‘Recovery of dead bodies could take years’

More and more reports are appearing about the discoveries of mass graves in Syria. The Syrian aid organization White Helmets has received reports of thirteen mass graves spread across the country. Reuters news agency has spoken to witnesses who say they have seen the mass graves with their own eyes.

A mass grave containing the bodies of at least 100,000 people is said to have been discovered north of Damascus. Mouaz Moustafa, the head of the nonprofit Syrian Emergency Task Force, told Reuters it was one of five mass graves he had personally seen in recent years.

“100,000 is the most conservative estimate,” Moustafa said of the number of bodies in the mass grave in Qutayfah, about 40 kilometers north of the capital.

These are images from news agencies AP and Reuters of the mass graves:

Reuters also spoke to former US War Crimes Ambassador Stephen Rapp. He has also been to the mass grave in Qutayfah, he says, and he has no doubt that the number is at least 100,000 bodies. However, it is not clear what exactly this number is based on.

According to the White Helmets, around 150,000 Syrians are still missing. Many were opponents of the regime and, in the years after the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, disappeared into the prisons of dictator Assad, who fled last week. This prison system is known for its horrific conditions and torture practices and was one of the main pillars that kept the regime in power.

For many Syrians, the end of the Assad era immediately meant the beginning of a search for their missing loved ones. Thousands of people went to prisons in the hope of finding their loved ones there.

A week later, with the prisons empty and hopes for the safe return of relatives dwindling day by day, the search shifts to the regime’s many cemeteries and morgues.

Former Ambassador Rapp works with two organizations, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability and the Syrian Emergency Task Force, to find mass graves and record what they find there. He compares the scale on which people were murdered and dumped in graves with the Nazi era.

“From the secret police who rounded up people in their homes and on the streets, to the guards and interrogators who tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who made the bodies disappear. Thousands of people participated in this killing machine.”

Syrians living near a military detention center that also has a cemetery told Reuters they saw refrigerated trucks driving back and forth between the prison and the cemetery during the Assad era. They say they saw with their own eyes that bodies were dumped from those trucks into the graves. “This is a horror place,” says a local resident.

It could take years before all the dead are recovered, said Mounir al-Mustafa, deputy chairman of the White Helmets. “We can’t open all of these mass graves. It’s a huge job to document everything, take samples and give codes to the bodies before we can identify people.”

Al-Mustafa says the priority now is to inventory the unidentified bodies in morgues and hospitals.

The body of the well-known Syrian refugee Mazen Hamada was found last week in Syria’s most notorious prison, Sednaya. He lived in the Netherlands until 2020. In 2014, the Autovantra visited him in an asylum seeker center: