"Machinery Of Death" Under Assad: Top Prosecutor On Mass Graves Found In Syria (X image @Fahadnaimb)
Beirut, Syria: Evidence emerging from mass grave in Syria has exposed a state-run “machinery of death” under Bashar al-Assad regime. An international war crimes prosecutor said that more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013. 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 said that “We certainly have more than 100,000 people that were disappeared into and tortured to death in this machine, reported Reuters”.
Rapp , who led prosecutions at the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals said that, “”We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis”. He is working with Syrian civil society to document war crimes evidence and is helping to prepare for any eventual trials. “I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves”, he said.
“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”, he added.
Also Read: Russia Close To Removing Taliban From “Terrorist” Label, Syria’s HTS Could Be Next
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on protests against him spiralled into a full-scale war.
The more than 60 years of Assad regime, which include both Bashar al-Assad, and his father Hafez al-Assad have long been accused by rights groups and governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country’s prison system and using chemical weapons against the Syrian people.
Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Moscow, has repeatedly denied that his government committed human rights violations and painted his detractors as extremists.
The head of U.S.-based Syrian advocacy organisation, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa, has estimated that at least 100,000 bodies were buried alone. He also visited Qutayfah, 25 miles (40 km) north of Damascus.
The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague said it had received data which indicated that there may be as many as 66, mass grave sites in Syria. The information is not a verified one. More than 157,000 people have been reported missing to the commission, reported Reuters.
Also Read: Fact Check: CNN’s Viral Video Of Freed Syrian Prisoner An Alleged War Criminal, Not Victim
It would be a long and difficult process for the families searching for their loved ones. A DNA matches will require at least three relatives providing DNA reference samples and taking a DNA sample for each one of the skeletal remains found in the graves, as per Bomberger.
As per satellite images, 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, said Reuters.
(With inputs from Reuters)
