Warning: this article may contain disturbing images
Mass graves containing more than 100,000 people forcibly disappeared by Bashar al-Assad’s killer regime have been uncovered in Syria.
The scale of Assad’s organised killings is something not seen ‘since the Nazis’, according to former US war crimes ambassador Stephen Rapp.
Rapp visited the sites of two mass graves outside of Damascus which have hundreds of thousands of human remains – and 100,000 is the ‘most conservative’ estimate of the victims, he said.
British and American citizens are also thought to be in the mass graves near Najha and Qutayfah, according to Mouaz Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
One gravedigger told Channel 4: ‘A while after they covered the bodies, a smell would emerge. The labourers would have to come back to cover graves so the smell faded.’
Another recalled the fire department coming to thaw dozens of bodies which were stuck together during a cold spell, before later burying them.
Nearby residents referred to the mass graves as a ‘place of horrors’, recalling how dozens of refrigeration trucks would deliver bodies each day.
‘We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,’ Rapp said.
‘We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death.’
The mass graves are thought to be the largest since the Holocaust. During the Balkan Wars in the 1990s, roughly 40,000 people went missing.
In Syria, 157,000 have been reported as missing, but the true number is likely higher.
Many of the victims are those who were sent to prison in Syria, or detained at checkpoints.
A third of all deaths since the civil war began took place in Sednaya prison —a facility so deadly it was nicknamed the ‘human slaughterhouse.’
Although executions were kept secret by the regime – with most deaths being officially recorded as ‘heart attacks’ – killings were signed off by the government at an executive level by high-ranking Syrian officials.
A 2015 report by Amnesty International revealed that prisoners were killed en masse in secret executions after being found guilty in mock trials overseen by prison guards.
After the executions were carried out, the victims’ bodies were loaded into a truck, transferred to Tishreen Hospital for registration and buried in mass graves, the report added.
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