Quinn Wilson
In Motion Staff Writer
With a death toll of over 130,000 and millions of Syrian citizens displaced, disgruntled politicians are the last thing a peace conference needs; especially when a Syrian police photographer defects, revealing an archive of torture from Syria’s government.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nation’s secretary general, gave Iran an invitation to the peace talks on Syria. This devolved into a twenty-four hour conflict that came close to ending the conference before it began. News feeds, both national and international, await the beginning of the end. After the first day, the tunnel ahead still appears dark and endless. Both sides are all in.
Social Media sites and forums are in a frenzy. Abu Khaled al Suri, one of the main figure heads of rebel group Ahrar al Sham, stated that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, another rebel group, was not al Qaida’s representative in Syria and was not following al Qaida’s current leader, Ayman al Zawahiri.
Will McCants, Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S.-Islamic World Relations and adjunct professor at John Hopkins University, explained why the possibility of Ahrar al Sham being designated a terrorist group could impede the aid of Syrian citizens. “If Ahrar is designated, it will be hard for (aid groups) to move humanitarian aid through the country since they control large swathes of it. The designation will also put the U.S. at odds with Qatar, Ahrar’s main state sponsor.”
On Twitter, Anne Barnard, the Times’ Beirut bureau chief, held a Q&A. It just goes to show that politicians and professors are not the only people concerned—the public is too. In the case of Twitter, your 140 character tweets don’t always have to be about the awesome sandwich your mother made you for lunch. Social Media can be cause for change, especially when the public gets a chance to interact with journalists and political analysts.
Within hours of the following events, lawyers commissioned by the Qatari government released a handful of photos to public eye. The archive of tortured victims, containing over 55,000 photographs, documents 11,000 numbered individuals. The ways in which the victims had been tortured were photographed, documented and preserved. Smuggled by a Syrian police photographer, the photographs are considered the largest archive of evidence regarding mass war crimes. David Crane, one of the investigators of the photos described them as “the likes of which we haven’t seen since Nuremberg.”