A mass grave outside of Damascus holds the remains of at least 100,000 people killed by the former regime of former President Bashar al-Assad, according to the leader of a Syrian advocacy group based in the United States on Monday.
Mouaz Moustafa told Reuters over the phone from Damascus that he had discovered five mass graves over the years, including the one at al Qutayfah, 25 miles (40 km) north of the Syrian capital.Moustafa, who is in charge of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, stated that “one hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate” of the number of burials at the location. “It’s a very, very, extremely, almost unfairly conservative estimate.”
In addition to Syrians, Moustafa said he is certain that there are more mass graves than the five locations and that other foreigners, including Americans and Britons, were also among the victims.
Reuters could not verify Moustafa’s claims. Since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on anti-government protests escalated into a full-scale civil war, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have perished.
Syrians, human rights organizations, and other governments accuse Assad and his father, Hafez, who died in 2000 before he became president, of many extrajudicial executions, including mass executions in the nation’s infamous prison system.
Assad characterized his critics as radicals and denied time and again that his government had violated human rights.
Koussay Aldahhak, Syria’s ambassador to the UN, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Speaking to reporters last week, he said he was awaiting orders from the new authorities and would “keep defending and working for the Syrian people.” He took over the position in January, when Assad was still in power.
After Assad fled to Russia and his government fell apart due to a lightning-fast rebel offensive that put an end to his family’s more than 50 years of tightly controlled rule, Moustafa arrived in Syria.
Following his interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News at the site in al Qutayfah for a report on the purported mass grave there, he spoke to Reuters.
He claimed that the Syrian Air Force’s intelligence branch was “in charge of bodies going from military hospitals, where they were collected after they’d been tortured to death, to different intelligence branches, and then they would be sent to a mass grave location.”
“The Damascus municipal funeral office also transported the corpses to the locations, and their staff assisted in unloading them from refrigerated tractor-trailers,” he said.
“We had the opportunity to converse with the individuals who worked on these mass graves, who either escaped Syria independently or with our assistance,” Moustafa said.
His group interviewed bulldozer operators forced to dig graves, who “many times on orders, squished the bodies down to fit them in and then cover them with dirt,” he said.
Moustafa emphasized the need to preserve grave sites to safeguard evidence for future investigations, despite their insecurity.
