On Monday, apparent evidence of systemic killing and torture at the hands of Syria's Bashar al-Assad regime was leaked by CNN and the Guardian. Three international lawyers announced via the media outlets that they'd been tasked with investigated the possibility of Syrian war crimes during the almost three-year civil war, and had discovered significant "evidence" of torture and murder on a massive scale.
Specifically, it's alleged that roughly 11,000 detainees were killed in Syria by the regime led by al-Assad. Thousands of leaked photographs of their bodies, which are disturbing and can be found here, indicate that many were tortured to death. The photographs had apparently been smuggled out of Syria and into the hands of Qatar, a state that has called for Syrian president al-Assad to be charged with war crimes.
The three lawyers at the helm of the report say that the leaked photos reveal that the deceased detainees had been starved and gruesomely tortured, and that the evidence is enough for al-Assad to be charged with war crimes in an international tribunal. The 31-page report was put together by a group of London lawyers, who were commissioned by Qatar to look into the possibility of Syrian war crimes.
Syria's bloody civil war has been ongoing since March of 2011, and it's estimated that 100,000 people have been killed. Last August, a chemical-weapons attack in Damascus, Syria killed more than 1,000 civilians. Though al-Assad claimed it was the work of the country's rebels, the country's leader is widely believed to be the culprit. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon noted that the incident was "most significant confirmed use of chemical weapons against civilians since Saddam Hussein used them [in 1998.]"