Scenes from an Atrocity

BY JON LEE ANDERSON

MAY 15, 2013

I first heard about the Syrian rebel who was supposed to have eaten a heart on Monday, when a friend who lives in Beirut tweeted something cryptic about abuse videos. Against my better instincts, I opened one of the links he attached to his tweet. It showed soldiers (or was it militia members? Rebels? It can be hard to tell in Syria) beating prisoners, whipping them with ropes. In the YouTube sidebar, there were a host of other videos, some tagged in Arabic and others in English, broadcasting their sickening contents: “18+, Basher Assad Soldiers Mutilating,” and so forth. After the warnings about graphic content, whatever video there is simply rolls, and whoever has chosen to click on it, whether over or under eighteen, watches it, and then lives with what he or she has seen.

Such videos have increasingly come to represent a new weapon in modern wars-by-terror. The phenomenon is not unique to Syria. One recent, much-commented-on video depicts the decapitation-by-chainsaw of a Mexican gang member by rival narcos. Violent networks around the world seem to have taken inspiration from Al Qaeda in their efforts to terrorize captive societies by filming, and broadcasting, the executions of their enemies. This began, to my knowledge, when Al Qaeda filmed Daniel Pearl’s decapitation, in 2002, and was followed, during the Iraq War, with a raft of real-life snuff videos courtesy of Al Qaeda and its allies: Margaret Hassan, a kidnapped British relief worker; the young American Nicholas Berg; many who got less attention because they were not Westerners. How many have we heard described in news reports since then? Usually, our television channels and newspapers have shown discretion, and what we have seen is, at most, merely a screenshot of the hostage looking abjectly into the camera—but we all know what came next. Most of us, I suppose, never think of actually looking up the video that shows the deaths themselves, because that would be prurient, brutal, and yet we all know they are out there. And, no doubt, there are plenty of people who do look for them.

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