Secretary of the political committee in the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC), Abdelbaset Abdullatif, raised alarm over the Assad regime’s efforts to obscure evidence of crimes committed against detainees over the past 13 years. Abdullatif highlighted a clear strategy by the regime to conceal traces of crimes against detainees and forcibly disappeared individuals, particularly following the identification of mass grave locations by local and international human rights bodies.
On Tuesday, the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Seydnaya Prison released recently captured satellite images exposing bulldozing and leveling activities at the site of a mass grave near the town of Al-Qutayfah in Rural Damascus province. The bulldozed mass grave is situated near the command center of the Third Division of Assad regime forces, approximately 45 kilometers north of Damascus.
The images, dated from the beginning of 2023, reveal bulldozing, land leveling, and soil turning operations that occurred at the site, intensifying at the end of the summer of 2022 and peaking at the close of the same year before ceasing in January 2023.
According to the Association, in 2019, the Assad regime erected a two-meter-tall concrete wall around the mass grave, believed to contain the remains of several thousand detainees who were either executed or died under torture in detention centers.
(Source: SOC’s Media Department)
