It was only when the stench seeping out of the ground became unbearable that Ahmed* realised the full horror of what he was being made to dig each day.
In a remote location, around 25 miles (40 kilometres) northeast of the Syrian capital Damascus, regime officials had ordered the excavator to dig trenches 100 metres long, four metres wide, and three metres deep.
It was 2012 – just one year after the start of the revolution in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad – and the start of what would become a decade-long bloody civil war.
Ahmed, now 47, who worked the morning shift, was told it was “military work” – no questions could be asked. The ground was hard, and the diggers strained against the rocky earth.
“I only discovered what was happening here after I had dug about four trenches. Then I realised it was a mass grave,” he tells The Independent at the site in Qutayfah, now walled off but still untouched after the fall of the Assad regime just a week beforehand.
Four armoured vehicles, mounted with satellites and containing what appears to be Russian manuals and belongings, are stationed at each corner. A few objects, that look like bones, are scattered on the ground of the otherwise empty, scrubby patch of land.
After digging the fourth trench, Ahmed says he noticed that the holes he had dug were being inexplicably covered up by a different team who clearly worked the later shift. Then the smell started. One month in, the workers could only work with scarves around their noses and mouths.
“The smell coming from the ground so bad we realised it must be from bodies. Every day I dug I realised that a different bulldozer would come later to cover it,” he says, a little dazed.
Horrified, he tried to quit but was threatened by regime soldiers who insisted he continue the work.
“I feared I would end up in the trench like the other bodies,” he continues.
That terror only worsened when his own brother, a soldier conscripted into the military, was arrested in 2013 on unknown charges in the city of At-Tall that sits in the countryside of Damascus province. A brother who, more than a decade later, is still missing.
“I keep thinking what if my brother was among the bodies they were burying? I was affected so badly I couldn’t eat,” Ahmed says.
Rights groups, foreign governments and Syria citizens have long accused Assad and his father Hafez, who rule for five decades between them, of widespread enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings – including mass executions – within the country’s notorious prison system. Assad has repeatedly denied that his government committed human rights violations, painting his detractors as extremists.
But since Assad’s shock overthrow by rebels, and hasty flight out of the country last week, people have been able for the first time access sites like this one – revealing the scale of the killings. The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague said it had received data indicating there may be as many as 66, as yet unverified, mass grave sites in Syria.
