The discovery of mass graves across Syria following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime is shedding light on the horrifying scale of atrocities committed during his rule. Reports suggest hundreds of thousands of bodies, many victims of torture, may be buried in unmarked sites.
Syrians are starting to uncover mass graves across the country, shedding light on the magnitude of atrocities committed during the brutal rule of ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad. More than two weeks after Assad fled Syria and his regime collapsed, scores of Syrian families still have no answer about what happened to their loved ones following their detention by Assad's secret police.
Hundreds of thousands of bodies of people 'tortured to death by the Assad regime' could be buried in a mass grave east of Damascus, according to Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the US-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), an anti-Assad advocacy group. Members of Syria's White Helmets civil defense collect human remains at a mass grave. (Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images) After years of work to expose mass graves, Moustafa told CNN he's finally been able to visit suspected sites after Assad's fall. The alleged mass grave site in the city of Qutayfah, about 45 kilometres from Damascus, is marked by trenches 6-7 metres deep, 3-4 metres wide, and 50-150 meters long, according to SETF. Moustafa said gravediggers who worked at the site had told him that, 'four tractor-trailer trucks, each carrying over 150 bodies in each, came twice a week from 2012 until 2018.' That would amount to hundreds of thousands of bodies, he told CNN. 'The bulldozer excavator driver described how intelligence officers forced workers to use the bulldozer to flatten and compress the bodies to make them fit and easier to bury before digging the next line/trench,' Moustafa said. On Monday, reports emerged of more than 20 bodies found in a mass grave north of Izraa in Daraa governorate, southern Syria. Videos from the Agence France-Presse news agency show men digging and pulling bones from the dirt. Another shows two rows of covered bodies lying on the ground and a bulldozer gently trying to dig the top layer of the soi
SYRIA ASSAD REGIME MASS GRAVES ATROCITIES HUMAN RIGHTS
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