Mass graves discovered in Syria reveal horrors of Assad regime
Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, numerous mass graves have been uncovered. Experts estimate that there may be at least 100,000 bodies in these graves. "We really haven't seen anything quite like this since the Nazis," says Stephen Rapp, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes.
The head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa, has reported that in a mass grave in Al Qutayfah (approximately 40 kilometres from Damascus) there are the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by the former regime of the ousted President Bashar al-Assad. In a conversation with the Reuters news agency, he explained that this is one of five mass graves he has identified over the years.
He emphasised that the number of people buried there is "a very, very extremely almost unfairly conservative estimate." He also mentioned that there are more such sites and that, besides Syrians, the victims included U.S. and UK citizens, as well as other foreigners.
Former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, Stephen Rapp, after visiting two mass graves in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, also holds no illusions about the number of buried individuals. - We certainly have more than 100,000 people that were disappeared into and tortured to death in this machine. I don't have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we've seen in these mass graves - he mentioned in a discussion with the agency.
- We really haven't seen anything quite like this since the Nazis. We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death - he added.
The fall of Assad's regime
As a result of a swift offensive lasting only 11 days, a coalition of rebels led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) ousted Assad on 8th December, who fled with his family to Russia. Mohamed al-Bashir became the prime minister of the transitional government.
14 years of war led to mass displacement of the population in Syria, food shortages, infrastructure collapse, economic downturn, and diseases. Approximately 16.7 million people urgently need assistance. The escalation of hostilities in Lebanon also worsened the situation, forcing over 560,000 people to flee the conflict to Syria.
