On Digital Memory: Syria Taught the World the Value of Digital Evidence, and Just How Easily It Can Be Erased

by Patrick Hilsman & Nizar Al Rifai
March 3, 2024

When we first started writing this piece in the autumn 2024, the Syrian regime seemed poised to control the crime scene it had created and the narrative we would remember forever. We were afraid the digital memory of Syria’s uprising and civil war were at risk of being erased, along with the crimes of the dictatorship. The memories that were uploaded and hidden were one of the only links to the past and we were concerned by how much could be lost forever. Then suddenly, the situation changed: many dungeons and gravesites that were hidden in plain sight were opened.

The rapid collapse of the Syrian regime and the final exit of Bashar al-Assad were moments of intense elation, as people struggled to pronounce the words “former president,” unable to comprehend that nothing remained of the Assad regime at the end of less than two weeks of fighting.

The joy when the gates of Sednaya prison were broken open releasing thousands of detainees, was soon shattered by the revelation of a sophisticated machine of death. Some civilians who were thought to be lost forever emerged, some of them thought dead for decades, including poets, refuseniks, and Lebanese citizens who had been captured in the 1980s. Execution chambers and various methods of body disposal were revealed, and the information is too much for anyone to process.

We will have more answers in the grim search for any trace of missing people that came before, but every piece of evidence, physical and digital, will be needed to move forward. For some evidence, it is already too late. In the frantic moments after the Liberation of Sednaya, a countless number of documents were destroyed in the chaos, leaving relatives to pick through the pieces.

As the world is fixated on the other wars that have broken out in Ukraine and Gaza, old memories are flooding back for activists and journalists, scenes from a time when city names and slogans that were buried deep in their collective memory and archives are flooding back. Aleppo was a place where journalists went against all advice to tell the story. It sank into darkness when ISIS took over, and once again when it was taken by the regime, along with its people. How do we find people who have been pulled into darkness? How do we find what is left of them when the veil lifts?

The names of the disappeared, the images of the lives they lived, the traces we have of their killers, all of it matters. People gave their lives for footage that showed to the world an authentic window into Syria. But now, indifference threatens to erase what they left behind.

Social media platforms created for entertainment in the West became the only source of free information in many of the dictatorships in the Middle East. It seems the creators of these platforms may not have understood how important they could be. It is easy to lose perspective and forget important historical data in the flood of online entertainment.

People worked for generations to build things as simple as happy lives, or as complicated and meticulous as discovering archaeological wonders, and we are losing the digital proof that reminds us our memory is real. Digital memory not only helps connect the modern world to our past, but it also gives us new avenues for justice. Evidence of countless war crimes is out in plain sight somewhere on the internet, and it is being treated as disposable.

People are forgetting the importance of historical relevance. In the same way a simple cooking pot, or a historical carving, is more than the sum of its parts, the value of war footage is not quantifiable.

Memories of Revolution

Images of the protests in Tunisia and Egypt lit the spark that sent millions of Syrians from across all religious sects pouring into the streets in 2011. The protests brought hope to the region and were a call to action for the world. Activists found new courage to chant slogans against the regime and film their soldiers and police brutalizing protestors. Important Alawite figures joined the protest movements in majority Sunni cities like Homs, calling for unity. These images, and the people disseminating them, would soon become targets themselves. This is not metaphorical. Just as the Israeli government has killed many of Gaza’s best and brightest young journalists, the Assad regime killed many of Syria’s best journalists.

Those of us who covered the war as foreign journalists spent hours going through footage from Aleppo, wondering if it was stable or interesting enough for anyone to care, asking ourselves if we had risked everything for nothing. The threat to our collective memory is more than simply forgetting. Witnesses can disappear. Their families can be threatened. But the fight to preserve memory must go on.

Activists have wielded great power with tiny flash drives. The memory for which so many made the ultimate sacrifice, as well as their needed experience, is at risk, not from guns and rampaging regimes, but from a bloated tech industry that seems to not be bothered to see the importance of history. YouTube in particular is using AI programs to scrub footage from the platform. This dehumanized approach to our collective past may not be the result of malicious intent, but it is a looming disaster for historians and advocates for justice.

