There was no mistaking the reek of death that rose along the Syrian desert highway four nights a week for nearly two years. It was the smell of thousands of bodies being trucked from one mass grave to another, secret location.
Drivers were forbidden to leave their cabs. Mechanics and bulldozer operators were sworn to silence and knew they’d pay with their lives for speaking out. Orders for ‘Operation Move Earth’ were verbal only. The transfer was orchestrated by one Syrian colonel, who would ultimately spend nearly a decade burying Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s dead.
The order for the transfer came from the presidential palace. The colonel, known as Assad’s ‘master of cleansing’, directed the operation from 2019 to 2021.
The first grave, in the Damascus-area town of Qutayfah, contained trenches filled with the remains of people who died in prison, under interrogation or during battle.
That mass grave’s existence had been exposed by human rights activists during the civil war and was long considered one of Syria’s largest.
But a Reuters investigation has found that the Assad government secretly excavated the Qutayfah site and trucked its thousands of bodies to a new site on a military installation more than an hour away, in the Dhumair desert.
In an exclusive report, Reuters revealed the clandestine reburial scheme and the existence of the second mass grave. Reuters can now expose, in forensic detail, how those responsible carried out the conspiracy and kept it a secret for six years.
Reuters spoke to 13 people with direct knowledge of the two-year effort to move the bodies and analysed more than 500 satellite images of both mass graves taken over more than a decade that showed not just the Qutayfah grave’s creation but also how, as its burial trenches were re-opened and excavated, the secret new site expanded until it covered a vast stretch of desert.
Reuters used aerial drone photography to further corroborate the transfer of bodies. Under the guidance of forensic geologists, the news agency also took thousands of drone and ground photos of the two sites to create high-resolution composite images.
At Dhumair, the drone flights showed the disturbed soil around the burial trenches was darker and redder than nearby undisturbed areas – the kind of change that would be expected if Qutayfah’s subsoil were added to the soil at Dhumair, according to Lorna Dawson and Benjamin Rocke, the geologists who advised Reuters.
Syria is dotted with mass graves, but the secret site that Reuters discovered is among the largest known.
With at least 34 trenches totalling 2km long, the grave near the desert town of Dhumair is among the most extensive created during the country’s civil war.
Witness accounts and the dimensions of the new site suggest that tens of thousands of people could be buried there.
To reduce the chance that intruders may tamper with the site before it can be protected, Reuters is not revealing its location.
After the initial story by Reuters, the government’s new National Commission for Missing Persons said it had asked the Interior Ministry to seal and protect the Dhumair site.
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