An international war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday that evidence emerging from mass graves in Syria has exposed a "death machine" run by the state under ousted leader Bashar al-Assad. Reuters reports that he estimated more than 100,000 people have been tortured and killed since 2013.
Speaking after visiting two mass graves in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, former US war crimes ambassador Stephen Rapp told Reuters: "We certainly have more than 100,000 people who disappeared and were tortured to death in this machinery. I don't have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we've seen in these mass graves. We really haven't seen anything like that since the Nazis," said Rapp who led prosecutions at war crimes tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone and is working with Syrian civil society to document evidence of war crimes and is helping to prepare for any eventual trials.
"From the secret police who removed people from their streets and homes, the prisoners and interrogators who starved them and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people worked in this system of murders", said Rapp to Reuters, A2 quotes.
"We are talking about a state terror system, which turned into a death machine."
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad's crackdown on protests against him turned into a full-scale war.
Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by rights groups and governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country's prison system and the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people.
Assad, who fled to Moscow, has repeatedly denied that his government committed human rights abuses and branded his critics as extremists.
The head of the US-based Syrian defense organization, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa, who also visited Qutayfah, 40 km north of Damascus, has estimated that at least 100,000 bodies are buried there alone.
"LAND OF HORRORS"
The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague said separately that it had received information indicating that there may be as many as 66 mass graves yet to be verified in Syria. More than 157,000 people have been reported missing to the commission.
Commission chairwoman Kathryne Bomberger told Reuters that reporting of missing persons was now "exploding" with new contacts from families. While during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. About 40,000 people disappeared.
For families, the search for the truth in Syria can be long and difficult. A DNA match will require at least three relatives to provide reference DNA samples and take a DNA sample from each of these skeletal remains found in the graves, Bomberger said.
The commission called for the sites to be protected in order to preserve evidence for possible trials, but the sites of the mass graves were easily accessible on Tuesday.
The United States is engaged with a number of UN bodies to ensure that the Syrian people receive answers and accountability, the State Department said on Tuesday.
Syrian residents living near Qutayfah, a former military base where one of the sites was located, and a cemetery in Najha, used to hide bodies from detention sites, described seeing a steady stream of refrigerated trucks delivering bodies that were they threw into long trenches dug with bulldozers.
"The graves were prepared in an organized manner - the truck came, unloaded its cargo and left, with them there were security vehicles and they were not allowed to approach, anyone who approached, got off with them. Abb Khalid, who works as a farmer near the Najah cemetery, said.
In Qutayfah, residents declined to speak on camera or use their names for fear of retribution, saying they were still unsure the area was safe after the fall of Assad.
"This is the land of horrors," one said Tuesday.
Inside a cement-walled compound, three children played next to a Russian-made military satellite vehicle. The ground was flat and flattened, with long, straight marks where bodies were believed to have been buried.
SATELLITE IMAGES
Satellite images analyzed by Reuters showed that large-scale excavations began at the site between 2012 and 2014 and continued until 2022. Multiple satellite images taken by Maxar during that time showed a digger and large trenches visible at the site , together with three or four large trucks.
Omar Hujeirati, a former anti-Assad protest leader who lives near the Najha cemetery, which was used until the larger Qutayfah site was created because it was full, said he suspected some of his missing family members may to be in the grave.
He believes at least some of those arrested, including two sons and four brothers, were arrested for protesting against the Assad government.
Details of Syria's mass graves emerged for the first time during German court hearings and US Congressional testimony in 2021 and 2023. A man identified only as a "grave digger" repeatedly testified about his work at the Najha and Qutayfah sites during the German trial for Syrian government officials.
While working in cemeteries around Damascus in late 2011, two intelligence officers appeared in his office and ordered him and his colleagues to transport and bury corpses. He testified that he got into a van decorated with pictures of Assad and traveled to the sites several times a week between 2011 and 2018, followed by large refrigerated trucks filled with bodies.
The trucks carried several hundred corpses from Tishreen, Mezzeh and Harasta military hospitals to Najha and Qutayfah, he told the court. Deep trenches had already been dug at the sites and the gravedigger and his colleagues would unload the bodies into the trenches, which would be covered with dirt by excavators once the trench was partially filled, he said.
"Every week, twice a week, three trailer trucks came, filled with 300 to 600 bodies of victims of torture, starvation and execution from military hospitals and intelligence branches around Damascus," he told Congress in a written statement. .
The gravedigger escaped from Syria to Europe in 2018 and has repeatedly testified about the mass graves, but always with his identity protected from the public and the media. (A2 Televizion)
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