Law seeks to prevent any normalization with the Syrian government by sanctioning companies who do business with the state.
The new round of sanctions come while Syria's economy draws closer to full collapse, with skyrocketing inflation causing its currency to devalue from roughly 45 Syrian Pounds (SP) to the dollar before the war, to now trading upwards of 3,000 SP against the dollar.
"The economic crisis is hitting every part of Syria, regardless of territorial control," United Nations envoy to Syria Geir O. Pederson told reporters earlier this month. "Medicine is more expensive, and scarce. Food prices have skyrocketed and supply chains have been disrupted."
Last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the sanctions "the beginning of what will be a sustained campaign of economic and political pressure to deny the Assad regime revenue and support it uses to wage war and commit mass atrocities against the Syrian people."
Damascus has said it refuses to "bow" to Washington's demands under the latest sanctions.
Assad has managed to remain in power with the backing of allies Russia and Iran, and regain large swathes of territory from opposition groups.
The war is estimated to have claimed the lives of more than 380,000 people and displaced over half of the country's pre-war population. In 2014, the United Nations announced it would stop counting the death toll, saying that violence had made it too difficult to accurately keep count.