The conspiracy by President Bashar al-Assad’s military to excavate the mass grave in Qutayfah and create an enormous second mass grave in the desert outside the town of Dhumair has not been previously reported.
The mass grave contained the bodies of soldiers and prisoners who died in the dictator’s prisons and military hospitals, the witnesses said.
But no independent Syrian groups or international organizations had access to the prisons or the mass graves.
Two truckers and the officer told Reuters they were told by military commanders the point of the transfer was to clear out the Qutayfah mass grave and hide evidence of mass killings.
But with few resources in Syria, even well-known mass graves are largely unprotected and unexcavated.
DHUMAIR, Syria, Oct. 14 – According to a Reuters investigation, the Assad regime conducted a covert two-year operation to transport thousands of bodies from one of the biggest mass graves in Syria to a hidden site in the isolated desert more than an hour away.
There has never before been any news of the plot by the military of President Bashar al-Assad to dig up the mass grave in Qutayfah and build a massive second mass grave in the desert outside the town of Dhumair.
In order to identify the location of the Dhumair grave site and provide a detailed account of the extensive operation, Reuters consulted 13 individuals who had firsthand knowledge of the two-year effort to relocate the bodies, examined documents created by the involved officials, and examined hundreds of satellite photos of both grave sites taken over a number of years.
“Operation Move Earth” was the name of the 2019–2021 operation that moved bodies from Qutayfah to a different secret location dozens of kilometers away. According to the witnesses, the goal of the operation was to conceal the wrongdoings of the Assad regime and aid in repairing its reputation.
On Tuesday, Reuters shared the investigation’s results with President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s administration. The government took a while to reply to inquiries for this report.
To lessen the possibility that trespassers will alter the grave, the news organization is not disclosing the exact location of the site here. The Assad government’s covert operation and how reporters discovered the plan will be covered in detail in a future Reuters special report.
Reuters has discovered that the grave in the Dhumair desert is one of the largest constructed during the Syrian civil war, with at least 34 trenches that are 2 kilometers long. Tens of thousands of people may be buried there, according to witness reports and the new site’s size.
Early in the civil war, around 2012, Assad’s regime started burying the dead at Qutayfah. According to witnesses, soldiers and prisoners who perished in the dictator’s jails and military hospitals were buried in the mass grave.
By providing images to local media in 2014, a Syrian human rights activist made Qutayfah public, exposing the grave’s existence and general location on the outskirts of Damascus. A few years later, in court testimony and other media reports, its exact location was revealed.
According to the witnesses involved in the operation, six to eight trucks carrying dirt and human remains traveled from Qutayfah to the Dhumair desert site for four nights almost every week from February 2019 to April 2021. No documentation mentioning Operation Move Earth or mass graves in general was found by Reuters, which was unable to verify whether bodies from other places also arrived at the secret location.
The stench was clearly remembered by all those directly involved, including two truck drivers, three mechanics, a bulldozer operator, and a former officer from Assad’s elite Republican Guard who had been involved from the beginning of the transfer.
A number of military officials who witnesses said were involved in the operation were not available for comment, as were former President Assad, who is currently in Russia. Assad and a large number of his associates left the country after the fall of the dictatorship late last year.
When Assad was on the brink of winning the Syrian civil war in late 2018, the plan to relocate thousands of bodies was conceived, according to the former Republican Guard officer. After being marginalized by years of sanctions and accusations of brutality, the dictator hoped to regain international recognition, according to the officer. Assad had already been charged at the time with holding thousands of Syrians in detention. However, neither independent Syrian groups nor international organizations were able to enter the mass graves or the prisons.
The officer and two truck drivers told Reuters that military commanders had informed them that the transfer was being made in order to remove the Qutayfah mass grave and conceal evidence of mass murders.
All 16 of the Qutayfah trenches that Reuters had photographed were empty by the time Assad was overthrown.
According to Syrian rights organizations, over 160,000 people vanished into the vast security apparatus of the overthrown dictator and are thought to be interred in the dozens of mass graves he established. One of Syria’s most agonizing faultlines might be eased if organized excavation and DNA analysis were used to determine what happened to them.
However, Syria has limited resources, so even well-known mass graves remain mostly unexcavated and unprotected. Additionally, despite repeated requests from the families of the missing, the country’s new leaders—who deposed Assad in December—have not made any records about the people buried there public.
The overwhelming number of victims and the need to reconstruct the legal system, according to Syrian Minister of Emergency and Disaster Management Raed al-Saleh, make the work more difficult. Training experts in forensic medicine and DNA testing is urgently needed, according to Syria’s new National Commission for Missing People, which also announced plans to establish a DNA bank and a centralized digital platform for families of the missing.
“As long as there are mothers waiting to find their sons’ graves, wives waiting to find their husbands’ graves, and children waiting to find their fathers’ graves, there is a bleeding wound,” al-Saleh stated in a late August interview with the semi-official Syrian news website al-Watan.
A careless move of bodies like the one from Qutayfah to Dhumair, according to Mohamed Al Abdallah, head of the Syria Justice and Accountability Center, a Syrian group that looks into war crimes and tracks down the missing, is devastating for bereaved families.
Al Abdallah stated, “It will be very difficult to piece these bodies together so that complete remains can be returned to families,” following the release of the Reuters findings. He said the new government’s creation of the commission for missing persons was a good move.
He claimed that although it has political backing, it still lacks the necessary funds and professionals.
Motorcyclists, drivers, and other transfer participants claimed that speaking out during the covert operation would have resulted in their death.
“Nobody would break the rules,” one driver declared. “You could find yourself in the holes yourself. “.”.
Feras Dalatey, Khalil Ashawi, and Maggie Michael reported from Dhumair, Syria; Ryan McNeil reported from London; Khalil Ashawi took the photos. Lori Hinnant was the editor, and Feilding Cage was the graphic editor.
