The leaked batch of videos, documenting cases of torture and abuse in the prisons of the now-ousted Assad regime, once again lays bare the horrors of Syria. These videos are not merely material meant to evoke sympathy for the victims; they are a brutal mirror of what the regime inflicted on the Syrian body.
Hundreds of scenes of torture, beatings, humiliation, and violations, even against the dead. Orchestrated acts of violence, with singing over broken bodies, as if killing was not enough, as if the crime demanded humiliation in death or in helplessness. These are not isolated atrocities; they are the archive of a regime that produced its own monsters, its own language, its own ethics, and its daily rituals of fear, obedience, and cruelty.
In the face of these scenes, the Syrian revolution appears not merely as political anger, but as an escape from a hell people knew, brushed against, or feared would swallow them whole.
The entire archive of Syrian power is gradually coming to light, whether by design or by accident, and the distinction no longer matters much. The crime is no longer a story told by a survivor, nor a memory carried by a family or an entire people. We are at the core of the system itself, though even the word “system” has become problematic, as it suggests coherence and order, while what these videos reveal is far more ambiguous: chaos within power, moral fragmentation, and an ability to distribute violence across an institution, an individual, a doctor, a nurse, a camera, and silence.
What is visible here is not self-contained. The image does not understand for us, does not judge for us, and cannot preserve memory on its own. It opens a door, and the question is: who walks through it? Justice, revenge, or spectacle?
In our eyes, the life of these videos moves with brutal speed across three roles: the video as shock, the video as a political tool, and the video as evidence. Within this triad lie atrocities that demand a normative analysis of each.
The Shock Video
Shock does not occur once. It renews itself with every clip, as if the complex Syrian ordeal never ends. Each video opens another time of violence and its possibilities, preventing the past from settling into a simple past or a closed history of justice. This is not incidental; an open memory is a condition for justice, and for the psychological and social repair that cannot be bypassed.
Here, shock serves a specific purpose: it is a moral refusal of the idea that the era of torture ended with the fall of the regime. Political collapse is not enough to tell victims that the crime is over. The regime’s fall is not the end of the story, nor of pain, nor of the demand for recognition.
At times, there is a celebratory, almost festival-like reception of these atrocities, as if seeing alone were enough to declare a new political victory, or to cleanse the past quickly. But the visible is not understanding, seeing is not justice, and the image is not the final event. To see does not mean we have understood, nor that we have done justice, nor that a new politics has triumphed simply because the images are now visible.
What is seen is only the sharp edge of the victims’ existence. It is the beginning of recognition, not its end. The appearance of the tortured body does not close the crime; it reopens it, for the sake of names, memory, the torture files and their details, and the right to know what happened. What is required here is understanding, not spectacle, justice, not passive witnessing.
The fall of the regime alone is not enough to end its power. Its archive still lives in people’s nerves, in their sleep, in their fear, in the brutal images that haunt them, in the slow death of the tortured, and in the imagination of mothers who do not know whether what they are seeing is a general report or a possible trace of a son or a relative. Shock begins to feel like a forced waiting for the next clip, one that no one wants, yet no one can stop or control. State and society are suspended before a screen they cannot turn off, nor reframe, because what appears on it is not outside their lives, but part of their deferred core.
The videos do not pass only through the eye; they land on the whole body. Syrians do not watch from the outside. They watch knowing, remembering, fearing they might recognize a face, a voice, a hand, a room, a wall, the image of a relative, a neighbor, a brother. The shock here is not only the shock of seeing, but the shock of recognition. Every leak is a possibility. It is one thing to see something terrifying; it is another to fear that it might belong to your home, your memory, your family name.
Understanding this shock is complex. It lies not only in what the video shows, but in its form, its randomness, and those who filmed it. The clip comes short, sharp, stripped of context, striking the eye before the mind can build meaning or grasp its implications. We do not enter the crime through a calm historical frame, but through repeated shock: a shot, a scream, a body, a face, an Assad slogan, then a cut. The video does not grant full understanding. It opens a cognitive wound, making us see more than we can process, leaving us suspended between seeing and not understanding.
