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.”
The al-Qutayfah mass grave is a vast, dusty field punctured by deep trenches stretching up to 500 feet long. Initially, activists estimated that more than 100,000 bodies lay beneath the dirt in tightly compressed piles. But in an interview with the CPC, a worker at the site put the number closer to 200,000. Other mass graves, which are also now being uncovered around the country, likely contain hundreds of thousands of bodies of Syrians killed since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on anti-government protests turned into a full-blown civil war.
A member of the CPC team interviewed gravediggers, forensic personnel, and locals in the area, who had witnessed the atrocities for years.
Fadel Abdulghany, head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, estimates that 1.3 million people, including thousands of women and children, have been detained in the Assad regime’s sprawling network of secret prisons since 2011. More than 100,000 people are still believed to be missing. And for tens of thousands of Syrians searching through hospitals, mosques, and graves for traces of loved ones, the road to any kind of closure remains long and hard.
“They arrested my uncle in October 2012,” one Syrian man who had traveled to Sednaya, a military prison and death camp nicknamed the “Human Slaughterhouse,” told the CPC. After the prison gates were flung open last week, he said, “There’s a glimmer of hope. We can’t give up hope.”
Watch our video here.
And read Jay Solomon on Alois Brunner, a notorious Nazi who lived in Damascus and advised the Assads.