One of Assad’s mass graves is found, with as many as 100,000 bodies

AMOUND OF dirt blocks the road to a walled compound on the outskirts of al-Qutayfa, a town around 30km north of , the Syrian capital. It is silent, save for the occasional bark of two stray dogs and the faint buzz of power lines running over the compound. Breeze-block walls enclose an area roughly the size of two football fields. For more than a decade, army turned this wasteland into a —believed by Syria’s new rulers to be one of his largest.For years, earthmovers would arrive late at night, followed by refrigerated trucks packed with bodies, locals said. Initially the graves were not deep enough; stray dogs would burrow into the dirt and pull up corpses. So Mr Assad’s soldiers were ordered to dig deeper.Until a week ago, this was one of the most sensitive areas in Syria—a garrison town where stopping your car in the wrong place could mean being arrested. Locals kept silent, paralysed by fear. “Whatever they sent me, I was supposed to bury,” says Haj Ali Saleh, a former mayor of the town who still lives there. He resigned in 2012 and was then briefly detained by the authorities after refusing to follow orders to construct a mass grave.But the regime found others who were more willing. It was the early years of Syria’s civil war, and Mr Assad’s grip was tightening. Prisons were overflowing and the regime turned to increasingly brutal methods to suppress dissent. Torture and execution became commonplace.At the gate of the compound stands a man who is desperately searching for his uncle, Mostafa al-Aqti, who has been missing since 2015. As he walks across the dusty ground, he bursts into tears. It is almost impossible to know how many people are buried in the grave, or who they are. Another former mayor of the town estimates the number to be over 100,000. If that figure is even close to accurate, this could be the largest mass grave in the world.In recent years human-rights organisations have used satellite imagery to determine that there was a mass grave on the outskirts of al-Qutayfa. They could not say anything definitive about the number of bodies it contained. In the years that followed, the regime attempted to cover its tracks. Residents describe trucks that would arrive to exhume bodies, moving perhaps thousands elsewhere. A foul stench would engulf the town as the trucks unearthed the graves. “Everyone in the town knew what they were doing,” says a farmer who lived nearby.Even before the civil war, al-Qutayfa was heavily militarised and home to several army units. Multiple local officials state that the Syrian army’s Third Division, one of the most loyal to the regime, oversaw the grave site. What started with a few political prisoners became an industrialised pit for disposing of the regime’s opponents. Local officials in al-Qutayfa name several senior military officers from the former regime who they believe were involved in the administration of the grave site. One is an Alawite general from the city of Tartus—an area that produced many of Mr Assad’s most loyal cadres.called a telephone number listed for this general in an online sanctions database. An unknown man answered and denied that he was the man named. He gave himself two different names in the course of the conversation (neither the one listed in the database). We were unable to confirm his identity. He said he was in Jableh, near Latakia. Many of the regime’s most senior officials fled to Moscow with Mr Assad, but others are still thought to be in Syria, hiding out in Alawite villages throughout the coastal areas, including Latakia.Everyone in al-Qutayfa seemed to have known that something horrifying was going on. But to say anything was to risk ending up in the grave. So far there has been no talk from those now in charge of Syria of exhumation and forensic testing to confirm the scale of the atrocity. The residents of al-Qutayfa are outraged. They are desperate for the world to know what happened in their town.After more than a decade of war, millions of Syrians have missing relatives. A handful of survivors have limped out of the regime’s prisons in recent weeks, but for many, the only hope for answers lies in the mass graves being discovered across the country. Ali Schwaat is a farmer in al-Qutayfa who worked just a few hundred meters from the grave site for over a decade. “The mother of a dead person can sleep,” he says, “but the mother of a missing son never will.”