In the report, shared exclusively with Reuters, the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC) said it identified the grave sites by using a combination of witness testimony, satellite imagery and documents photographed at the military airport in the Damascus suburb of Mezzeh after the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad in December.
Reuters did not examine the documents and was unable to independently confirm the existence of the mass graves through its own review of satellite imagery. However, Reuters reporters saw signs of disturbed earth in images of many locations pinpointed by SJAC. Two of the sites, one on the Mezzeh airport property and another at a cemetery in Najha, show clear signs of long trenches dug during periods consistent with witness testimony from SJAC.
Death came in many forms, he told Reuters. Although detainees saw nothing except their cell walls or the interrogation room, they could hear “occasional shootings, shot by shot, every couple of days.”
“A small wound on the foot of one of the detainees, caused by a whipping he received during torture, was left unsterilized or untreated for days, which gradually turned into gangrene and his condition worsened until it reached the point of amputation of the entire foot,“ Haroun said, describing a cellmate’s plight.
The new government has issued a decree forbidding former regime officials from speaking publicly, and none were available to comment.
“Discovering the fates of those missing persons and searching for more graves is one of the greatest legacies left by the Assad regime,” he said.
The SJAC said all the survivors it interviewed were tortured. The report focuses on the first years of the uprising, from 2011 to 2017. However, some testimonies from former regime officers based at Mezzeh detailed events up to the regime’s fall.
SJAC, a U.S.-based Syrian-led human rights group funded by European governments and, until the recent funding freeze by the Trump administration, the U.S. government, said its estimate of the dead comes from two air force intelligence datasets listing a total of 1,154 detainees who died there between 2011 and 2017. The datasets were leaked in a Facebook group monitored by SJAC as the regime collapsed and cross-checked by the organization against documents and witness testimony. The estimate does not include people who were executed after being sentenced to death by a military field court set up inside a hangar.
In December, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed war crimes charges against two ranking Syrian air force intelligence officers over “the infliction of cruel and inhuman treatment on detainees under their control, including U.S. citizens, in detention facilities at the Mezzeh Military Airport.”
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