Mass grave in Syria found with over 100,000 bodies severely tortured

Syrian emergency worker: ‘100,000 is a very, very extremely, almost unfairly conservative estimate.’

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

A US-based Syrian advocacy organization reported the discovery of a mass grave containing 100,000 bodies of people who were killed by the Assad regime, many of them severely tortured.

Mouaz Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, told Reuters that this was one of five mass graves he had seen.

This one is located at al Qutayfah, 25 miles (40 km) north of the Syrian capital.

“One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate” of the number of bodies buried at the site, said Moustafa.

“It’s a very, very extremely, almost unfairly conservative estimate.”

Moustafa said that he believes that there are most likely more than the 5 mass grave sites already known.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed after Bashar al-Assad cracked down on attempts in 2011 to revolt.

Syrians accused Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez, who died in 2000, of massive extrajudicial killings, torture, and mass slaughter.

Moustafa arrived in Syria after Assad fled to Russia and was interviewed by Britain’s Channel 4 news.

He said that the intelligence branch of the Syrian Air Force was “in charge of bodies going from military hospitals, where bodies were collected after they’d been tortured to death, to different intelligence branches, and then they would be sent to a mass grave location.”

He said that corpses were also transported to sites by the Damascus municipal funeral office, with staff assisting in unloading them from refrigerated tractor-trailers.

“We were able to talk to the people who worked on these mass graves that had on their own escaped Syria or that we helped to escape,” said Moustafa.

His group has spoken to bulldozer drivers compelled to dig graves and “many times on orders, squished the bodies down to fit them in and then cover them with dirt,” he said.

Moustafa said he was concerned that the graves are not secured and that they should be guarded and preserved for human rights investigations.