WORLD NEWS FOR MONTENEGRO DIASPORA
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AUTHOR:M.J. GDNUS
At least 100,000 bodies of victims of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime are in a mass grave outside Damascus, said Muaz Mustafa, director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF).
He told Reuters that one of five mass graves is located in Al-Qutayfa, 40 kilometers north of Damascus.
- One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate of the number of bodies buried there - Mustafa said.
He believes, as he notes, that there are more than five mass graves, and that the victims included American and British citizens, as well as other foreigners.
Mustafa said the Syrian Air Force's intelligence branch was "in charge of moving bodies from military hospitals, where the bodies were collected after they were tortured to death, and then sent to the mass grave site."
He noted that the bodies were also transported to the graves by the Damascus municipal funeral office, whose staff helped unload the victims from refrigerated trucks onto tractor trailers.
SETF personnel, he said, spoke to bulldozer drivers who, they said, were forced to dig the graves and "many times, on orders, they crushed the bodies to fit them in and then covered them with earth," according to Reuters.
Mustafa also expressed concern that the graves were not secured, stressing the importance of preserving them to preserve evidence for investigations.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since the country's civil war erupted in 2011, while Assad has repeatedly denied that his government has violated human rights.