Through the camera and social media, the image exceeds the role of a document. It becomes a shock to perception itself. Each clip pulls the crime out of the past and throws it into the present, as if time has not settled, as if history cannot organize itself under the weight of the image. The visible does not immediately become knowledge. It may be the beginning of knowing, but it can also delay it, attacking the eye, the body, and the memory before language can catch up.
The power of the video lies not only in what it shows, but in what it renders unseen. We see the beating, but not everything that came before: the order, the path to the room, the family’s fear, the preceding days, the language that made the body permissible, the institution that allowed it, and what happened after the clip ended. We see the broken body, but not the life that preceded it: childhood, home, routine, a mother, a past in which this person was whole before the camera reduced them to a moment of fracture and erasure.
In the image, society also sees what was buried within its own structure: obedience, fear, cruelty, the instinct to survive through silence, and the capacity to turn the other into a body that can be violated.
In its most extreme form, shock does not expose the perpetrator alone; it reveals what society tried not to see within itself. The viewer becomes both implicated and terrified, not because they committed the act, but because they realize that evil was never as distant as they wanted to believe. It was everywhere, and that is devastating.
Shock does not end with the archive of the former regime. After its fall, new shocks emerge; the coast and Sweida are examples. Violence does not easily leave the Syrian space; it shifts form, location, and name. These videos cannot be treated as a closed archive of a finished past. They unfold within a present still capable of producing horror, reminding us that the fall of power at the top does not necessarily dismantle the deeper structure of violence, nor end the social and political capacity to reproduce it.
There is also something of carelessness and disorder in Assad’s security apparatus. Victims of all ages are subjected to a raw, instinctive, sharp, and criminal violence that appears in their handling of blood, bodies, and fear. It is as if they are not executing a defined act, but entering a prolonged ritual in which the human being is made permissible. The tortured body is no longer tied to death or pain; it becomes material for singing, for cruelty, for degradation. There is a collapse in any grasp of even the basic elements of modernity itself: any space where a body can be held in place becomes a site of violence.
An officer beats, a soldier films his friends and turns the camera on himself, a doctor watches or remains silent, an institution opens the space, and a system makes everyone complicit while leaving responsibility without a clear owner. Here, shock returns to its most difficult question: who is responsible, and what is the role of the viewer before such atrocities?
The issue is not that the regime was a perfectly organized structure. The word “regime” itself can be misleading, suggesting a structural coherence not always visible in these clips. Familiar models of violence, Nazi, Stalinist, and fascist, are not enough to fully grasp what is happening. What emerges instead is a chaotic structure: a mix of command, fear, instinct, individual initiative, institutional, and pre-institutional complicity. A power that knows how to produce violence, then lets it fragment into many hands, until it is no longer clear where the decision begins and where the personal desire for humiliation and participation takes over.
In its most extreme form, shock does not expose the perpetrator alone; it reveals what society tried not to see within itself. The viewer becomes both implicated and terrified, not because they committed the act, but because they realize that evil was never as distant as they wanted to believe. It was everywhere, and that is devastating.
Shock does not end with the archive of the former regime. After its fall, new shocks emerge; the coast and Sweida are examples. Violence does not easily leave the Syrian space; it shifts form, location, and name. These videos cannot be treated as a closed archive of a finished past. They unfold within a present still capable of producing horror, reminding us that the fall of power at the top does not necessarily dismantle the deeper structure of violence, nor end the social and political capacity to reproduce it.
There is also something of carelessness and disorder in Assad’s security apparatus. Victims of all ages are subjected to a raw, instinctive, sharp, and criminal violence that appears in their handling of blood, bodies, and fear. It is as if they are not executing a defined act, but entering a prolonged ritual in which the human being is made permissible. The tortured body is no longer tied to death or pain; it becomes material for singing, for cruelty, for degradation. There is a collapse in any grasp of even the basic elements of modernity itself: any space where a body can be held in place becomes a site of violence.
