The five-week-long trial of the Islamic State (IS) group's jailers has been underway for just over a week in Paris and the historical significance of this hearing is already becoming clear. Few criminal trials have provided such an intimate look into the machinery of a totalitarian system and its dehumanizing operations. Even rarer are the witnesses who were plunged into IS's inner workings, swallowed up by its torture center in the basements of the Aleppo hospital, and who can now recount what they saw there.

Since the opening of the proceedings on February 17, 11 former Western hostages, held in Syria by the jihadist group between 2012 and 2014, have taken the stand one after the other to recount the interminable ordeal they endured in IS dungeons. Some spent more than a year there. There were 25 of them in all, including 13 journalists and 11 aid workers, who were taken captive. Sixteen survived. All were victims of unimaginable abuse, but also unwilling witnesses to the massive persecution that had begun as early as 2012 against the Syrian people, two years before the IS proclaimed its "caliphate."

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