Assad’s “death machine”: mass graves were located near Damascus

Shocking documentation: the collapse of the regime in Syria after decades of oppression now allows the Assad family’s murder mechanism to be revealed in Syria. Rebel forces recently found two mass burial sites near Damascus, which were apparently used by the regime. According to estimates, at least 100,000 people were buried at one of these sites, and the possibility that there are 66 other mass burial sites that have not yet been photographed and examined is being considered.

Stephen Rapp, former US ambassador for war crimes, estimated in a conversation with the Reuters news agency that more than 100 thousand people have been tortured and murdered by the Syrian regime since 2013, the beginning of the civil war. Rapp visited the two mass burial sites that were discovered in the area of ​​Kutayfa and Najah, on the outskirts of the capital Damascus.

The evidence and photographs collected in the field by the Reuters agency from those areas reveal a systematic system of employing murderous terror on the part of the Assad regime. This is a killing system that included secret policemen who kidnapped people from the streets and from their homes, investigators who starved and tortured, and truck drivers who hid their bodies. Rapp emphasized how unusual the findings are: “We haven’t seen anything like this since the Nazis.”

The International Committee on Missing Persons in The Hague reported shocking data: more than 157,000 people in Syria were reported to the committee as missing, with the possibility of the discovery of additional mass burial sites now becoming possible. Local witnesses described a steady stream of refrigerated trucks carrying bodies into deep trenches, which were bulldozed and covered immediately afterward.

Satellite images published by the Reuters news agency and examined indicate that excavations began in these areas in the years between 2012 and 2014, in the midst of the Syrian civil war. Work at the site continued until 2022. Satellite images showed excavation of large trenches along with 3-4 trucks all around.

A local witness to the event, identified as the “grave digger” at the regime’s horror sites, testified that between 2011 and 2018 he went to the sites several times a week, when tow trucks transported between 300 and 600 bodies of victims of torture, starvation and executions from military hospitals and intelligence bases around Damascus.

The families of the missing persons reported to the committee are expected to face a complex and daunting process of identification, which requires DNA samples from three relatives for each body. Moez Mustafa, the head of the Syrian organization “Syrian Emergency Mission”, estimated that at least one hundred thousand bodies were buried in just one site – Kutayfa.

Assad, who fled to Moscow, continues to deny any human rights violations during his tenure, portraying his opponents as extremists. However, the accumulating evidence, which emerged for the first time in legal hearings in Germany and testimony in the US Congress, paints a shocking picture of an institutionalized murder mechanism that has been operating systematically for years.

First published on N12