Atrocities on Film

Digital evidence is not always the work of activists, who hide it away, or pass it along secretly to be seen by the world. It can also come in the form of exuberant admissions of guilt by perpetrators. For many researchers, journalists, analysts, and activists, the Syrian Civil War taught hard lessons about how easily a dictatorial fascist regime can target and erase digital memory. Even with all the tools we now possess, the reality usually is worse than the images that manage to reach the world.

The Syrian regime has conducted countless massacres against the civilian population, many of them in broad daylight. Footage of the Syrian army killing protestors quickly spread across the world, sparking international outrage. Some remained hidden from the public for nearly a decade.

In 2013, in the largely Palestinian Damascus neighborhood of Tadamon, Palestinian civilians were massacred by regime gunmen who meticulously documented the act. Video of the incident remained on a pro-regime fighter’s computer for years, until, in 2022, researchers were able to obtain it and launch an investigation into the atrocity.

Many of the rebel groups, notably the now-ruling Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), have been accused of unthinkable crimes of which they have scattered evidence all over the internet. There are activists and civilians who fought for a free Syria languishing in HTS prisons even as Assad’s dungeons are opened. All factions have left some record of what they have done, and where they are holding people who are still alive. Nowhere will be safe, until there is an accounting of all current detainees, from all factions, without exceptions.

The unthinkable joy of displaced Syrians returning to Aleppo should be a reminder of the cost of displacement and that people are still being uprooted from Tel Rifaat, Sheikh Maqsod, and elsewhere in the country. According to the UN, more than 14 million Syrians have been displaced since 2011, with roughly half of them inside the country. The eyes of the world must be on the refugees and IDPs in all parts of Syria.

Killing the Messengers

When it became clear the Assad regime would maintain its bombing campaign against opposition-held cities, Syrian volunteers formed the Civil Defense, aka the White Helmets, to rescue civilians buried under the rubble. They would eventually also document ongoing atrocities, including the targeting of hospitals and multiple chemical attacks. This mission unleashed a torrent of disinformation from Russia and their allies in tandem with a campaign of deliberate targeting that killed hundreds of the volunteers with airstrikes. The accusations ran the gamut from claiming the White Helmets had staged chemical attacks, to claims they had beheaded children. To those of us who had covered the war in Syria, it would have been intolerable to hear western commentators deny the suffering of civilians, or accuse rescue workers of faking war crimes, without speaking out.

Attempts to suppress knowledge of the war went beyond targeting activists and journalists. Witnesses have also been kidnapped and intimidated. Following the regime recapture of rebel-held Douma in 2018, witnesses to the chemical atrocity that had taken place during the last days of the siege were rounded up and forced to give interviews denying the chemical attack. Medical staff were intimidated, witnesses were coerced into public spectacles to deny the evidence.

Every Frame Counts

Even if a single image doesn’t tell the whole story, it can damn the guilty. Allied intelligence was initially baffled by aerial images of Auschwitz, perhaps unable to grasp the full reality of the evil on display. When the camp was liberated, the images became something more significant, something carved in stone to confirm the accounts of those who survived. For all their crimes, the Nazi leaders were put away for specific violations, which is partly why the Nuremberg trials have stood the test of time. The convictions were not the victor’s vague revenge but real responses to specific crimes.

Despite so much lost evidence, Syria, Gaza, and Ukraine are among the most documented genocides in history. International institutions are growing legitimacy for accountability. There are more media outlets trying to draw attention to violations than ever before despite having to work with limited budgets and in an environment where corporate media favor uninformative panel debates over on-the-ground coverage.

The lessons of Syria are being applied to other conflicts. Ukrainian preservationists are turning to cutting-edge tech to immortalize history in a race against destruction. Teams of historians, technologists, and activists have mobilized to digitally capture Ukraine’s most cherished monuments, churches, and historical landmarks before they are reduced to rubble. Each scan, each 3D model, stands as an act of defiance against Russia’s genocidal war that aims to erase Ukraine and its identity. In Gaza, frantic efforts are underway to preserve history in an enclave where over 60% of built structures have been destroyed by bombardment, according to a study by The New York Times.

