PARIS: Ahmad Al-Sharaa, leader of the Syrian Arab Republic, on his first visit to Europe since taking power, arrived at the Elysee palace in Paris on Wednesday where he was greeted by President Emmanuel Macron.
Ahead of the high-profile talks at the Elysee Palace, Al-Sharaa met a whistleblower known as “Caesar” who smuggled out tens of thousands of pictures depicting the tortured corpses of detainees under ousted ruler Bashar Assad.
Al-Sharaa and Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani “met with Farid Al-Madhan, known as ‘Caesar,’ on the sidelines of their visit” to Paris, the Syrian presidency said in a statement, posting images of the meeting.
Al-Madhan revealed his identity in February during an interview with Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera after being known for years only as a Syrian military photographer under the pseudonym Caesar.
He fled Syria in 2013 with some 55,000 graphic images taken after Syria’s war erupted two years earlier with the brutal repression of anti-government protests, smuggled in a flash drive.
The photos, authenticated by experts, show corpses tortured and starved to death in Syrian prisons.
He testified to a US Congress committee and his photographs inspired a 2020 US law which imposed economic sanctions on Syria and judicial proceedings in Europe against Assad’s entourage.
Germany, the Netherlands and France have since 2022 convicted several top officials from the Syrian intelligence service and militias. After war erupted, Al-Madhan told Al Jazeera he was tasked with “taking pictures of victims of detention.”
He had said that these included “old men, women and children, who were detained at security checkpoints in Damascus, and from protest squares that called for freedom and dignity.”
He said he postponed his defection from the government forces and fleeing the country in order to be able to “collect the largest number of pictures documenting and incriminating the Syrian regime apparatuses of committing crimes against humanity.”
In March, Al-Sharaa signed into force a constitutional declaration for a five-year transitional period during which a “transitional justice commission” would be formed to “determine the means for accountability, establish the facts, and provide justice to victims and survivors” of the former government’s misdeeds.
