“At least 100,000 bodies in mass grave outside Damascus,” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg

Mouaz Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, said in an interview with Reuters news agency that the site in al Qutayfah, 40 km north of the Syrian capital, was one of five mass graves he had identified over the years.

“One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate” for the number of bodies buried at the site, Moustafa said. “It’s a very, very extremely – almost unfairly extremely – conservative estimate.” The man said he is confident there are more mass graves than the five sites and that in addition to Syrians, American and British citizens and other foreigners are buried there. (Read more below the photo)

The man told Reuters that the Syrian Air Force intelligence service was “responsible for transporting bodies from military hospitals, where they were collected after being tortured to death by various intelligence services, and then sent to a mass grave site.”

Bodies were also transported to the sites by the Damascus Municipal Funeral Home, with staff helping to remove them from refrigerated tractor-trailers, he said. “We were able to talk to the people who worked on these mass graves,” Moustafa said. His group also reportedly spoke to bulldozer drivers who were forced to dig the mass graves and “often on orders flattened the bodies to make them fit inside,” he said.

Moustafa expressed concern that the graves are currently not secured and said they should be preserved to safeguard evidence for investigations. The Reuters news agency has not been able to independently verify Moustafa’s claims for the time being. (Read more below the photo)

Mass executions

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed since 2011, when President Bashar al-Assad suppressed protests against his rule, a conflict that turned into a full-scale civil war. Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, are accused by Syrians, advocacy groups and other governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country’s notorious prison system. Assad has repeatedly denied that his government violated human rights and portrayed his opponents as extremists.