66 Mass Graves… Witnesses Reveal Details of the “Terror Machine” in Syria

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Mass graves in Syria reveal the scale of the “killing machine” of the former al-Assad regime, with estimates from the International Commission on Missing Persons suggesting that there may be up to 66 potential mass grave sites across the country.

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A report from The Washington Post, based on witness accounts, describes how refrigerated trucks almost every day would dump bodies into a barren field outside the Syrian capital.

The report states that the job of Fayad Hassan, a 55-year-old janitor working in Qatifa, located 25 miles north of Damascus, was to unload the dead and throw their bodies into deep ditches dug into the dusty earth.

The site where Hassan worked for three years starting in 2014 is one of 10 mass graves discovered by civil defense workers and human rights organizations in the Damascus area, with the understanding that there are likely more still to be found.

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The newspaper adds that the al-Assad regime sought to conceal the mass killing of its opponents from the world during the nearly 14-year-long civil war.

The excavation of the mass graves is beginning to shed light on the fate of over 150,000 people who went missing during the conflict.

International prosecutor Stephen Rapp, who visited several mass graves in Syria last week, including the Qatifa grave, stated that they were part of a “state terror” system that would provide evidence for future war crimes trials.

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Rapp added, “We haven’t really seen this kind of death machine, or anything like it, since the Nazis.”

Although the al-Assad government has repeatedly denied torturing and killing its critics in detention centers, the evidence revealed by human rights organizations and whistleblowers over the years has been damning.

In 2013, a defector smuggled out a “file” containing 53,000 photos of corpses, known as the “Caesar photos,” taken in Syrian prisons and military hospitals.

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The newspaper notes that the regime meticulously documented the killings. At Sednaya Prison, al-Assad’s most notorious prison, records now circulating within the prison show the scale of deaths that occurred within its walls.

One of the ledgers reviewed by the newspaper reveals that on one day in 2015, 25 prisoners were marked as having been sent to a military hospital, with the word “corpse” written next to each name.

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The following day, 18 names were listed for transfer; four were noted as injured, and the rest were classified as corpses, according to the records.

Experts say that the work of digging up mass graves and identifying the dead in Syria could take years, if not decades.

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