The Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a Syrian human rights organization based in the United States, claims that the remains of at least 100,000 people have been found near the Syrian capital. They were allegedly killed during the rule of the Syrian fugitive dictator Assad.
This was told by the head of the SETF, Muaz Mustafa, to Reuters.
According to him, the remains of the killed people were found in at least five places. One of them is located in Al-Qutayf, which is about 40 kilometers north of Damascus.
"One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate of the number of bodies buried in this place. It is a very, almost unfairly conservative estimate," the head of the SETF said.
He expressed confidence that there are more than five mass graves. He also believes that the remains belong not only to Syrians, but also to citizens of other countries.
According to unconfirmed estimates, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed since 2011, when the suppression of protests against Assad's rule escalated into a full-scale civil war.
Mustafa, who returned to Syria after Assad fled, said that military intelligence was responsible for transporting the bodies of the killed to the mass graves.
The bodies were delivered with the help of the Damascus municipal funeral home. The killed were placed in refrigerated trucks, brought to the burial site, unloaded and covered with soil.
"We were able to talk to people who worked in these mass graves <...> These people told how, on orders, they had to crush the bodies with bulldozers so that they would fit in the graves," Mustafa said.
The 43-year-old Assads regime fell in Syria
On the night of December 7-8, the Syrian army command announced the end of the rule of dictator Bashar Assad. He fled the country less than two weeks after the start of a rapid offensive by opposition groups.
Opposition groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched an offensive in the northwest on November 27, 2024.
It took them several days to take control of the largest cities in the north of the country - Aleppo and Hama. After that, the opposition established control over the city of Homs.
A few days later, they approached Damascus, the capital of Syria. Dictator Assad was able to leave the country with the help of russia.
The Assads regime in Syria lasted a total of 43 years. Bashar Assad ruled the country for the last 24 years.
As Ukrainian News Agency earlier reported, on December 16, Assad issued his first public statement since fleeing Syria following a successful opposition offensive.
We also wrote that the Syrian transitional government had called on russia to review its military presence in the country.
Prior to this, Bloomberg reported that Moscow was allegedly negotiating with the new Syrian government to retain its military bases.
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