Bones stick out of the red earth south of Damascus. A vertebra, a piece of a thigh bone. In the middle of the vast field, a deep, elongated hole opens up: one of the many mass graves found after the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad.
After the regime's collapse, Syria faces an excavation work that can take years to complete, writes AP. According to Stephen Rapp, former US congressman who previously led prosecutions against war criminals in, among others, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, tens of thousands of bodies may be buried on the site.
Now we have the opportunity to confirm what we already know about the death machine that was maintained and driven by the Assad regime, says Rapp to AP on site in Najha.
Over 150,000 missing
The American works together with two organizations that document Syria's mass graves and try to identify perpetrators guilty of war crimes. The organizations have for years collected testimonies and satellite images to determine the extent of al-Assad's mass graves, which have grown in scope during the Syrian civil war since it started in 2011.
It's unbelievable that this is happening in the 2000s, says Rapp.
According to several calculations, over 150,000 Syrians are missing after the war. Most of them disappeared into the regime's vast prison system and were never heard from again. The majority are believed to have ended up in various mass graves around the country.
In an interview with Reuters, who was also on site in Najha, Rapp seems shocked by the extent.
When we talk about this kind of state-organized killing, we haven't seen anything like it since the Nazis, he says.
Took matters into their own hands
Residents near a military base where one of the mass graves was found describe to the news agency how they have seen a steady stream of refrigerated trucks dumping bodies on the site over the years.
The opposition Syrian civil defense group White Helmets has received reports of at least 13 mass graves, eight of them near Damascus.
We can't open them yet. It's an enormous task to document and take samples and catalog the bodies before we can identify the people in them, says White Helmets' deputy chief Mounir al-Mustafa to AP.
For many relatives of the missing, the wait is unbearable. On Monday, residents in Izraa in southern Syria began digging up a mass grave on their own. Remains of over 30 people were found, and another 40 are believed to be buried in the ground. Some of the bodies had bullet holes in their heads and eyes, others seemed to have been burned to death, according to a local official.
Until December 8, the Syrian state had been ruled with an iron fist by the al-Assad family since the 1970s.
Syria's political system was formed by Hafiz al-Assad, president from 1970 to 2000. Son Bashar al-Assad inherited power after his father's death in 2000 and implemented some changes. But the fundamental system remained the same: with the president as both head of state, supreme commander, and holding the highest executive power.
The uprising against Bashar al-Assad's regime that started in connection with the Arab Spring in 2011 soon took the form of a civil war with significant involvement of foreign powers, resulting in many deaths and a massive refugee wave.
Independent organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly reported on al-Assad's brutal rule and the state-controlled secret police that systematically tortured, imprisoned, and killed opponents of the regime.
