The bodies of Brits and Americans have been unearthed in Assad’s mass graves as Syrian rebels claim they dug up at least 100,000 corpses at a single site.
It comes as the head of a US-based Syrian organisation said on Monday one of the pits – a site at al Qutayfah, 25 miles north of the capital – contained shocking numbers of the dead at a ‘conservative estimate’.
A state-run ‘machinery of death’ are words that have been used to describe the regime of Bashar al-Assad with tens of thousands estimated as having been murdered or tortured since 2013.
Since civil war begin in 2011, an estimated 470,000 – 610,000 people have lost their lives.
But the deposing of Assad has fostered hopes of a ‘new Syria‘ where ‘everyone lives in peace and justice prevails’.
Speaking after visiting two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, former U.S. war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp said: ‘We certainly have more than 100,000 people that were disappeared into and tortured to death in this machine.
‘I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves.’
‘When you talk about this kind of organised killing by the state and its organs, we really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis’, said Rapp, who led prosecutions at the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals.
A satellite image shows, what a war crimes prosecutor calls a mass grave site in Najha, Syria February 21, 2013
A drone view shows the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
Bones are seen at the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
‘From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing’, he added.
Head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa, said the site at al Qutayfah contained one hundred thousand bodies as ‘the most conservative estimate’.
He added: ‘It’s a very, very extremely almost unfairly conservative estimate.’
Moustafa said he was sure there were more mass graves than the five sites, and that along with Syrians victims included U.S. and British citizens and other foreigners.
The task force boss had arrived in Syria after Assad flew to Russia and his government collapsed in the face of a lightning offensive by rebels that ended his family’s more than 50 years of rule.
He said the intelligence branch of the Syrian air force was ‘in charge of bodies going from military hospitals, where bodies were collected after they’d been tortured to death, to different intelligence branches, and then they would be sent to a mass grave location’.
Moustafa also reported corpses were transported to sites by the Damascus municipal funeral office whose personnel helped unload them from refrigerated tractor-trailers.
He added: ‘We were able to talk to the people who worked on these mass graves that had on their own escaped Syria or that we helped to escape.’
Stephen Rapp, head of Commission for International Justice and Accountability, talks with media as people inspect the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
People inspect the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
A drone view shows the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
Syrians investigating allegations of secret compartments in Syria’s Sednaya Prison, the notorious center of ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, continue excavations to find a trace of their relatives in Damascus, Syria on December 17, 2024
Fighters of the ruling Syrian body inspect the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
Fighters of the ruling Syrian body walk at the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
People inspect the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
A man rides a bike next to an armoured vehicle near the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
A fighter of the ruling Syrian body walks, as people inspect the site of a mass grave from the rule of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad
His group has spoken to bulldozer drivers compelled to dig graves and ‘many times on orders, squished the bodies down to fit them in and then cover them with dirt’.
Moustafa expressed concern that graves sites were unsecured and said they needed to be preserved to safeguard evidence for investigations.
Syrian residents living near a former military base where one of the sites was located and a cemetery used to hide bodies from detention sites described seeing a steady stream of refrigeration trucks delivering bodies which were dumped into long trenches dug with bulldozers.
In Qutayfah, people declined to speak on camera or use their names for fear of the retribution, saying they were not yet sure the area was safe after Assad’s fall.
‘This is the place of horrors,’ one said on Tuesday.
Inside a site enclosed with cement walls, three children played near a Russian-made military satellite vehicle. The soil was flat and levelled, with straight long marks where the bodies were buried.
Satellite imagery showed large-scale digging began at the location between 2012 and 2014 and continued up until 2022. Multiple satellite images taken by Maxar during that time showed a digger and large trenches visible at the site, along with three or four large trucks.
Omar Hujeirati, a former anti-Assad protest leader who lives near the Najha cemetery, said he suspected several of his missing family members may be in the grave.
The head of a US-based Syrian organisation said on Monday one of the pits – a site at al Qutayfah, 25 miles north of the capital – contained shocking numbers of dead at a ‘conservative estimate’
Since civil war begin in 2011, an estimated 470,000 – 610,000 people have lost their lives
Those responsible ‘must be held accountable in a clear judicial process or people would take matters into their own hands’
The bodies of Brits and Americans have been unearthed in Assad’s mass graves as Syrian rebels claim they dug up at least 100,000 corpses at a single site
He believes at least some of those taken, including two sons and four brothers, were detained for protesting against Assad’s government.
‘That was my sin, what made them take my family,’ he said, a long, exposed trench behind him where the bodies were apparently buried.
He said those responsible must be held accountable in a clear judicial process or people would take matters into their own hands.
‘We want our rights, according to Syrian law, and not by some behind-the-scenes process. These massacres and slaughterhouses of death are unacceptable to anyone with humanity,’ he said. ‘We want reputable organizations to come so this isn’t covered up.’