Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
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I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. In late December, NPR correspondent Ruth Sherlock drove from the Syrian capital Damascus into the open, flat scrubland outside the city. It's a desolate place where stray dogs roam and where, eventually, a dirt track led to an area closed off by high cement walls. There's these metal gates between the walls, but it's barricaded by a mound of earth.

But the gate has opened a crack, so we're going to climb over the mound to get inside. Inside, it seemed at first there was very little, just dirt and some Russian military trucks. But that's because what is here lies hidden below ground. This is a mass gravesite, one of dozens that Syrians are discovering across the country, a remnant of Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime.

There's a bone here. The weather has worn a lot of it away. It's white and partially eroded. I just want to take a moment and really think about what we're doing here because it's easy to not comprehend the truth of what this place could be.

But when you hear the stories, you hear every day, truck after truck after truck piled high with corpses of people who'd been executed or died in detention under the Syrian regime were brought here. And it's chilling to think that many of those people might be under this ground.

Today, Ruth Sherlock joins us on the podcast. She's been covering the outpouring of grief and anger from Syrians coming to terms with the extent of the mass killings and the questions they now face over retribution, reconciliation and the future of their country. A warning, this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence. We'll be right back.

We're back with the Sunday Story. I'm here with NPR correspondent Ruth Sherlock. Ruth, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much, Aisha. First, let me thank you for being here and, you know, for taking on what is like a clearly traumatic assignment. A lot of what is coming out of Syria has just been hard to even comprehend. Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, Syrians have had so much to contend with. But in a way, I feel it's a privilege to be able to document this moment.

So since the start of the Syrian revolution 13 years ago, there have been reports about what's been going on in the country. Systematic disappearances, brutal repression of any dissent. The Assad family ruled for over 50 years and then the regime just collapsed. I mean, like a house of

cards in a matter of days, right? Just really everything changed. Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia. You went into Syria after that happened. What was it like? I mean, it was just surreal. Just even being able to cross the border from Lebanon would have been, you know, almost impossible for a Western journalist. Syria had become such a closed country. But the

And just a couple of days after the fall of the regime, we did just that. We drove across and, you know, we were stamped out of the Lebanese side and on the Syrian side, we just passed an empty immigration office. Nobody even looked at my passport. By the customs, there was a group of rebel fighters, but they kind of just grinned at us and waved at us as if they even couldn't believe what was happening.

And then it's a short drive to Damascus, just over 40 minutes. And on the road, we passed these burnt out tanks and military uniforms that had been discarded by soldiers as they were fleeing.

And the air in the capital, it was thick and heavy and toxic, partly from the fires that people had set alight in kind of government buildings. And then also from the dust, from the debris caused by Israeli airstrikes. They were bombing, hitting military installations that used to belong to the regime because there is so much uncertainty about who the new leadership and what comes next.

Under Assad, even a whispered word of dissent could have someone disappeared into the intelligence services' vast network of detention centers and prisons, right? Right.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, these massive, terrible human rights abuses have been widely documented, but it is really something else to be able to go to these places, to these dozens of intelligence branches and see where torture happened. And I think it's only now that we're really getting a clearer picture of how many people were killed in this system. Sure.

Shortly after I visited the mass grave near Damascus, Stephen Rapp, a former US ambassador at large for war crimes, he went to the same location and he says the Syrian regime had established a, quote, machinery of death and that nothing like this has been seen, quote, since the Nazis.

So one of the first things the rebels did when they took power was liberate the infamous Sednaya prison, which I understand had become a symbol of the brutality and terror that the Assad family instilled in Syrians. One of the first places we headed to straight after we crossed the border was Sednaya prison. Tens of thousands of Syrians were jailed there. People suspected of opposing the regime were

And under Assad, you wouldn't speak about this place in public. Even if you had, for example, a relative inside, you'd just avoid any association with it. But now people were crowding into the prison, this enormous complex surrounded by high walls and barbed wire fences on a hill north of Damascus. And they were going because they were going to look for people who'd been jailed there. You went there with them and you brought us this report.

Hundreds of people walk up the snaking dirt paths that lead up the hill to Sadnaya prison. Many are immaculately dressed, as if they hope that today they might finally meet their loved one that disappeared here. Nader Sabsabi says his brother was detained in 2012. He searches a handwritten ledger he's found with names of the detainees for clues. The reason is that he was detained.

My brother went out of the house to buy bread. He was stopped at a checkpoint, and that's all we know. Sabsabi has made the hours-long journey from his home city of Deraa to here every day since the regime fell to search. Most prisoners were released by opposition rebels in the hours after the regime collapsed, but people believe there could be more cells, hidden underground where others might be alive.

