The US-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) believes that there are several mass graves like the one found in the city of Qutayfah, about 30 miles from Damascus. It could contain the bodies of several hundred thousand Syrians, murdered by the Bashar Assad regime.
The site in Qutayfah "is marked by trenches 6-7 meters (19-23 feet) deep, 3-4 meters wide, and 50-150 meters long," according to a CNN report.
Gravediggers at the site told a SETF representative that “four tractor-trailer trucks, each carrying over 150 bodies in each, came twice a week from 2012 until 2018.” That adds up to hundreds of thousands of bodies.
“The bulldozer excavator driver described how intelligence officers forced workers to use the bulldozer to flatten and compress the bodies to make them fit and easier to bury before digging the next line/trench,” Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of SETF, told CNN.
Assad's crimes are the worst since the crimes of the Nazis. And yet, the mob of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas leftists who crammed the streets of major cities around the world and college campuses across the United States have yet to utter a peep.
British author and journalist Douglas Murray pointed out this double standard earlier this year.
“Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been killed by Bashar al-Assad,” Murray said in an interview with John Anderson. “There’s no one on the streets of Sydney or Melbourne. There’s no one on the streets of London. We have seen hundreds of thousands of people killed in the last decade in Yemen, Muslims being killed. There’s no one on the streets of Melbourne. Nobody is standing outside the Sydney Opera House calling, ‘Gas the Houthis, gas the Shia.’”
The protests against Israel's actions in Gaza are not about the killing of Muslim Palestinians. They are about Israel daring to protect itself from those who wish to wipe it off the face of the earth. If only those damn Jews wouldn't fight back, we'd have peace.
The peace of the grave, to be sure.
It's not innocent deaths that the protesters are decrying. If that were the case, they'd be screaming out their rage at Assad, the Houthis, and the other mass murderers who kill their political opponents or troublesome minorities.
The anti-Israel left is equally silent about other atrocities.
The atrocities carried out by the Assad regime — more of which are being uncovered each day — have been met with the same silence as a number of other conflicts in recent years, among them: the roughly 30,000 people who have been killed in Myanmar as a result of that country’s ongoing civil war; the approximately 28,000 deaths in West and Central Africa during a series of terrorist insurgencies; and even the Mexican cartel wars, in which roughly 20,000 people have died in the last two years. In Sudan, fatality estimates vary widely but have been put as high as 150,000.
Yet none of these acts of war have been met with the same global reaction as Israel’s war against Hamas, which came in response to the deadliest attack on Israel in its history.
And what about the International Criminal Court (ICC)? They've indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" for how they've prosecuted the Gaza War. They're not even investigating Bashar Assad, now happily sitting in luxurious exile in Russia.
U.S. war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp told Reuters that Assad had set up a state-run “machinery of death” after he visited the Qutayfah mass grave site and another in Najha, near Damascus.
“I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers, given what we’ve seen in these mass graves," said Rapp.
Related: CNN Helped Release a Syrian 'Prisoner' Who Turned Out to Be a Notorious Torturer
During the Syrian civil war, as Assad unleashed "barrel bombs" on civilians and Russian fighter planes strafed civilians, the Syrian civil defense "White Helmets" were angels of mercy, first on the scene and always assisting in recovery and rescue efforts.
Now, they're engaged in the grim task of unburying Assad's victims.
Images have emerged showing Syrian Civil Defense crews, known as the White Helmets, recovering the remains of those buried in some of the country's mass graves, with some photos showing piles of bones and skulls in body bags. Past satellite imagery has also indicated large burial sites.
Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners disappeared into Assad's network of prisons, where many faced torture and death, in the years since the civil war in Syria began in 2011 with his brutal crackdown on protests against him. Both he and his father, Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000, have been accused of widespread killings and abuses.
“We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” Rapp said.
“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,” he said.
“We are talking about a system of state terror, which became a machinery of death," Rapp said.
Russia is not a party to the ICC, so Assad is probably safe from prosecution for the rest of his life as long as he stays in Russia.
