WARNING: we alert you to the presence of sensitive content || There were bags identified with numbers and many families are now looking for around 150,000 missing people
Syrians are beginning to discover mass graves across the country, revealing the magnitude of the atrocities committed during the deposed dictator’s brutal regime.
More than two weeks after Assad fled Syria and his , many Syrian families remain unanswered about what happened to their loved ones after they were detained by Assad’s secret police.
Hundreds of thousands of bodies of people “tortured to death by the Assad regime” may be buried in a mass grave east of Damascus, according to Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syria Emergency Intervention Force (SETF), based in the United States. USA, an anti-Assad advocacy group.
After years of work to expose mass graves, Moustafa told CNN he was finally able to visit the suspected sites after Assad’s fall.
The alleged site of the mass grave in the city of Qutayfah, about 45 kilometers from Damascus, is marked by trenches six to seven meters deep, three to four meters wide and 50 to 150 meters long, according to SETF .
Moustafa explained that the gravediggers who worked at the site told him that “four tow trucks, each with more than 150 bodies, came twice a week from 2012 to 2018”. That would amount to hundreds of thousands of bodies.
Teams work at the discovered mass grave, believed to contain the remains of civilians killed by the deposed Assad regime, on the road to Damascus International Airport, the Syrian capital, on December 16. (Abdulkarem Al-Mohammad/Anadolu/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
“The bulldozer driver described the way the Secret Service agents forced the workers to use the bulldozer to flatten and compress the bodies in order to make them fitter and easier to bury before digging the next line/trench,” he said Moustafa.
On Monday, reports emerged of more than 20 bodies found in a mass grave north of Izraa, in Syria’s southern Daraa province.
Videos from the Agence France-Presse news agency show men digging and removing bones from the earth. Another shows two rows of bodies covered in the ground and a bulldozer trying to gently dig out the top layer of soil.
Around 150,000 people are missing in Syria, most of whom have been abducted or detained by the Assad regime or its affiliates, according to the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP). CNN cannot independently verify this number.
Bodies identified by numbers
In 2020, a man known as “the Gravedigger” told a German court that he was recruited by the Assad regime to bury hundreds of bodies in mass graves, according to ICMP.
The bodies were those of Syrians from several detention centers, the witness told a trial of former Syrian intelligence officers. The man added that, along with others, he escorted several trucks “loaded with 300 to 700 corpses into mass graves in Qatayfah, north of Damascus, and al-Najha, to the south, four times a week. The bodies could only be identified by the numbers engraved on the chest or forehead and showed serious signs of torture and mutilation,” according to ICMP.
SETF’s Moustafa said he was aware of at least eight mass graves in Syria. He also asked international experts to come to the country to help with the process of exhuming and identifying the bodies.
Teams work at the discovered mass grave, believed to contain the remains of civilians killed by the deposed Assad regime, on the road to Damascus International Airport, the Syrian capital, on December 16. (Abdulkarem Al-Mohammad/Anadolu/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)
Jenifer Fenton, spokeswoman for the United Nations special envoy for Syria, said last week that documentation related to places of detention and mass graves “must be secured to assist families in seeking justice and accountability.”
“We must prioritize accounting for the missing, ensuring that families receive the clarity and recognition they so desperately need,” he said at a press conference.
One of these family members is Hazem Dakel, from Idlib, who currently lives in Sweden.
Dakel said his uncle Najeeb was arrested in 2012, and the family later confirmed he had been murdered. His brother Amer was arrested the following year. Former detainees in the famous , near Damascus, said Amer had disappeared in mid-April 2015 after being tortured in prison. But the regime never acknowledged his death.
The family is now “sure” that Amer died under torture in Saydnaya, Dakel posted on Facebook.
Amid the celebrations of Assad’s fall, there is also great sadness among the families of the missing.
“They are mourning their children,” Dakel said. “Yes, the regime fell after resistance and fighting, but there was sadness – where are our children?”
Eyad Kourdi and Raja Razek contributed to this report
