‘I feared I would end up in the trench’: Digging Assad’s mass graves in Syria | EUROtoday

It was solely when the stench seeping out of the bottom grew to become insufferable that Ahmed* realised the total horror of what he was being made to dig every day.

In a distant location, round 25 miles (40 kilometres) northeast of the Syrian capital Damascus, regime officers had ordered the excavator to dig trenches 100 metres lengthy, 4 metres broad, and three metres deep.

It was 2012 – only one 12 months after the beginning of the revolution in Syria in opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad – and the beginning of what would grow to be a decade-long bloody civil battle.

Ahmed, now 47, who labored the morning shift, was advised it was “military work” – no questions could possibly be requested. The floor was arduous, and the diggers strained in opposition to the rocky earth.

“I only discovered what was happening here after I had dug about four trenches. Then I realised it was a mass grave,” he tells The Independent on the website in Qutayfah, now walled off however nonetheless untouched after the autumn of the Assad regime only a week beforehand.

Four armoured automobiles, mounted with satellites and containing what seem like Russian manuals and belongings, are stationed at every nook. Just a few objects, that appear like bones, are scattered on the bottom of the in any other case empty, scrubby patch of land.

After digging the fourth trench, Ahmed says he seen that the holes he had dug have been being inexplicably lined up by a special workforce who clearly labored the later shift. Then the odor began. One month in, the employees may solely toil with scarves round their noses and mouths.

“The smell coming from the ground was so bad we realised it must be from bodies. Every day I dug I realised that a different bulldozer would come later to cover it,” Ahmed says, somewhat dazed.

Horrified, he tried to stop, however was threatened by regime troopers who insisted he proceed the work.

“I feared I would end up in the trench like the other bodies,” he continues.

That terror solely worsened when his personal brother, a soldier conscripted into the navy, was arrested in 2013 on unknown expenses within the metropolis of Al-Tall which sits within the countryside of Damascus province. A brother who, greater than a decade later, remains to be lacking.

“I keep thinking, what if my brother was among the bodies they were burying? I was affected so badly I couldn’t eat,” Ahmed says.

Rights teams, overseas governments and Syrian residents have lengthy accused Assad and his father Hafez, who dominated for 5 many years between them, of widespread enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings – together with mass executions – throughout the nation’s infamous jail system. Assad has repeatedly denied that his authorities dedicated human rights violations, portray his detractors as extremists.

But since Assad’s shock overthrow by rebels, and hasty flight in a foreign country final week, individuals have been in a position for the primary time entry websites like this one – revealing the size of the killings. The International Commission on Missing Persons, in The Hague, mentioned it had acquired knowledge indicating there could also be as many as 66, as but unverified, mass grave websites in Syria.

Qutayfah was first recognized by the workforce on the US-based advocacy group Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), after gravediggers who had managed to flee and search asylum in Western nations got here ahead with their chilling tales. The SETF matched their testimonies to satellite tv for pc imagery displaying excavation work over the course of a number of years.

Mouaz Moustafa, the founding father of SETF, whose personal uncle was disappeared by the regime, joins The Independent on the website. He says this was simply one in all not less than six potential mass graves they’d recognized, holding probably lots of of hundreds of people that had been disappeared by the regime.

From their investigations, the SETF consider that as many as 800 our bodies arrived per week from 2013 to 2017 to Qutayfah. They consider it was chosen as a location as a result of it was a closed navy zone, and since an earlier mass grave in Najha, round 40 kilometres south, had “filled up”. The SETF believes Qutayfah ceased to be operational when it too crammed up in 2017 and, in some unspecified time in the future, partitions have been constructed round it to defend it from the prying eyes of the surface world.

“We went back in the timeline and you could see the trenches on site. Anyone can do it. Go to Google Earth, put in this location, and go back in the timeline. You see excavators digging. You see trucks, giant trailer trucks full of human beings. You can see the scale of it,” Mr Moustafa says.

You have a state which has performed a equipment of dying and state terror in opposition to its personal individuals

Ambassador Stephen J Rapp, battle crimes prosecutor

Stephen J Rapp – a high worldwide battle crimes prosecutor and former US ambassador-at-large for battle crimes points, who’s working with the SETF to doc the mass graves and establish officers implicated in battle crimes – additionally visits the location. He tells The Independent that the mass grave was a part of the “machinery of death and state terror” that the Assad regime used in opposition to its personal individuals for many years. He has additionally mentioned that, given the size of the mass graves, it was greater than doubtless that tens of hundreds of individuals have been tortured to dying – one thing “we really haven’t seen since the Nazis”.

What makes Syria distinctive within the twenty first century is the extraordinary documentation of the websites by the Assad authorities itself.

“It’s a regime that was document mad,” Mr Rapp continues, including that he recognized almost 100 centres, from navy intelligence branches to prisons, containing substantial quantities of proof of the crimes. A forms so detailed and damning it was virtually “stupid”.

He says that such important proof urgently must be secured throughout the nation, with determined relations in search of lacking kin having combed mass grave websites, prisons, morgues and hospitals, in search of any proof of their lacking kin.

“At the moment, there is no real security, and people are coming in and trying to find information on their families and taking files away,” Mr Rapp says. “It’s going to take a real commitment on the part of the transitional authorities to provide that security.”

At Qutayfah – which has thus far remained untouched as a result of it’s so distant – residents who dwell domestically shed extra mild on the horror right here.

Alaa, 33, tells The Independent the local people started noticing the location in 2013 however dared not ask about it. All they knew was that vans got here in the course of the evening to ship one thing.

That modified in 2016, as he was driving his bike previous, and he noticed a canine dragging out what regarded like a human leg.

“I stopped to take pictures, and the soldier arrested me at the guard point and took me to the nearby town. Then I was imprisoned for a year and a half in the security branches,” he says, explaining how he was held within the infamous cells of the navy investigations branches 293 and 227 – which have underground dungeon cells that The Independent has visited.

The regime accused him of taking pictures at hand to the opposition. “After I was released, I saw they had put this wall up,” Alaa provides.

Facing the potential of jail and torture himself on the identical expenses, Ahmed the gravedigger says he was too terrified to stop his job. He additionally panicked, fearing his personal brother was among the many lifeless, and began secretly sharing his brother’s pictures with the opposite staff “in case they spotted him”.

“Imagine 11 trenches – how many bodies can they fit into that? They put them in randomly,” he says. “I was so terrified of leaving the job in case they put me in these trenches and accused me of speaking about what happened.”

In desperation, he and his fellow staff determined to intentionally work slowly. The plan labored: they have been ultimately sacked for inefficiency.

“Before that it was a nightmare, like a double-edged sword. If I left, there would be a problem; if I stayed, there would be a problem. Eventually they let us go.”

The SETF’s Mr Moustafa says Syria wants the worldwide neighborhood to return to the nation to assist discover the tens – if not lots of – of hundreds of lacking individuals, the overwhelming majority of whom at the moment are believed to be lifeless in mass graves like Qutayfah.

“This story is mine. And it’s everyone’s. It’s every human being who has a heart, it’s everyone’s story,” he says from the grave website, crumbling into tears.

“Because if we let things like this happen, it’s not just about Syria,” Mr Moustafa says. “It means you can be a dictator and use chemical weapons and cluster bombs and torture to death in order to hold on to power, and the world will normalise [it] and let it happen.”

*Names have been modified