DHUMAIR: 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 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.
