"Shortly after the fall of Bashar Assad in Syria in December 2024, reports emerged of mass graves being uncovered in liberated areas."

"Grim as such discoveries are, they should come as little surprise. The scale of the regime’s torture and killings in its detention facilities became evident years earlier, when in January 2014 a forensic photographer defected and left the country with a cache of 55,000 photos of people who had been tortured and died in detention."

"As an expert in forensic anthropology and mass casualties in conflict, I was asked to evaluate what became known as the “Caesar photographs.” What was clear to me then, and is even more so now, is that those photos represented a systematic approach to torturing, killing and disappearing massive numbers of people by the Assad regime."

"With Assad now gone, the newly formed government of the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has vowed to seek justice for the crimes Syrians suffered under Assad. Doing so will be difficult, even with the civil war in Syria being one of the better monitored conflicts in recent history. Yet it is a task that is imperative for the sake of pursuing justice in a shattered country and reducing the likelihood of violence returning to Syria."

Stefan Schmitt,  Project Lead for International Technical Forensic Services Global Forensic Justice Center, Florida International University 

Members of the volunteer Syrian Civil Defense conduct work at a mass grave in the Baghdad Bridge area outside Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images

 

"According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the uncovered graves were distributed as follows:

*November 6: Remains believed to belong to more than 5 people were found inside a farm near the village of Al-Ghizlaniyah on the road to Damascus International Airport.

*November 11: Remains of 3 people were found in a mass grave in the village of Tal Melah, northwest of Hama, during rubble removal. The victims’ identities remain unknown.

*November 17: Remains of 6 people were discovered inside the Air Defense Battalion "Batchoura" in the town of Otaya in Rif Damascus, during sewage rehabilitation work.

*November 30: A mass grave containing the remains of 10 unidentified individuals was found on the Tarablous road opposite the village of Al-Mazraa west of Homs, during construction work."

ANHA, Hawar News Agency  

The month of November witnessed a series of shocking discoveries across several Syrian regions, where a number of mass graves containing the remains of 24 individuals were uncovered during debris removal and infrastructure cleaning operations. ANHA

 

 Following the overthrow of Syria's dictatorial president Bashar al-Assad in December, families of missing Syrians would arrive a the Najha cemetery hoping to find remains of their missing loved ones. They were intent on digging up the mass grave there marked by mounds of overturned dirt with their shovels. Once the realization set in that what they would find would represent bones in body bags with no way left to them to determine to whom those bones belonged, they gave up their desperate searches.

 

Tens of thousands of Syrians whom the Assad regime considered opponents had been detained and disappeared during the 14-year civil war between the Alawite Shiite regime of Bashar al-Assad and the majority Sunni Syrians. Many of those in Assad's prisons were killed under torture or executed, pointed out human rights groups. This was a regime that used chemical agents in their bombs to asphyxiate people, barrel bombs to tear them limb to limb, helicopter gunships targeting people waiting in bread lines.

 

Uncountable numbers of regime victims were hurriedly buried at the Najha cemetery outside the capital Damascus. Syrian families are haunted by the fate of their missing relatives. No fewer than 60 mass graves have so far been identified in Syria, with new ones discovered on a regular basis. The exacting forensic work to determine the identity of each of the bodies being recovered has become a problem for Syria's new government which has pledged accountability and justice for the Assad regime's war crimes.

 

For one man, 36-year-old Khaled al-Mishtowli, the loss of his family members are many in number; three brothers, his father, three cousins and two aunts. The agonizing work of identifying the bodies would have been advanced, he says wistfully, if those burying them "had at least buried the people's ID cards with their bodies".  The process of of exhuming and identifying the bodies will be a long, arduous, undertaking, which he and others call on the government and international groups to undertake. 

 

An uncovered mass grave believed to contain the remains of civilians killed by the ousted Assad regime in Daraa, Syria. Bekir Kasim/Anadolu via Getty Images

 

According to the Syrian minister of emergency and disaster management, about 140,000 Syrians are missing. The figure of 400,000 deaths by the Assad regime has long been recognized. In 2013, Mr. al-Mishtowli explains, his relatives began disappearing from their town of Sayida Zeinab on Damascus' outskirts as they were engaged in ordinary pursuits, or on their way back home from their workplaces. His family members, all of whom were Sunni Muslim, were apprehended by pro-regime Shiite militias, he believes.

 

"We are asking for anyone, international organizations, the United Nations, anyone who can exhume the bodies and identify them", he pleaded. In response, a spokeswoman for a new Syrian commission on missing people responded: "This is a very long process, one that began now but will unfortunately extend over many years". Her commission will be dependent on international organizations to assist in building the required technical and forensic capabilities such as DNA laboratories. 

