"This is the place of horrors": 150,000 missing Syrians; mass graves show the worst abuses "since the Nazis"

"This is the place of horrors"

NBC reports today: Syrian mass graves show the worst abuses 'since the Nazis,' top prosecutor says

Mass graves uncovered in Syria in the days since President Bashar al-Assad was overthrown are exposing evidence of some of the worst abuses since the Nazis, a top international war crimes prosecutor said.

More than 100,000 people were tortured and killed in the state-run “machinery of death,” Stephen Rapp, former U.S. war crimes ambassador at large, told Reuters on Tuesday after visiting two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus.

“I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves," said Rapp, who led prosecutions at both the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals and is now working to help document evidence of war crimes in Syria.

Rapp, who also spoke to BBC News, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Images have emerged showing Syrian Civil Defense crews, known as the White Helmets, recovering the remains of those buried in some of the country's mass graves, with some photos showing piles of bones and skulls in body bags. Past satellite imagery has also indicated large burial sites.

Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners disappeared into Assad's network of prisons, where many faced torture and death, in the years since the civil war in Syria began in 2011 with his brutal crackdown on protests against him. Both he and his father, Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000, have been accused of widespread killings and abuses.

And while Syrians across the country celebrated as thousands of people were freed from prison cells by rebel forces within hours of Assad's overthrow, the search is on for those who did not survive to see the end of the Assad family's 50-year rule. 

'System of state terror'

“We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” Rapp said of the evidence emerging from the mass graves.

“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,” he said.

“We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death," Rapp said.

Assad, now in Russia, has repeatedly denied accusations from human rights groups, whistleblowers and former detainees that his regime carried out human rights violations.

The horrors of Syria's mass graves were previously described in German court hearings and U.S. congressional testimony in 2021 and 2023, with past satellite imagery released by Maxar Technologies, a U.S. defense contractor, showing a location being investigated as a possible mass grave.

The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague said it has received reports of at least 66 sites of mass graves in Syria.

Working with Syrian families of the missing and Syrian organizations, it said in a news release Dec. 10 that it had also collected reports of at least 28,200 missing relatives from more than 76,200 people from Syria.

More details from a Reuters story:

The head of U.S.-based Syrian advocacy organisation the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa, who also visited Qutayfah, 25 miles (40 km) north of Damascus, has estimated at least 100,000 bodies were buried there alone. 

The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague separately said it had received data indicating there may be as many as 66, as yet unverified, mass grave sites in Syria. More than 150,000 people are considered missing, according to international and Syrian organisations, including the United Nations and the Syrian Network for Human Rights, it said. 

Commission head Kathryne Bomberger told Reuters its portal for reporting the missing was now "exploding" with new contacts from families. 

.... 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 refrigeration trucks delivering bodies which were dumped into long trenches dug with bulldozers. 

"The graves were prepared in an organised manner - the truck would come, unload the cargo it had, and leave. There were security vehicles with them, and no one was allowed to approach, anyone who got close used to go down with them," Abb Khalid, who works as a farmer next to Najha cemetery, said. 

In Qutayfah, residents declined to speak on camera or use their names for fear of the retribution, saying they were not yet sure the area was safe after Assad's fall. 

"This is the place of horrors," one said on Tuesday. 

Inside a site enclosed with cement walls, three children played near a Russian-made military satellite vehicle. The soil was flat and levelled, with straight long marks where the bodies were believed buried. 

.... Details of Syria's mass graves first emerged during German court hearings and U.S. congressional testimony in 2021 and 2023. A man identified only as "the grave digger" testified repeatedly as a witness about his work at the Najha and Qutayfah sites during the German trial of Syrian government officials. 

While working in cemeteries around Damascus at the end of 2011, two intelligence officers showed up at his office and ordered him and his colleagues to transport and bury corpses. He testified that he rode in a van adorned with pictures of Assad and drove to the sites several times a week between 2011 and 2018, followed by large refrigeration trucks filled with bodies. 

The trucks carried several hundred corpses from Tishreen, Mezzeh and Harasta military hospitals to Najha and Qutayfah, he said in the trial. At the sites deep trenches were already dug and the grave digger and his colleagues would unload the corpses into the trenches, which would be covered with dirt by excavators as soon as a section of the trench was full, he said. 

"Every week, twice a week, three trailer trucks arrived, packed 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 grave digger escaped from Syria to Europe in 2018 and has repeatedly testified about the mass graves, but always with his identity shielded from the public and the media.