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

It was only when the stench seeping out of the ground became unbearable that Ahmed* realised the full horror of what he was being made to dig each day.

In a remote location, around 25 miles (40 kilometres) northeast of the Syrian capital Damascus, regime officials had ordered the excavator to dig trenches 100 metres long, four metres wide, and three metres deep.

It was 2012 – just one year after the start of the revolution in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad – and the start of what would become a decade-long bloody civil war.

Ahmed, now 47, who worked the morning shift, was told it was “military work” – no questions could be asked. The ground was hard, and the diggers strained against 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 at the site in Qutayfah, now walled off but still untouched after the fall of the Assad regime just a week beforehand.

Four armoured vehicles, mounted with satellites and containing what appear to be Russian manuals and belongings, are stationed at each corner. A few objects, that look like bones, are scattered on the ground of the otherwise empty, scrubby patch of land.

After digging the fourth trench, Ahmed says he noticed that the holes he had dug were being inexplicably covered up by a different team who clearly worked the later shift. Then the smell started. One month in, the workers could only toil with scarves around 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, a little dazed.

Horrified, he tried to quit, but was threatened by regime soldiers who insisted he continue the work.

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

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That terror only worsened when his own brother, a soldier conscripted into the military, was arrested in 2013 on unknown charges in the city of Al-Tall which sits in the countryside of Damascus province. A brother who, more than a decade later, is still missing.

“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 groups, foreign governments and Syrian citizens have long accused Assad and his father Hafez, who ruled for five decades between them, of widespread enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings – including mass executions – within the country’s notorious prison system. Assad has repeatedly denied that his government committed human rights violations, painting his detractors as extremists.

But since Assad’s shock overthrow by rebels, and hasty flight out of the country last week, people have been able for the first time access sites like this one – revealing the scale of the killings. The International Commission on Missing Persons, in The Hague, said it had received data indicating there may be as many as 66, as yet unverified, mass grave sites in Syria.

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Qutayfah was first identified by the team at the US-based advocacy group Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), after gravediggers who had managed to escape and seek asylum in Western countries came forward with their chilling stories. The SETF matched their testimonies to satellite imagery showing excavation work over the course of several years.

Mouaz Moustafa, the founder of SETF, whose own uncle was disappeared by the regime, joins The Independent at the site. He says this was just one of at least six possible mass graves they had identified, holding potentially hundreds of thousands of people who had been disappeared by the regime.

From their investigations, the SETF believe that as many as 800 bodies arrived per week from 2013 to 2017 to Qutayfah. They believe it was chosen as a location because it was a closed military zone, and because an earlier mass grave in Najha, around 40 kilometres south, had “filled up”. The SETF believes Qutayfah ceased to be operational when it too filled up in 2017 and, at some point, walls were built around it to shield it from the prying eyes of the outside 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.

Stephen J Rapp – a top international war crimes prosecutor and former US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, who is working with the SETF to document the mass graves and identify officials implicated in war crimes – also visits the site. He tells The Independent that the mass grave was part of the “machinery of death and state terror” that the Assad regime used against its own people for decades. He has also said that, given the scale of the mass graves, it was more than likely that tens of thousands of people were tortured to death – something “we really haven’t seen since the Nazis”.

What makes Syria unique in the 21st century is the intense documentation of the sites by the Assad government itself.

“It’s a regime that was document mad,” Mr Rapp continues, adding that he identified nearly 100 centres, from military intelligence branches to prisons, containing substantial amounts of evidence of the crimes. A bureaucracy so detailed and damning it was almost “stupid”.

He says that such vital evidence urgently needs to be secured across the country, with desperate family members looking for missing relatives having combed mass grave sites, prisons, morgues and hospitals, looking for any evidence of their missing relatives.

“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.”

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At Qutayfah – which has so far remained untouched because it is so remote – residents who live locally shed more light on the horror here.

Alaa, 33, tells The Independent the local community began noticing the site in 2013 but dared not ask about it. All they knew was that trucks came in the middle of the night to deliver something.

That changed in 2016, as he was riding his motorcycle past, and he saw a dog dragging out what looked 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 in the notorious cells of the military investigations branches 293 and 227 – which have underground dungeon cells that The Independent has visited.

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

Facing the possibility of jail and torture himself on the same charges, Ahmed the gravedigger says he was too terrified to quit his job. He also panicked, fearing his own brother was among the dead, and started secretly sharing his brother’s photos with the other workers “in case they spotted him”.

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“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 workers decided to deliberately work slowly. The plan worked: they were eventually 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 needs the international community to come to the country to help find the tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of missing people, the vast majority of whom are now believed to be dead 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 site, 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 changed