 

"The international community has to help the Syrian authorities to build infrastructure first, and to train their people to learn how to eventually do this on their own", explained Karla Quintana of the U.N. Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, -- whereas in the past the United Nations and other international bodies took responsibility for exhuming mass graves.  

"We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis."

"From the secret police who disappeared people from their streets and homes, to the jailers and interrogators who starved and tortured them to death, to the truck drivers and bulldozer drivers who hid their bodies, thousands of people were working in this system of killing."

"We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death."

"I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers given what we’ve seen in these mass graves."

Stephen Rapp, former U.S. war crimes ambassador at large

People search for human remains at a trench believed to be used as a mass grave on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus.   Aris Messinis / AFP via Getty Images

 

  

Mexico's Dirty War

"The struggle to uncover the whole truth of Mexico’s Dirty War has been long and arduous. For years, the Mexican government maintained a policy of denial and obfuscation regarding its actions during this period."

"It wasn’t until the early 2000s that significant efforts were made to investigate these crimes, leading to the establishment of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Social and Political Movements of the Past (Femospp)."

"However, despite these efforts, justice has been slow, and many cases remain unresolved."

The Latin American Post

Posters about missing people are placed on a wall for the presentation of a report about the country’s 1965-90 “dirty war” by Mexico's governmental Truth Commission in Mexico City, Aug. 16, 2024.

Argentina's infamous 1976-1983 military dictatorship and its well-earned reputation of 'disappearing' its critics and political opponents is an internationally recognized representation of the corrupting power of such powerful groups in their victimization of populations whose human rights have been regularly violated. The well-publicized horrors undergone by Argentinians never knowing where their family members suddenly disappeared to, and the sinister rumours of macabre death missions when secret prisoners were disposed of by dumping their bodies into the sea represented the stuff of nightmares.

Now, though similar, but limited-scale, such operations that took place in Mexico have long been rumoured and Mexicans called upon their government, one administration after another, to investigate and finally produce a true picture of what had occurred, to put to rest the agony of families whose members had disappeared without trace. Finally a governmental Truth Commission has done just that, revealing the scope of the decades-long secret operation and the scope of its impact.

 

Mexico's 1965-1990 "dirty war" mystery is finally unravelling with emerging evidence of Mexican authorities having disposed of dissident bodies. The revelations by the country's governmental Truth Commission's report relied on witnesses and documents that were leaked over the years which detailed victims' chilling last moments in executions reflecting the Mexican government's efforts to eliminate leftist and guerrilla movements challenging the legitimacy of the military government.

 

A visitor looks at an exhibit during the inauguration of a memorial to victims of Mexico's "dirty war" at the former Federal Security headquarters where protesters were taken in 1971 following a violent crackdown in Mexico City, June 10, 2019.

 
Apprehended individuals, as yet individually unidentified, one by one were directed to stand beside a bench at a military airfield located near Acapulco, believing their photographs were to be taken. Instead, each was shot in the back of the head, and their bodies disposed of by being dumped out in the Pacific Ocean by planes dispatched to that very specific government mission. Testimony given by a man who served in a military police unit of the time related that the gun used in the killings most often, was given a nickname: "the sword of justice".

It is speculated that up to 1,500 victims met their end in this way, though there is no way to be certain of numbers, much less the identification of them as missing individuals. Another witness who worked as a military aviation mechanic, described having taken part in fifteen of the death flights. He spoke of female victims that were offered release or that of their husbands dependent on their agreeing to have sex with soldiers. None of them, to his recollection, had been released.

Log books for about 30 flights by one plane from the base between 1974 and 1979 were located by the truth commission. Another 25 flights were claimed through another witness statement dating two decades in the past, from a man claiming to have been an armed forces deserter. A list of 183 names of likely victims of "death flights" had been held in the possession of a deceased rights activist. Matches were found for people who had disappeared during the counter-insurgency campaign led by the government. 

Small rural guerrilla movements in Guerrero state where Acapulco is located appear to have been the target. Swept up in the disappearances and killings, a broad range of people were included; fishermen in the area recalled seeing bodies wash up on shore. This obvious evidence of what many had suspected led the military to begin placing the bodies in sacks weighted with rocks, before disposing of them in the ocean. 

 

These are but a small part of details within the 4,000-page report whose contents include executions, torture, disappearances and forced displacement against farmers, students, union activists and members of Indigenous groups, by the government.

The truth commission cited evidence that there were  roughly 4,500 identified victims of severe abuse during the "dirty war" in Mexico; another 1,450 were documented as killed, while 517 were categorized as disappeared with no trace. Excavations have been carried out by the government, in and around military bases in recent years in an effort to relocate remains of the buried in clandestine grave sites, realizing scant success. 

 

600 possible perpetrators of the abuses  were asked by the commission to be investigated for involvement.