Citing 13 different people familiar with the situation, as well as documents and satellite photos, the agency said the purpose of the operation, called “Move Earth”, was to cover up the crimes of the Assad government.
According to the findings, for four nights almost every week from February 2019 to April 2021, six to eight truckloads of soil and human remains were sent from Kuteifa to Dumayr.
Everyone who was directly involved in the process and spoke to Reuters (two truck drivers, three mechanics, a bulldozer driver and a former officer in Assad's elite Republican Guard) “remembered the stench” that lingered at the burial sites.
The grave in the desert consists of at least 34 trenches with a total length of 2 km, the media notes. Tens of thousands of people could be buried there.
According to journalists, the Assad government began burying those killed in Kutaif around 2012, these were the bodies of soldiers and prisoners who died in the dictator's prisons and military hospitals.
The idea to transport thousands of bodies arose in late 2018, when Assad was “close to victory in the civil war” and hoped to regain international recognition after years of sanctions and accusations of brutality, the material says.
In Qutaif, Reuters discovered 16 burial trenches, each ranging from 15 to 160 meters long. By the time Assad fell in December 2024, all 16 trenches were empty.
