A mass grave containing the bodies of at least 100,000 people tortured and killed under the brutal dictatorship of ousted President Bashar al-Assad was discovered outside Damascus, according to the head of a US-based Syrian advocacy group — who said the corpses were squished by bulldozers to “fit them in.”
Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), said the regime’s victims were found in al-Qutayfah, about 25 miles north of the capital.
“One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate,” Moustafa told Reuters of the amount of bodies he believed were dumped at the chilling site. “It’s a very, very extremely, almost unfairly conservative estimate.”
Moustafa also warned that it was just one of eight mass graves created by Assad’s fallen government.
The mass grave identified at al-Qutayfah is littered with multiple trenches estimated to be about 19 to 23 feet deep and more than 10 feet wide.
Moustafa, who arrived in Syria after Assad fled to Moscow last week, said the grave was likely the outcome of the work entrusted to the former regime’s military.
“[The Syrian air force was] in charge of bodies going from military hospitals — where bodies were collected after they’d been tortured to death — to different intelligence branches, and then they would be sent to a mass grave location,” he said.
Moustafa said the grave matches the description from funeral officer personnel who helped unload the bodies and later escaped Syria to spread the word of the atrocities committed under Assad.
His group has also spoken to bulldozer drivers who were ordered by the regime to squish “the bodies down to fit them in” the holes.
The grim discovery is believed to be one of the largest mass graves in modern history.
A Stalin-era mass grave in Ukraine — located at Bykivnia, a forest outside the capital Kyiv — is estimated to be the burial site of more than 200,000 executed political prisoners, according to the BBC.
Along with the mass grave in al-Qutayfah, reports have emerged of dozens of bodies found in the Daraa governorate, in southern Syria.
Harrowing video from the Agence France-Presse news agency shows the bodies sprawled out in bags outside the hole, with men pulling bones from the dirt where they were found.
The bodies being discovered across Syria are likely among the more than 150,000 people who have disappeared under the Assad regime, whose administration regularly arrested and tortured dissenters and threw them into prisons never to be seen again, according to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).
The true number of the missing during the years of the bloody civil war and after has yet to be independently verified.
Jenifer Fenton, the spokesperson for the United Nations’ special envoy to Syria, has called on the rebels to secure related documents to Assad’s detention sites and mass graves to ensure justice and accountability.
“We must prioritize accounting for the missing, ensuring the families receive the clarity and recognition they desperately need,” she said in a statement.
The Syrian rebels, led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, have vowed to hold Assad’s administration accountable for the alleged human rights violations and war crimes.
