 "Syrian rebels observe a location identified as a mass grave for detainees killed under the rule of Bashar Assad in Najha, south of Damascus, Syria, December 17, 2024. AP")
Syria and the world have just started to uncover the magnitude of atrocities committed by the ousted President Bashar al-Assad. More than 100,000 people are believed to be buried in mass graves in the West Asian country.
Since the rebels overthrew Assad, families have been desperately searching for their loved ones who went missing after being detained by the secret police. While their fate remains unknown, there is fear that most are dead. This has shed light on how political prisoners were tortured to death in Syria’s notorious prisons.
Let’s take a closer look.
Syria mass graves
Mass graves in Syria have exposed a “machinery of death”, an international war crimes prosecutor has said.
Speaking to Reuters, former United States war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp, who visited two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, 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.”
“We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” Rapp, who is working with Syrian civil society to document war crimes evidence, said. “We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death.”
Images and videos have emerged online showing the White Helmets humanitarian organisation recovering the remains of those buried in mass graves in Syria. Some pictures show piles of bones and skulls kept in body bags.
According to the International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague, there are at least 66 sites of mass graves in Syria.
Rapp said tens of thousands of bodies could be buried in the town of Najha alone.
Over 150,000 people remain unaccounted for after “disappearing” into Assad’s prisons, with most feared to be inside these mass graves, Mounir al-Mustafa, deputy director of the White Helmets, a Syrian search and rescue team, told The Washington Post.
He said that the White Helmets, or Syrian Civil Defence crews, have got reports of at least 13 mass grave sites around the country.
“We can’t open these mass graves yet. That is a massive task to document and take samples and give codes to the corpses before we can identify those people,” al-Mustafa added.
People in Qutayfah, where one of the mass grave sites was discovered, knew what was going on, but to say something meant they could end up in the grave, as per an Economist report.
“This is the place of horrors,” a resident in the town, located 37 kilometres north of Damascus, told Reuters.
The Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based NGO, believes at least 100,000 people killed by the Assad regime could be buried in the mass grave in Qutayfah.
A local resident who witnessed the burial of bodies over the years told BBC that security forces brought them packed in refrigerated containers. After the ground was full of bodies, the site would be flattened by bulldozers.
Speaking to CNN, Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the SETF, an anti-Assad advocacy group, said gravediggers who worked at the Qutayfah site had told him that “four tractor trailer trucks, each carrying over 150 bodies in each, came twice a week from 2012 until 2018.”
On Monday (December 16), residents and medical teams reportedly found the remains of more than 30 corpses in the village of Izraa in southern Daraa province.
As per The Washington Post, Moussa Al-Zouebi, the head of the village’s health directorate, said some of the people whose remains were uncovered were killed by “shooting in the head, in the eye, or by burning.”
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How Syrians were tortured
Political prisoners started vanishing in Assad’s network of prisons in the early years of the Syrian civil war that began in 2011. As he brutally cracked down on dissent, many people are believed to have been tortured to death.
Satellite imagery analysed by Reuters reveals that digging on a large scale began in Qutayfah between 2012 and 2014, continuing until 2022.
“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,” Rapp told the news agency.
Syria ’s prisons run by the military, intelligence and security agencies were notorious for atrocities, mass executions and inhuman conditions that led to prisoners dying from disease and starvation, The Washington Post reported citing human rights groups, whistle-blowers, and former detainees.
Assad, who fled to Russia, has repeatedly denied accusations that his regime engaged in human rights violations.
The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague said in a news release on December 10 that it received reports of at least 28,200 missing relatives from over 76,200 people from Syria.
The rebels in Damascus have set up a hotline for people and ex-prisoners to help in locating places and secret prisons of the Assad government to find missing persons.
Since Assad’s ouster, thousands of prisoners in Damascus and other cities, including Aleppo, Homs and Hama, have been freed by the insurgents. But the families of those who remain missing are still waiting for their relatives.
With inputs from agencies