AL-QUTAYFAH, Syria—Every week for years, the refrigerated trucks came, at least two or three rumbling to the edge of a barren field along a private military road, before idling and departing. Residents who lived in this town, a 40-minute drive from Damascus, knew what they were up to. “We’d see them driving on this street, dripping with blood,” one resident told an interviewer from The Center for Peace Communications on Wednesday.
But until now, no one could speak out.
This week, roughly 10 days after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, locals finally revealed what the government had been doing all that time near their homes. Al-Qutayfah contains the largest known mass grave in Syria. The trucks had been dropping off frozen bodies, up to 600 corpses per week.
Issam Ali Saad, an al-Qutayfah resident who was forced to dig trenches at the site for five years and sign documents pledging secrecy, spoke to a member of the CPC, which gained exclusive footage to the site, shared with The Free Press. “You could tell they were the bodies of prisoners. It was clear from the marks on the bodies,” Saad said. “Sometimes they came in blindfolded with a bullet hole in their forehead. Some bodies showed signs of bruising, and others had burnt limbs.”