The Tadamon Massacre: Archiving Violence through the Perpetrators’ Gaze

Abstract

On 16 April 2013, the Assad regime’s Military Intelligence Branch 227 committed a massacre of over 300 civilians (including women and children) in Damascus, by driving them to a secluded part of Tadamon neighborhood, taking them to a pre-dug pit, and executing them one by one. The perpetrators videotaped the entire massacre, footage that was never intended to be circulated, but a source close to the perpetrators leaked the video to us. Having analyzed the video content, managed to find the main shooter on Facebook and then interview him, and having found contextual information and evidence for this massacre, one of the questions that still need to be addressed was: How can we unravel, examine, and systemize these types of violent video produced by the Assad regime? Much like the Caesar photos, the prison CCTV system, and the Mukhabarat archives, the phenomenon of perpetrators producing and archiving very violent images like the Tadamon massacre demonstrates how and why the Assad regime has become the chief archivist of its own violence.