An officer beats, a soldier films his friends and turns the camera on himself, a doctor watches or remains silent, an institution opens the space, and a system makes everyone complicit while leaving responsibility without a clear owner. Here, shock returns to its most difficult question: who is responsible, and what is the role of the viewer before such atrocities?
The issue is not that the regime was a perfectly organized structure. The word “regime” itself can be misleading, suggesting a structural coherence not always visible in these clips. Familiar models of violence, Nazi, Stalinist, and fascist, are not enough to fully grasp what is happening. What emerges instead is a chaotic structure: a mix of command, fear, instinct, individual initiative, institutional, and pre-institutional complicity. A power that knows how to produce violence, then lets it fragment into many hands, until it is no longer clear where the decision begins and where the personal desire for humiliation and participation takes over.
This chaotic structure does not begin with Assad alone. Part of its Syrian roots is entangled with an older history, marked by the shocks of security violence since the era of union, Nasserism, and Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj, when the security state began to learn how to turn the political body into an enemy that could be erased. In Syrian and Lebanese memory, the killing of Farajallah al-Helou and the dissolution of his body in acid remains an early and brutal marker of this security imagination: not only killing the opponent, but erasing their trace, their body, and the possibility that they remain as a witness to the crime. In the narratives that followed under Nasserism, both the torturers and the tortured were erased.
Today’s shock is greater because it is filmed, multiplied, and exposed to all, but it does not come from nowhere. Its violent roots are embedded in a long history, where every philosophy of force was inscribed on the body. The shock of the crime evolves to the point where the viewer begins to feel guilty for having remained silent, for having been unable to act, or simply for having survived. Crime in Syria is not a purely individual act, nor a fully declared institutional order; it is an overlapping network of ambiguous roles: a hand that strikes, an eye that watches, a camera that records, a door that opens, and an institution that allows the human being to become material for beating and humiliation.
The Video: The Camera as a Political Tool
After the shock, the video emerges as a political instrument. The clip is no longer just evidence of a crime; it becomes capable of carrying another meaning, entering the circulation of an ongoing civil war: fear, sectarianism, anger, a pre-verbal political expression, and calls for revenge. But before this circulation, there is something deeper: the camera itself. The camera is not a neutral witness; it is an active, complex agent in shaping meaning, never innocent within violence.
In Syria, the regime created small, filmed stages: rooms, corridors, cars, hospitals, and transient spaces turned into sites of torture. These scenes were recorded for many reasons, but what they reveal is not documentation alone. The perpetrator does not settle for the act; he wants to appear within it. He wants to see himself torturing, to leave a trace, to turn the crime into a memory of fear, to appear with his hair, his presence, his voice beside the lens. It is as if violence is incomplete until it becomes a scene.
The Syrian perpetrator, as these clips reveal, is performative yet deprived of an independent self. He does not produce himself as an individual, not through clothing, appearance, or distinct features. He appears as a figure dissolved into an apparatus, into loyalty, into a feared sectarian frame, into a power that grants him a distorted right to appear. It is almost his only right: to appear with a tool, with violence, with a voice, in a manner beyond contestation. As if power does not grant him a personality, but permission to act, and to watch himself doing it.
From here emerges the idea of the seer, the seen, and the act of seeing. Vision is not a simple binary between an eye and an object, nor a camera observing from the outside. There is the first seer: the perpetrator or the one holding the camera. There is the first scene: the tortured or killed body. And there is the act of seeing itself: the camera as an instrument of power and public humiliation, a substitute for discourse, for politics, for speech and dialogue. The camera does not transmit violence from the outside; it organizes it. It determines who holds the gaze, who is subjected to it, who appears as an agent, and who is reduced to a violated body.
But when the video reaches us now, vision is no longer just triadic; it becomes fourfold. A new seer enters: us, the families, the survivors, the outraged, the organizations, those seeking evidence, those seeking revenge. Another question also enters, that of the system itself: who gave the order? Who allowed the filming? Who made the perpetrator confident that appearing in the act would not endanger him, but mark loyalty and power?