The commotion, the shooting in the air and people running towards the prisoners because we understand they've managed to open a new door. OK, we're inside the courtyard of the prison. They've just closed the doors behind us because they want to stop the crowds. They believe they've found something and they need silence. They need calm to try to hear the voices of the prisoners. A rebel shouts for quiet, but it's too chaotic with hundreds of people combing the jail.

Some hack at the concrete floor with metal pipes, a desperate hope that someone could be underneath. Anything seems possible in this place that Syrians have known for so long as a centre of torture, where prisoners were hung by ropes, beaten, starved. Israqoukeh says Sednaya is worse than anyone can imagine, a slaughterhouse, she says.

Her brother was in here for years. She heard he'd been killed, but never received a death certificate. So all this time, she's kept a shred of hope. The end of the Assad regime has brought us unbelievable happiness, but it's also reopened old wounds.

Outside this section of the prison, we meet Aissa Hosseini. He's searching for his three cousins and asks us what we've seen inside. The Assad regime didn't usually tell families where the detained were held or even if they were still alive. Hosseini's searched every prison in the capital, every institution. It's too much.

Some 100,000 Syrians disappeared into jails like these, say rights groups.

It's getting dark and rescuers end their search in Sednaya. There are no more secret cells, no more hope for families like Husseini. As we leave, we meet Samer Haider. He's come with his four young children. It's so they remember the bloody legacy of the Assad regime, he says. So that we never forget. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Sednaya Prison.

I mean, this must have been beyond devastating for the families who would have held on hope that they would see their father, their daughter, their son. And, you know, they had all this excitement that the regime failed and they don't find that loved one and they still don't know what happened. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's just this kind of

outpouring of grief happening right now. And Aisha, the United Nations is saying that some 150,000 people could still be missing. And in Sednaya prison, when the rebels threw open the cell doors, you know, only about 2,000 people apparently came out. But there are tens of thousands of people who are believed to have been thrown into that prison during the course of the civil war. So, I mean, what happened to those prisoners?

This really was the big question for us. NPR's regional producer Jawad Rizalla and I, we started searching for people who might be able to help us find information, maybe witnesses to what happened inside Sidnaya. Jawad reached out to Syrian contacts and one person asked another and in the way that happens, we were eventually put in touch with a former inmate and then another and then another.

And two of the men we spoke to had gotten out of the prison just days before, just when those doors were flung open by the rebels.

They were really just shadows of their former selves, you know, they were like sickly thin, they had these like ribs protruding and these gaunt faces, their cheekbones were showing. And one of the men, when we got to his house, his family had laid out this huge platter of sticky Syrian sweets to celebrate his return, but he couldn't touch them because he told us, you know, his stomach, it can't cope with anything that rich after years of what was basically starvation.

We interviewed the former prisoners all separately, and all three of the men's testimony of what went on in Sednaya was remarkably similar. One of those men who wanted to be known only by his first name, Adham, he actually decided to do this really difficult thing. He decided to go back to the prison he'd just come out of because he believed in showing it to us.

And so he took us through this labyrinth of concrete corridors of Sednaya to his cell, where he lived in this crowded place with 17 others for nearly six years. We saw the tiny plastic cup that guards used to measure a meal size for a prisoner. And Aisha, it was like less than you'd feed a baby. Hmm.

And then something happened that just stopped me in my tracks. I asked him about the nickname, said Naya Had. It's often referred to as the slaughterhouse. But then he corrected me. This wasn't just a nickname. He said it's an actual place and it's upstairs. Here's that moment. And Piyaz Jawad Rizallah is with me and he interprets.

The slaughterhouse is upstairs. What does he mean? As prisoners, we know that the slaughterhouse area is above. No, not below, here, above the floor.

He takes us up to a huge empty room. Metal cages line the walls. He says this is where people were executed, hanged in large numbers. What we learned next from his testimony and the other prisoners is how that slaughterhouse operated.

And here's part of that report. 32-year-old Talaat Hussein Tala says he never thought people could be so violent and evil. He says the killings followed a regular schedule. On Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, they would collect those that they wanted to execute.

They would come before breakfast. They would come in around four or five guards. They would call out for the people in a low voice, and people that were called out, they knew they were going to be executed.

The guards put these prisoners in a separate cell and kept them there without food or water until Wednesday.

He says that was the killing day. Another freed Sednaya detainee, who goes by the name Abu Hassan, picks up the story. He says the guards would call the prisoners' names out, ten at a time. Then they beat them, within earshot of the other detainees.

Then, after midnight, the executions began. None of the interviewees we spoke with saw the killings, but all three recount hearing a similar sound. They believe it was a table being snatched from under the prisoners' feet in the moments they were hung.

Former prisoner Talal says this would continue for hours. We can hear it. Talal's cell was close to the shower rooms used by the guards. He says after the long killing nights, he could hear them shouting at each other. We would hear them argue about who's going to shower first to get the blood off them. Oh, okay.