Disinformation and Threats

Prior to wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the Syrian Civil War was the most documented event in history, prompting a new kind of citizen journalism. Ordinary civilians under siege took to recording the crimes around them. Many paid the ultimate price. Just as the sheer volume of evidence from Syria was new and overwhelming, so too were Russian-led disinformation campaigns, which sought to flood the internet with falsehoods about Syria’s revolutionaries and rescue workers. The sheer mass of video recordings from Syria serve as a bulwark against the coordinated disinformation campaigns against opponents. Activists still living in Assad-controlled Syria also helped disseminating the images and accounts of the conflict, from right under the regime’s noses.

Organizations trying to preserve evidence of history and proof of war crimes have been directly targeted. Early on in Syria’s revolution, activists took to uploading evidence to YouTube, but then the regime started mass-reporting and taking advantage of bloated reporting systems to get YouTube to act as a proxy to censor evidence of the regime’s crimes. Subsequently, activists started turning to private online cloud storage. The removal of key visual evidence from online platforms highlighted how important “hard copies” were. Activists used tricks to hide evidence from the regime and ISIS while living under their respective rules. Countless terabytes of footage, evidence of war crimes, and other historical data, were hidden on hard drives, flash sticks, and burned CDs, which were in turn buried in yards or hidden in walls. Even this did not stop the regime from leveling homes and destroying what was potentially hidden within them. The regime did everything it could to hide the evidence of its crimes. They hunted activists inside Syria and abroad, and enacted a strategy of intimidation to scare people into deleting photos and self-censoring.

With new tools to prove war crimes, the governments who commit them are resorting to a new level of dishonesty: “Syrians gassed themselves,” “Palestinian families are all hiding rockets”, “Ukrainians faked Bucha.” The recourse of violent regimes is to distract the eyes of the world while plucking out the eyes of domestic opposition.

Digital Memory of the War Belongs to Syrians

Whether it is images of hundreds of thousands pouring into the streets protesting and chanting against the regime, or of police and pro-regime thugs brutalizing civilians or killing them, these images belong to Syrians. While Syrians struggle to take their country back, it is the responsibility of tech companies to treat their collective memory as something sacred, not as trash to be thrown out and erased from posterity.

Relatives who spent years combing for traces of their loved ones may have a chance to see them again or learn of their fates. Preliminary reports indicate that some of the liberated prisoners had been held captive since the 1980s. Syrians across the diaspora are now revisiting images of the gigantic protests in 2011 and 2012.

During the fall of Assad, while the world’s eyes were focused on the majority-Sunni areas of Aleppo, Hama, and Homs, Assad had already lost much of its political control in the majority Druze region of Suwayda. For over a year, protestors had taken to the streets, flying the revolution flag and calling for an end to Assad. Protestors who were children when the revolution started, who grew up under the absolute control of the regime, were chanting revolutionary slogans and songs from 13 years ago perfectly.

International Justice is Coming… Slowly

Justice, however imperfect, is coming. The process of creating and archiving copious amounts of footage from the Assad regime’s crimes was laborious and spanned the decades that accompanied the abuse. So, too, the process of justice will be laborious, painful, and long. Many of the guilty have already fled Syria. Countless murderers will escape justice and countless disappearances will go unsolved.

An unknown but significant number of regime-affiliated militia members have fled to Europe and nations in the Middle-East. As more prisoners emerge from Assad’s dungeons, and more evidence comes to light, the task of justice will have to be an international effort. Prosecutions for human rights violations in Syria have already started in Germany and Sweden, but perpetrators are doubtlessly spread across the European Union and elsewhere. Accountability cannot stop at Syria’s borders.

A regime that thought the surviving witnesses to its crimes would remain under a veil of intimidation forever has now woken up to a new reality. With ICC arrest warrants issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, institutions of international law are starting to gain more legitimacy. Syria taught the world hard lessons on the deadly nature of indifference. The bombing of rescue workers, the mass reporting campaigns against social media posts on war crimes in Gaza, the lies from the militaries of Syria, Israel, Turkey, and Russia, the targeting of journalists, are all part of a strategy that counts on us to be indifferent. We will not be.

Nefarious actors will always try to deny the past. The process of peace building will require civil society to be anchored to some collective memory. It is easy to see communities slip into patterns of denial and counter-denial where every atrocity is a coincidence or a conspiracy according to those who do not want to be held accountable. In post war societies, so-called “memory wars” are often a barrier to collective understanding of the past and in stable prosperous nations it is no different. Despite access to unlimited information, it is still a struggle to remind people that these things happened, that people stood against them and who they were.