Mass Grave With Over 1 Lakh Bodies Found Near Syria's Capital

A mass grave with an estimated 1 lakh bodies has been discovered on the outskirts of al-Qutayfa, a town 30 km north of Syria's capital Damascus. For over a decade, this site was used by the Bashar al-Assad regime to dispose of political opponents and war casualties. Satellite imagery and eyewitness accounts confirm the grave was dug by the Assad forces in the early years of the Syrian civil war, with refrigerated trucks regularly delivering bodies.

Locals reported that earthmovers and trucks filled with corpses arrived late at night, and initially, the graves were not deep enough to prevent dogs from pulling up the bodies. To address this, the Assad soldiers were ordered to dig deeper. The site, roughly the size of two football fields, remained hidden for years, with residents too afraid to speak out.

After visiting mass grave sites in Qutayfah and Najha towns near Damascus, former US war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp confirmed, “We certainly have more than 100,000 people that were disappeared into and tortured to death in this machine. I don't have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we've seen in these mass graves.”

Mr Rapp, who previously led war crimes prosecutions in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, said, “When you talk about this kind of organised killing by the state and its organs, we haven't seen anything quite like this since the Nazis," as per Reuters.

Haj Ali Saleh, the former mayor of al-Qutayfa, recalls being ordered to bury bodies sent by the regime. “Whatever they sent me, I was supposed to bury,” he told the Economist. In 2012, he resigned after refusing to build a mass grave and was briefly detained. 

As the civil war escalated, the Assad regime faced growing dissent and began using brutal methods to suppress opposition. Torture and executions became routine as part of the regime's measures to maintain control. Former residents and local officials also estimate the grave could contain more than 1,00,000 people, many of whom were tortured and executed by the regime. Satellite images analysed by human rights organisations show evidence of large-scale digging at the site between 2012 and 2014, continuing as recently as 2022.

Rapp said the extensive machinery of murder involved various sectors of the regime, including secret police who abducted victims from their homes, jailers and interrogators who tortured them, and workers who buried the bodies. “Thousands of people were working in this system of killing,” he said.

Despite the scale of the atrocity, no official investigation or exhumation has been carried out by the current Syrian leadership. Families of the missing, including those of a local man searching for his uncle, are desperate for answers. Human rights advocates have labelled the regime's actions as part of a “machinery of death” that may be among the worst in modern history, Reuters reported.

After more than a decade of civil war, millions of Syrians still search for their missing loved ones. While a few survivors have recently come out of prison, many cling to the hope of finding their friends and family members soon.

A farmer from al-Qutayfa who worked near the grave site for over ten years said, “The mother of a dead person can sleep, but the mother of a missing son never will.”