By Timour Azhari and Anthony Deutsch
QUTAYFAH, Syria (Reuters) – An international war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has exposed a state-run “machinery of death” under toppled leader Bashar al-Assad in which he estimated more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013.
Speaking after visiting two mass grave sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, former U.S. war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp told Reuters: “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.”
“When you talk about this kind of organised killing by the state and its organs, 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.
“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.
Syrian residents living near a former military base where one of the sites was located and a cemetery 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.
In Qutayfah, people 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 buried.
Satellite imagery analysed by Reuters showed large-scale digging began at the location between 2012 and 2014 and continued up until 2022. Multiple satellite images taken by Maxar during that time showed a digger and large trenches visible at the site, along with three or four large trucks.
Omar Hujeirati, a former anti-Assad protest leader who lives near the Najha cemetery, said he suspected several of his missing family members may be in the grave.
He believes at least some of those taken, including two sons and four brothers, were detained for protesting against Assad’s government.
“That was my sin, what made them take my family,” he said, a long, exposed trench behind him where the bodies were apparently buried.
He said those responsible must be held accountable in a clear judicial process or people would take matters into their own hands.
“We want our rights, according to Syrian law, and not by some behind-the-scenes process. These massacres and slaughterhouses of death are unacceptable to anyone with humanity,” he said. “We want reputable organizations to come so this isn’t covered up.”
(Reporting by Timour Azhari and Anthony Deutsch; Additional reporting by Reade Levinson and Stephanie van den Berg; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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