This later viewer does not see from a void. They see through memory, fear, loss, political position, and a need for meaning. The video does not remain the same in every eye. For the perpetrator, it was a display of power, perhaps his only mode of existence: a self that does not know the world as possibility, but as a relation to death. For a mother, it may become the possible image of her son, the unbearable moment of seeing him through her own eyes. For a survivor, it may reopen a pain they do not know how to handle. For the public, it may become a shock that compels a stance. And for a discourse of revenge, it can become potent fuel.
Avengers, too, are children of the camera. Not because they filmed the crime, but because they may inherit its image as the perpetrator intended: power, humiliation, fear. The danger is that the later gaze remains captive to the first, that we see as the perpetrator wanted us to see. The task of memory, then, is not to reproduce the spectacle, but to break the perpetrator’s gaze within the video, to shift the image from a scene of humiliation into knowledge of the crime, and from a memory of fear into a question of justice.
The video does not carry a single voice. It holds the voice of the perpetrator boasting, the voice of the victim even in silence, the voice of families searching, the voice of the public in anger, the voice of the sect seeking explanation, and the voice of justice demanding names. The danger is that one voice swallows all others: the voice of revenge, of sect, or of power. Justice begins when we prevent the loudest voice from becoming the whole truth, and when we restore to the victim their voice, to the families their questions, and to the crime its case file.
The Visible Is Not Justice: What Do Syrian Torture Videos Do to Us?
After the shock and the camera comes the hardest question: how do we prevent the video from turning from evidence into fire? Leaked clips do not exist in a vacuum, nor do they reach a neutral eye. They enter a wounded society, impoverished in politics and institutions, burdened by sectarian fear and an open civil memory. A video may begin as evidence of a crime, only to become, through commentary, anger, and circulation, material for division and revenge.
In the Syrian context, pain searches for a quick form. It does not always find an institution to contain it, a language of justice to regulate it, or a shared memory capable of naming the crime without turning it into a new war. Ready-made frames take over: accent becomes sect, region becomes sect, sect becomes judgment, civil memory becomes the reference, and revenge becomes salvation. Here, the image is no longer innocent in how it circulates. A video that should open a path toward justice can turn into new fire if it is loaded with broad collective meaning: these are perpetrators, these are victims, these are responsible because they resemble the voice, belong to the place, or come from the same memory as the perpetrator.
The problem is that such shortcuts obscure the origins and complexity of violence. This violence did not arise from identity alone; it emerged from the intersection of sectarianism, poverty, revenge, and social fractures, from the legacy of a militarized system and Assadist annihilation, and from the absence of a political horizon capable of presenting the individual as an individual, not as a member of a closed group, sect, region, or accent. When people do not appear as citizens within institutions, they appear as communities governed by fear, need, and loyalty. And when investigation and justice are absent, identity becomes a quick explanation, and memory turns into a communal, sectarian court.
The state is not only an apparatus; it is also an imagination, the belief that the hospital is for healing, the law for protection, the office for administration, the road for movement, living, and coexistence. What these videos reveal is that this imagination has fractured in Syria. Things no longer carry their names. The hospital becomes a room of violence, the car a site of abduction, the office an extension of interrogation, and the road a possibility of death and burial.
Here, it is not only the tortured body and its loved ones that collapse, but the very meaning of the modern world. And when that meaning collapses, the path to justice becomes harder, because justice requires a world in which words still function: hospital, law, witness, institution, responsibility, case file. In this void, sect becomes a quick and comforting shortcut to pain.
Accent turns into identity, and identity becomes available as an explanation, but this shortcut is dangerous. Sect is present in every Syrian context; it cannot be ignored or absolved with convenient language. Yet it is not the sole explanation for violence. If we reduce everything to sect, we obscure power, poverty, the apparatus, loyalty, chains of command, and the environment that produced cruelty. If we deny sect entirely, we erase one of the most powerful languages of fear in Syria.