Abu Hassan remembers Thursdays were less violent. On Thursday, it's a very relaxing day for us because the cops or the guards would be tired from all of the executions and they would be sleeping all day. And this routine of gathering prisoners from Saturday and then executing them by Wednesday, it came to rule prison life. I mean, what these men are describing is...

It's unimaginable. How does their testimony match with what we, you know, already know about the killings in Setanaya?

Well, these interviews are not the first to talk about Sednaya being essentially a killing factory. The US State Department said it believed executions were happening there and even published at one point the satellite footage of the prison showing a smokestack coming out of one of the buildings that they suggested could be evidence of an incinerator. And some years ago, Amnesty International published a report in which they had similar accounts to those that we gathered

And they said that as many as 13,000 people were killed. But the testimony in their report ended in 2015. And so the accounts we've gathered show these executions continued right up until last year. And they really demonstrate how this was apparently systematic.

So with all of this evidence of mass killings, I imagine that grieving families want to know at the very least, where are the bodies of their loved ones?

Exactly, Aisha. And this is the question we looked at too. Where did the bodies go? Rights groups have been tracking possible mass grave sites in Syria remotely for years. And in the days after the regime fell, locals in Damascus began taking reporters to places where they believed bodies were buried. And that's when we met the excavator driver. When we come back, the excavator driver.

We're back with NPR's Ruth Sherlock, who's been covering the revelation that many thousands of Syrians killed by the Assad regime wound up in mass graves. So, Ruth, you wanted to report on the graves, but it couldn't have been easy to find people willing to talk at this point. That's right.

That's right. But I had an important contact. His name is Mouaz Mustafa, and he leads this group, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, based in Washington, D.C. He's maybe best known for bringing a man known as Caesar before the U.S. Congress. Caesar presented lawmakers with tens of thousands of photos that he'd smuggled out of Syria that showed people

the torture that was happening in these regime detention centers. And Mustafa, he's also in touch with lots of people who were inside this regime system and witnessed the brutality. And it just so happened that he and I were staying in the same hotel in Damascus. And then when I went up to him and I asked him if he could connect me with people associated with the mass graves, he said, yes.

If we give them security that they're not going to get arrested or anything, they'll tell you everything. And that is just what happens.

Here's my report. A couple of hours later, a man arrives at the hotel. He seems in his 50s, weathered looking, not surprising since he's spent his life working outdoors. He's friendly, but clearly also nervous. We sit down with coffee to chat. I'm a journalist. I work in the radio in America.

He asks to be known by his nickname, Abu Fadi, and then he really opens up. Mustafa interprets. Abu Fadi dug trenches in one of Syria's biggest mass graves. He's a municipal worker.

In 2012, he says, Syrian intelligence came to speak with his boss. They summoned him and other workers for a job at a cemetery near Damascus. They told me, dig three big holes. Dig three holes.

So we dug three holes. It was like four metres by five metres, about five to six metres deep. It was night by this point. He says the workers were told not to touch their phones or even smoke a cigarette. The officers wanted pitch darkness. They came back after three hours.

And that's when three tractor-trailers arrived, filled with bodies. Abu Fadi watched as the funeral workers pulled the corpses from the trucks into the trenches he'd made. Then the security officers ordered a man operating a bulldozer to cover the filled trenches with soil. He was forced to go up the bodies to cover them.

The three holes were so filled with bodies that there wasn't enough dirt to reach the other side to cover. So the bulldozer driver stopped.

But the intelligence officials ordered him to continue. They told him to roll on the exposed corpses, to flatten them into the trench. It was just such a horrific scene. For weeks after, when I wanted to eat, I couldn't eat. I couldn't function normally. It was a mess.

Soon regime officials called Abu Fadi again, this time to an area of flat scrubland near the town of Kutefa, outside of Damascus.

He became one of the workers creating a new mass grave. For a year and three months, he says, he was told to dig new trenches. He says he believed it was too dangerous to refuse. They make it pretty clear that it's not really a choice to not come back to it. Abu Fadi's own brother was disappeared by the regime, and he was a soldier in the Syrian army. So Abu Fadi doesn't know why he was taken.

He eventually learned his brother had been jailed in Sednaya, the detention centres where prisoners were executed in groups. And then Abu Fadi had no more news. In searching for your brother, did you go to the mass grave site? He says he took his brother's photo to the manager of the site and showed other grave diggers. He asked them if they'd seen him among the dead.

As we speak, I notice that Abu Fadi rarely references the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad by name. Is it hard to say? Is it strange to talk about his name to the media? No, it's not hard, he says. I just don't want to dirty my mouth by saying his name.

As we wrap up our interview, Abou Fadi agrees to take us to the site of the mass grave he helped to dig. So the next day we head out there. No one knows for sure, but it's thought tens of thousands of people could be buried here.

