Mass Graves Highlight Challenges of a Post-Assad Syria

What Happened?

A mass grave has been unearthed near Al-Qutayfa, a small town which lies approximately thirty kilometers north of Damascus, Syria.

As The Economist reported:

‘Until a week ago, this was one of the most sensitive areas in Syria—a garrison town where stopping your car in the wrong place could mean being arrested. Locals kept silent, paralyzed by fear. “Whatever they sent me, I was supposed to bury,” says Haj Ali Saleh, a former mayor of the town who still lives there.’

There’s no way to know yet how many people are buried in the mass grave, but early estimates put the figure at over 100,000.

Why it Matters

Former dictator Bashar Al-Assad ran a police state which routinely arrested Syrian citizens without warrants, trials, or informing relatives of their whereabouts.

What exactly became of those arrested by the Assad regime has long been the subject of speculation. The mass grave found at Al-Qutayfa has begun to reveal the gruesome fate of the those who fell under the control of Assad’s security apparatus.

According to the Washington Post:

‘The International Commission on Missing Persons estimates there could be as many as 66 such sites across Syria, where the Assad regime sought to hide from the world the mass killing of its opponents during a nearly 14-year-long civil war. When the graves are excavated, they could begin to shed light on the fate of the more than 150,000 people who disappeared during the conflict.’

How exactly Assad’s machinery of state terror operated is still being determined, but the Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations recently told Reuters ‘the intelligence branch of the Syrian air force was in charge of bodies going from military hospitals, where bodies were collected after they'd been tortured to death, to different intelligence branches, and then they would be sent to a mass grave location.’

Where those arrested by Assad’s regime were tortured or by whom remains unknown. 

How it Affects You

The fall of Assad’s regime has left a power vacuum in Syria. Former regime officials who were part of the country’s security apparatus have almost certainly fled or gone into hiding.

Locating those officials and bringing them to justice will likely be a difficult and long-term endeavor since they have had time already to flee to destinations of their choice.

Without security over the grave sites themselves to preserve evidence, prosecuting former regime officials could become even more challenging, since evidence could be lost or destroyed by those seeking to avoid being held accountable.

The hunt for former Assad regime officials is likely to take years and span multiple continents, and the prospect that most of them will avoid ever being punished is real.