Sectarianism is not an ornament to violence, nor an external detail. It enters into fear, loyalty, the distribution of trust, memory, the army, security, neighborhoods, accents, and the way the other body is read. Yet it is not sufficient on its own to explain the crime. Sect is not a simple historical actor, nor a name that can account for everything. It is a relation, a position, a history, institutions, fear, interests, and individuals who differ within a single label. When we reduce it to a closed block, we replace investigation with identity, and action with belonging, allowing violence to reproduce itself endlessly.
The issue, then, is not to affirm sect or deny it, but to understand how it enters into violence, how violence uses it, and how it can shift from explanation into a condition for taking up arms. Violence can move across flags, languages, and identities, reproducing itself wherever it finds power, weapons, a group, and fear. That is why it is not enough to say “sect,” and not enough to say “individual crime.” What is required is to see the whole network.
The problem is not loyalty itself, but what loyalty is directed toward. There is a form of loyalty that expands the human being beyond their group, and another that confines them within it. Justice requires loyalty to the victim as a human being, not to the sect as a closed body and a single explanation. It requires loyalty to truth, which is costly and demands a project that disarms revenge. When loyalty to sect becomes stronger than loyalty to the victim, the crime shifts from a case file into a banner, one that groups carry forward without reflection.
Justice also requires a horizon of understanding, not mere reaction. We cannot approach the video with a ready-made gaze, a sectarian gaze, a vengeful gaze, or a spectator’s gaze. We must slow judgment in order to see what is in the image and around it: the body, the voice, the place, the rank, the command, the institution, and the fear that preceded the frame. This understanding is not for exoneration, but to delay the rush toward collective judgment. Without this slowing, the image becomes what we want to see in it, not what it can actually reveal; it becomes a trigger for revenge rather than a source of meaning.
Every video carries multiple voices. The voice of perpetrators boasting, the voice of the victim even in silence, the voice of families searching, the voice of the public reacting in anger, the voice of the sect seeking explanation, and the voice of justice demanding names. The danger is that one voice swallows all others: the voice of revenge, of sect, or of power. Justice begins when we prevent the loudest voice from becoming the whole truth, and when we restore to the victim their voice, to families their questions, and to Syria’s history a possible meaning.
Here lies the core problem of justice. Justice does not try a general label, not a sect, an accent, or a region. It descends from the broad name to the specific act: who struck? who gave the order? who filmed? who opened the door? who remained silent by virtue of their position? who protected the crime after it occurred? who benefited from the silence? who ensured the crime would remain without a clear perpetrator?
As for the video as evidence, families stand at the center of the scene. They do not watch as the public does. They are not looking for news, commentary, or abstract proof. They are searching for traces: a face, a voice, a shirt, the movement of a hand, the way a body falls, a final possibility of knowing what happened to those who disappeared. This is not viewing; it is a search for the missing within terror. What may be, for us, an attempt to understand becomes, for families, a path toward their own grave. They are thrown into death again and again, held in a burning morgue. A mother does not see a video; she may see the possibility of her son.
It is not enough to say that the archive has been exposed; the more urgent question is how we will look at it as a path toward justice.
Memory is not innocent. Those who narrate the past shape part of its meaning, and those who circulate images help determine their fate. The ambiguity surrounding the dissemination of these videos risks becoming a new cycle of violence: do they serve as evidence, spectacle, or fuel for revenge? The victim must not be stripped of their name and turned into material for collective discourse. The tortured body belongs neither to the perpetrator, nor to a new authority, nor to a sect, nor to revenge. It is a human trace that must be restored to its name, its file, its context, and the family’s right to know.
Here lies the shared responsibility of both authority and society. The task is not to suppress or bury the images again, but to frame their circulation justly: protecting the dignity of victims, warning families, preserving evidence, preventing sectarian incitement, and providing expertise in transitional justice and psychosocial support. Without such a framework, the voice of revenge will rise above that of justice, and memory itself will become another arena of violence, rather than a path toward accountability and recognition.
