Syrian mass graves: Experts claim horror unseen since nazis

The head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Mouaz Moustafa, reported that a mass grave in Al Qutayfah (25 miles from Damascus) contains the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by the former regime of ousted President Bashar al-Assad. In a conversation with Reuters, he mentioned that this is one of five mass graves he has identified over the years.

However, he emphasized that the number of people buried there "a very, very extremely almost unfairly conservative estimate." He also noted that there are more such sites and that, besides Syrians, the victims included U.S. and U.K. 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, has no doubts about the number of individuals buried. - 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 said in a conversation 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.

As a result of a rapid offensive lasting only 11 days, a coalition of rebels led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) ousted Assad on December 8. He fled with his family to Russia. Mohamed al-Bashir became the prime minister of the transitional government.

Fourteen years of war led to massive population displacement in Syria, food shortages, infrastructure collapse, economic downturn, and disease. About 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.

Source: Reuters, PAP