Mass graves continue to surface in liberated Syria

Last week, an international war crimes prosecutor said that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria had exposed a state-run "machinery of death" under the Assad regime.

The International Commission on Missing Persons in the Hague separately said it had received data indicating there may be as many as 66, as yet unverified, mass grave sites in Syria.

Commission head Kathryne Bomberger told Reuters its portal for reporting the missing was now "exploding" with new contacts from families.

The doors of Syria's secret prisons flung open after armed anti-regime groups ousted the Assad regime this month, more than 13 years after his brutal repression of anti-regime protests triggered a war that would kill more than 500,000 people.

Many families rushed to former prisons, detention centres and mass graves to find any trace of disappeared relatives.

Countless souls under the ground

While describing the scenes in Tadamon, Southern Damascus the PBS reported: "After almost 14 years of war, it's a desolate wasteland with more bodies buried underground than people still living above it. Human remains are scattered all around."

The Syrian Emergency Task Force claimed that a mass grave near Damascus holds the remains of at least 100,000 people in Al Qutayfah.

The BBC reported that in Husseiniyeh, on the road that leads to the Damascus airport, satellite images show differences in the landscapes of areas where mass graves have been discovered.

A key Syrian rescue group and an activist told AFP a burial site outside Damascus was likely a mass grave for detainees.

The site, near the Adra industrial area northeast of the capital, is less than 20 kilometres from the infamous Sednaya prison.

"We think this is a mass grave, we found an open grave with seven bags filled with bones," the White Helmets rescue group said.

More than 12 mass graves were discovered in Daraa Governorate in southern Syria containing the remains of bodies believed to be civilians killed by the regime of ousted leader Bashar Assad.

Syrian residents living near a cemetery in Najha, near Damascus described seeing a steady stream of refrigeration trucks delivering bodies which were dumped into long trenches dug with bulldozers.

Bags with bones

Satellite imagery analysed by Reuters showed large-scale digging began in Al Qutayfah between 2012 and 2014 and continued up until 2022.

Syrian Civil Defence teams have received numerous calls from people claiming to have seen cars dumping bags by the roadside at night. The bags were later found to contain bones.

"Since the fall of the regime, we've received over 100 calls about mass graves. People believe every military site has one," said civil defence officials.

Details of Syria's mass graves first emerged during German court hearings and US congressional testimony in 2021 and 2023.

More than 150,000 people are considered missing, according to international and Syrian organisations, including the United Nations.