Several media outlets, including Reuters and Sky News, have confirmed on Sunday the discovery of at least one mass grave inSyria’s capital Damascus linked to crimes committed years ago under Bashar al-Assad‘s regime.
Assad, who ruled Syria for 24 years following his father’s three-decade reign, was ousted last weekend by a coalition of rebel forces, including Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is designed as a terrorist organization by the United States. A key ally of Russia, Assad has since fled the country and sought asylum in Moscow.
Since the civil war erupted in 2011, Syria has been largely inaccessible to journalists, with the Assad government imposing strict media restrictions and ongoing violence making reporting dangerous.
Following Assad’s ousting, journalists have returned to Syria, uncovering and verifying accounts of life under his regime. Among the findings is a mass grave in Damascus’ Tadamon district, as reported by Reuters, Sky News, and other outlets.
The grave is linked to a 2013 massacre captured in a video that was released in 2022. The footage shows men in military fatigues leading blindfolded individuals to a large pit, shooting them, and pushing their bodies into the grave. The U.S. State Department said in an April 2022 statement regarding the video, that the massacre “reportedly killed hundreds of Syrian civilians.”
“When we arrived there, there were small children with shovels and buckets full of human bones,” Sky News reporter Diana Magnay, who visited the site, said in a Sunday newscast. The network’s footage then showed children picking through the rubble that contains human bones.
Khaled Houriya, a local mechanic in the area, told Reuters the neighborhood was “known as execution street” and that “anyone who came to this street was considered lost.” He also said Assad security forces often asked his neighbors to help dig mass graves.
During Assad’s rule, dissent and criticism of authorities were severely repressed and extremely dangerous, if not fatal. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged this during a speech in Jordan on Saturday and said that “the Syrian population has been traumatized by decades of repression.”
Blinken also noted that thousands of Syrians are missing, adding that “relevant organizations should have access to facilities that can help determine the fate of missing Syrians and foreign nationals—and eventually hold abusers accountable.”
Newsweek has reached out to the U.S. Department of State for comment via email on Sunday.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported in March that more than 14 million Syrians were forced to flee their homes since the start of the civil war, with 7.2 million internally displaced. The latest death toll, conducted by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, estimates 617,910 have been killed since 2011.
Since the fall of Assad’s regime, thousands of Syrians have been freed from prisons. However, thousands remain missing and unaccounted for, with many feared killed and potentially buried in mass graves.
Turkey’s state-run news outlet Anadolu Agency, located another potential mass grave near Damascus behind the city’s airport in a report published on Sunday.
“It is suspected that more than 100 pits, each around 20 meters (65 feet) deep, are being used as graves, with bodies buried on top of one another,” the outlet reported.
Assad has been accused of numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity, including using chemical weapons like sarin gas on civilians, massacres, and starvation, among others. Thousands of Syrians were detained without trial, many of them held in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, often for years.
On Thursday, U.S. federal authorities announced a former Syrian military official who oversaw one of the country’s most notorious prisons during the civil war has been charged with multiple counts of torture.
Samir Ousman al-Sheikh, 72, who served as the head of Syria’s Adra Prison between 2005 and 2008 under Assad, is accused by a U.S. grand jury of overseeing brutal torture and being directly involved in abuse at the facility. The charges come after his arrest in July, when he was detained at Los Angeles International Airport for alleged visa fraud.
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