An international war crimes prosecutor described a state-operated “machinery of death” under former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, citing evidence from mass grave sites that indicates over 100,000 people were tortured and killed since 2013.
Stephen Rapp, ex-US ambassador for war crimes, addressed the journalists following the visit to two mass graves located in Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus. “We definitely have more than 100,000 people disappeared, tortured to death and buried in this machine, and this system of killing is unprecedented, resembling something which was not experienced during the Nazi regime,” said Stephen Rapp to Reuters.
Rapp, who previously led war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and Sierra Leone, emphasized that thousands of individuals were involved in the systematic killings. He detailed how secret police abducted citizens, interrogators tortured them to death, and truck and bulldozer operators worked to conceal their remains in mass graves.
The Syrian Emergency Task Force, an advocacy group based in the US, estimates that 100,000 bodies alone are buried in Qutayfah. The International Commission on Missing Persons, based in The Hague, has identified 66 unverified mass grave sites across Syria, with more than 157,000 people reported missing.
The atrocities are part of a broader conflict that began in 2011 when Assad’s violent suppression of protests escalated into a full-scale war. Both Assad and his late father, Hafez al-Assad, have been accused by human rights groups and international governments of mass executions, extrajudicial killings, and the use of chemical weapons against civilians.
Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Moscow, denies these accusations and dismisses them as the propaganda of extremists. Yet Rapp and his investigators are working with Syria’s civil society groups to gather evidence for possible trials later.
“This is a place of horrors, a system of state terror,” Rapp said. “It is imperative to hold those responsible accountable.
