Syrian mass graves reveal “machinery of death” under Assad, top prosecutor claims.

News Mania Desk / Piyal Chatterjee / 18th December 2024

An international war crimes prosecutor claimed on Tuesday that evidence discovered at mass burial sites in Syria has shown a state-run “machinery of death” under deposed leader Bashar al-Assad, in which he estimates more than 100,000 people have been tortured and murdered since 2013. Former US war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp told Reuters after touring two mass burial sites in the villages of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus: “We certainly have more than 100,000 people who were disappeared 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,” said Rapp, who led prosecutions at the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals and is working with Syrian civil society to document war crimes evidence and is helping to prepare for any eventual trials. “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 said. “We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death.”

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are thought to have died since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on anti-government rallies devolved into a full-fledged conflict. Both Assad and his father, Hafez, who served as president before him and died in 2000, have long been accused by rights groups and governments of massive arbitrary murders, including mass executions in the country’s jail system and the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people.Assad, who fled to Moscow, has consistently disputed that his administration violated human rights and portrayed his critics as fanatics. Mouaz Moustafa, the leader of the Syrian Emergency Task Force in the United States, who also visited Qutayfah, 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Damascus, estimates that at least 100,000 people were buried there.

Separately, the International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague stated that it has received evidence indicating that there might be up to 66 unconfirmed mass grave sites in Syria. Over 157,000 persons have been reported missing to the commission.
Kathryne Bomberger, the commission’s chairwoman, told Reuters that its missing-persons webpage was “exploding” with fresh contacts from relatives. In comparison, around 40,000 individuals went missing during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.For the families, the hunt for the truth in Syria might be lengthy and challenging. A DNA match will require at least three relatives to provide DNA reference samples, as well as a DNA sample from each of the skeletal remains discovered in the tombs, according to Bomberger.

The United States is working with a variety of United Nations entities to ensure that the Syrian people receive answers and accountability, the State Department announced on Tuesday.
Syrians living near Qutayfah, a former military installation where one of the sites was located, and a cemetery in Najha used to hide dead from detention sites recalled witnessing a continual stream of refrigerated trucks transporting bodies that were dropped into large pits built with bulldozers.
“The graves were made in an orderly manner; the truck would arrive, discharge its payload, and then leave. “There were security vehicles with them, and no one was allowed to approach; anyone who got close used to go down with them,” says Abb Khalid, a farmer next to Najha cemetery .