For years, “Caesar” was almost a legend or a symbol that transcended reality for Syrians. But at his core, he was a hero of flesh and blood—a hero who resembled them and belonged to their world. He was not a superhuman figure or an anonymous man from a heroic novel. He was an ordinary employee, someone you could encounter daily on your street or in an office. Yet, he possessed extraordinary courage that enabled him to change the course of Syrian history.
Who is Caesar?
It is now possible to answer the question: Who is Caesar? He is First Warrant Officer Farid Nada Al-Madhan, from the town of Sheikh Miskin in Daraa, who worked in Damascus. Before the revolution, he was responsible for photographing traffic accidents. After the uprising, the regime reassigned him to document the corpses of detainees.
Farid came from a town much like the neighborhoods and villages that many Syrians come from. If it weren’t for this, my friend wouldn’t have called me, saying: “I actually know him—he’s from our town.”
Farid grew up amid familiar struggles, but he chose to bear the responsibility of exposing the truth. With this decision, Caesar proved that heroism is not exclusive to great figures or supernatural powers—it is a personal choice made by an ordinary individual at a pivotal moment. In the end, heroes are our family members, our neighbors, our friends—those who have the courage to stand up against injustice.
When the photos leaked by “Caesar” were published, they constituted one of the most gruesome archives of dictatorship in modern history. While the world was already aware of the brutality of the Assad regime, these images provided irrefutable visual evidence of the scale of the crimes committed against detainees. These leaks were a historic shock, as they provided the first well-documented revelation of systematic torture and mass death inside Syrian detention centers.
The world reacted widely to the photos, with over 1,000 media outlets covering them. They sparked heated discussions in human rights and political circles. After the release of Caesar’s photos, the idea of normalizing relations with Assad was no longer just a controversial political choice—it became a moral dilemma for governments considering restoring ties with him.
It can be said that these images established an invisible barrier between the Syrian regime and the international community. Any attempt to reintegrate Assad politically has now become tantamount to justifying the unjustifiable.
The Truth in a Loaf of Bread and a Sock
Although the name Caesar was used by Roman emperors after Julius Caesar, a prominent military and political leader, and is now synonymous with power and greatness, in the case of the Syrian “Caesar,” the name became a symbol of courage and justice instead of authority. By instinct and human ambition, Farid unintentionally achieved justice, transforming a name associated with leadership and power into one that holds deep humanitarian and ethical value.
We never had a picture of Caesar. Perhaps we imagined him as a man resembling the heroes of crime films—someone with advanced technology, high-tech surveillance tools, driving luxury cars, and communicating through secure, untraceable channels. But Caesar needed none of that. His tools were incredibly simple—all he required was a loaf of bread and his socks to conceal one of Syria’s most significant archives. He was not a hero with advanced weaponry but rather a witness to a crime that could have remained undocumented, armed only with his human conscience.
Farid used two ordinary objects to hide his evidence: his socks and a loaf of bread—both of which hold profound meaning in Syrian daily life. Bread, which accompanied Syrians through checkpoints and long lines at bakeries as they waited for hours to ease their hunger, became in this story a means of salvation—not from hunger this time, but from the erasure of truth. And socks, which have long been sold on sidewalks by street vendors boarding buses to offer them at cheap prices, unexpectedly became the vessel for preserving one of Syria’s most important archives.
The fact that this archive was hidden using items symbolizing poverty and daily survival is not a mere coincidence. It is a harsh reminder of the conditions under which these crimes were documented. Under dictatorship, even salvation is tied to the tools of poverty, as if the Syrian, even in moments of resistance, can only rely on what he carries in his heavy daily existence to confront death and oblivion.
But Farid’s role was not limited to smuggling photos. He also worked to help the families of the disappeared and detainees, trying to protect them from financial extortion by regime officers who deceived them with false promises about their loved ones’ fates. In an interview with Al Jazeera, he said with deep sorrow: “I couldn’t control myself. They are killing our sons, humiliating us, and then taking money from us as bribes just to show us our children’s dead bodies!”
Smuggling the photos was only the beginning. Farid had to face daily anguish as he sifted through them one by one. The bruised and burned faces spoke to him in silence: “When I looked at the photos, I felt as though they were speaking to me,” he said, unable to even recognize his own relatives among the victims, as the torture had erased their familiar features.
It Was Assad Who Starved Syrians, Not Caesar
Some have pointed fingers at Caesar, blaming him for worsening Syria’s hunger crisis and economic collapse. There is no doubt that unilateral sanctions have often been an unjust weapon that affects civilians before regimes. But even before the Caesar Act was passed, Syria’s economy was already collapsing due to corruption, mismanagement, and the regime’s prioritization of war funding over economic stability. Productive sectors were devastated, prices had skyrocketed, and Assad had weaponized starvation in besieged areas like Ghouta.
If hunger today is being used as an argument against Caesar, then why was Assad not condemned when he systematically starved detainees and civilians? How does a law enacted after the disappearance of over 120,000 people become the only ethical issue at hand? This selective approach reflects a double standard, driven either by ignorance of the facts or by deliberate complicity.
At the same time, it cannot be denied that the Caesar Act weakened the Syrian regime from within, turning it into a fragile entity that can no longer sustain itself with the same strength it once had. Sanctions have long hurt regimes that rely on military and repressive funding to survive.
But this is not about glorifying U.S. sanctions. It is about acknowledging that justice cannot be selective. When the whistleblower becomes the accused, and one tragedy is condemned while another is excused, we are facing a moral failure that cannot be ignored.
Today, instead of saying “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” one might say Caesar has already given us everything he had. He lost his right to a normal life, forced to live under strict security measures to protect him, as he revealed in his interview with Al Jazeera.
He was deprived of integrating into French society, of learning the language, and of finding work. He and his family live in hiding, as a tribute to the tortured and the disappeared—to all the faces that appeared in his smuggled photos, whose identities could no longer be recognized, because the regime left no faces to see and no flesh on the bones.