Every night for two years a staff sergeant in the Syrian army left his workplace at a military hospital in Damascus and went home to his family. Concealed inside the sole of his shoe was a memory stick which could get them all killed.
“In a repressive regime like the Assad regime, they do random checks,” said David Crane, a professor of international law at Syracuse University in upstate New York. “There were horrific consequences for what he was doing.”
Last summer he vanished and was presumed dead. His family held a funeral. In fact the sergeant, who has been given the pseudonym Caesar, had escaped bearing 55,000 photographs documenting evidence of horrific torture that may one day be used in a war crimes tribunal.