At least 100 000 bodies in Syrian mass grave, US advocacy group head says

A mass grave outside of Damascus contains the bodies of at least 100 000 people killed by the former government of ousted President Bashar al-Assad.

Speaking to Reuters during a telephone interview from Damascus, Mouaz Moustafa, the head of a US-based Syrian advocacy organisation Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), on Monday said the site at al Qutayfah, 40 km north of the Syrian capital, was one of eight mass graves that he had identified over the years.

“One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate” of the number of bodies buried at the site, said Moustafa. “It’s an extremely, almost unfairly conservative estimate,” he said.

Moustafa said gravediggers who worked at the site had told him that “four tractor-trailer trucks, each carrying over 150 bodies in each, came twice a week from 2012 until 2018.” That would amount to hundreds of thousands of bodies, he told CNN.

Neither Reuters nor CNN were able to confirm Moustafa’s allegations.

Over 150 000 Syrians missing, believed to be in mass graves

More than 150 000 Syrians remain unaccounted for after disappearing into Assad’s prisons, and most are believed to be in mass graves around the country, Mounir al-Mustafa, deputy director of the White Helmets, a Syrian search and rescue team, told AP.

An array of prisons run by the military, intelligence and security agencies were allegedly notorious for systematic torture, mass executions and brutal conditions that killed inmates from disease and starvation, according to human rights groups, whistle-blowers, and former detainees.

The White Helmets have received reports of at least 13 mass grave sites around the country, eight of them near Damascus, al-Mustafa said.

“We can’t open these mass graves yet. It’s a massive task to document and take samples and give codes to the corpses before we can identify those people,” he said.

In 2020, a man known as “the Gravedigger” told a German court the Assad regime recruited him to bury hundreds of bodies in mass graves, according to the ICMP. The bodies could only be identified by the numbers etched on their chests or foreheads and exhibited severe signs of torture and mutilation,” according to ICMP.

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