Since the capture of Syria by the Islamist rebels of the HTC group, Damascus has once again opened its streets to researchers and NGOs. And reveals the secrets of the violence that was unleashed there for two decades. Only nine days after the capture of the capital and the liberation of the regime’s terrible prisons, the discoveries of mass graves sometimes containing thousands of bodies are multiplying, proof of the crimes committed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) announced this Wednesday, December 18, the discovery of a mass grave located in the middle of the city, in the Tadamon district, in the south of Damascus. The remains unearthed by researchers come from “a massacre carried out in April 2013”. HRW teams “became interested in this location thanks to clues in a leaked video taken in April 2013, showing summary executions by Syrian government forces and affiliated militias,” the statement said. In this video, 11 blindfolded victims are shot at point blank range, and pushed into a machine-dug pit, alongside 13 other people. “Researchers spoke with a neighborhood resident who said a pro-government paramilitary group had forced him and other residents to bury bodies” in the same grave in 2015 and 2016, adds the NGO . Human remains scattered throughout the surrounding neighborhood lead researchers to believe that “other people were very likely killed or buried in the same place.”
Not far from there, in a warehouse in the southern suburbs of Damascus located about fifty meters from the mausoleum of Sayyeda Zeinab, a site revered by Shiites, the White Helmets, an organization of Syrian rescuers, announced the discovery of around twenty bodies and bones on Wednesday December 18. Rescue workers had received reports of putrid odors emanating from the site. “In the warehouse, we found a fridge where decomposing bodies were lying,” as well as human bones scattered on the floor. “On the bags where the bodies were located was written ‘Aleppo-Hraytan'”, accompanied by a number, said Ammar al-Salmo, head of the White Helmets with AFP. These are the names of the large city in northern Syria and a neighboring town.
Reports of very large-scale mass graves, more difficult to verify at the moment, are increasing. The White Helmets have received reports of at least 13 mass grave sites across the country, eight of them near Damascus. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed since 2011, when Bashar al-Assad’s repression of protests against his regime intensified and gave rise to a full-scale civil war. At least 100,000 people have died under torture in the regime’s prisons, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH), an NGO.
The graves of hundreds of thousands of bodies
Tuesday December 17, the British news agency Reuters reported the assertions of Mouaz Moustafa, head of a US-based Syrian defense organization called the Syria Emergency Operations Group. In a telephone interview from Damascus, he told the agency that he had identified the site of a mass grave in Al Qutayfah, 40 kilometers north of the Syrian capital. According to Mouaz Moustafa, this would contain more than 100,000 bodies. This figure constitutes “the most conservative estimate” but could be well below reality, according to the man. Allegations not confirmed by Reuters.
To identify this area, his group reportedly “talked to people who worked on these mass graves that had escaped from Syria”, as well as to bulldozer builders forced to dig graves who, “many times on orders, crushed the bodies to fit them, then covered them with earth,” Mouaz Moustafa explains in the interview. According to him, the alleged Al Qutayfah site constitutes one of five massive mass graves in the country.
According to another member of the Syria Emergency Operation Group quoted by the American news agency AP — Stephen Rapp, former American ambassador and also member of the “Commission on International Justice and Accountability” — another mass grave is currently reportedly unearthed south of Damascus, in the village of Najha. Visiting the site on Tuesday, December 17, he reported that several tens of thousands of dead, former inmates of Assad’s prisons could be buried in this mass grave located next to an ordinary cemetery.
Protect these crime scenes at all costs
According to the Associated Press, residents of a village called Izraa, in the south of Daraa province, have also started digging themselves to unearth the remains buried in a mass grave in their village. The remains of more than 30 bodies were reportedly discovered, and medical teams who reached the village estimated the total number could be as high as 70.
Regardless of the NGO or research group, everyone is campaigning to make the security of these places a priority, because they constitute evidence of the crimes committed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Human Rights Watch described this Monday, December 6, the mass grave discovered south of Damascus as a “mass crime scene.” “The current danger is that, on this site as on others, vital evidence will be abandoned, without protection,” judges the human rights organization. “Without measures to secure sites like this, there is a risk of losing essential evidence to elucidate the fate of thousands of missing Syrians and to prosecute and convict the perpetrators of the crimes.”