At the site, Fadi walks along the barely visible traces of the trenches he says he dug. This is one. This is one. This is one. This is one. This is empty. This is empty. This is empty.

NPR's regional producer Jawad Rusalla interprets. So where there is shrubbery, that's where there's a trench. Like this one here. Standing at this site, Abu Fadi says of course he feels guilty.

And he still wonders if his own brother is buried here, underneath this soil. Muaz Mustafa from the Syrian Emergency Task Force watched this site on Google Earth for years and saw it change into what it is now. You could see it in the satellite imagery after undisturbed ground.

parallel lines of mass graves. Mustafa brought a grave digger who'd worked at this site to testify before the US Congress. He says after that, the regime seemed to get nervous. And that's when it erected the high walls. And he says flattened the earth to make this place look less conspicuous. It looks like it's just an open area without any real markers of what's underneath our feet right now.

As the sun sets, we leave. And in the car, Mustafa calls up the grave digger who testified and now lives in Germany. Mustafa interprets. On the phone, he tells us even more details about how this mass grave site worked. The trucks would come at night. This man says he oversaw a group of men whose job it was to drag the bodies into the grave.

He says the trucks brought people from a military hospital in Damascus that seemed to be a gathering point for corpses of people killed in Syria's many intelligence branches.

But the bodies of people killed in Saidnaya prison, they arrived separately. NPR's Jawad Rizallah takes over interpreting. Saidnaya, basically they would be executed at around 12 or 1 a.m. and we would come pick them up at 4 a.m. His account tallies with what our witnesses, the former prisoners at Saidnaya, told us, right down to the timings.

They said the killings happened on Wednesday nights, and he says the bodies often arrived on a Thursday. So they didn't have any smell or anything because they were freshly executed, and they had the marks of torture on their bodies. In addition, you could see that they were executed by hanging. They would be cuffed with their hands behind their back, and their feet would be cuffed as well.

and they would be naked as well. Both the gravedigger and Abu Fadi, the excavator driver, said they were horrified by their work, but too terrified for their safety to stop. The gravedigger on the phone eventually managed to flee the country, and Abu Fadi says he did what he could to work slowly and poorly until eventually he was fired.

It's right about now, during this phone call in the car on the way back from the mass grave site, that the strangest thing happens. Abu Fadi realises he knows the guy on the phone, the grave digger. In the middle of these grim stories, a sort of reunion...

There's a kind of joy, almost hilarity in the car. It feels maybe like a release after the horror. Mustafa interprets for us. I thought you might not remember. I was like, of course I remember you. They're in tears at this point and remember the plots they hatched, small rebellions against this awful work.

How many times did we break the bulldozer and the excavator together so they won't let us dig more graves? So many times. We always had so many tricks under our sleeve, he says. Perhaps for these men, it's about not being so alone in reliving this period of their lives and about connecting in this shared realisation that it is all over. Assad is gone.

That is a lot to come to terms with for everyone, for those who had family members who were killed, as well as those who played a part in this machinery of death.

There's so much being uncovered right now, but I have to think that there is so much that we still don't know, right? That's right. The thing about the Assad government is that they kept meticulous notes. So every person that was detained and disappeared and what happened to them, all of that was written down in every intelligence branch. And there are dozens of them, even just around Damascus.

There are these piles of documents with all this information about what happened to these people. But the thing is...

it's hard for the new authorities to secure all that. One of the problems is manpower, and also there's so much else going on in that moment. And the problem is these documents are exposed. I think some places have been secured now, but when we were there, you know, in Sednaya prison, there was documents just flying around and people trampling all over them. In one case, I heard about some Bedouin sheep herders had used some documents they found to kind of burn a fire to keep warm outside. And...

This is a...

possible trove of evidence if it can be secured in time. And a lot of that will be extremely valuable to be able to, you know, hold trials and bring those responsible for these atrocities to justice. Well, I mean, that's the big question going forward. Like, what does justice look like for Syria? And who might be held accountable? Of course, you know, this is

one of the pressing issues for Syrians. But there's all these different complicated layers when it comes to justice in Syria that you have to think about. There is, you know, the question of whether Assad himself, who has fled to Russia, whether Russia might consider sending him back for prosecution to Syria one day. There's the question of those high-level security officers and what should happen to them. I mean, many of the officials from the regime will have fled or gone into hiding.

And even to people with no power who were kind of unwillingly forced into doing the bidding of the regime. And since those first days when Assad fell, the new authorities in Damascus have been calling for calm, trying to stop acts of revenge with civilians taking matters into their own hands. And they say that, you know, they are seeking to prosecute top officials. And then

there's the question of the whole fabric of society in Syria, the kind of neighbor to neighbor question. This is a place with many different religions and during the war we did see sectarian killings. There were villages where people were slaughtered in their homes, both Sunni Muslims and Alawites.

And there's real trauma here and hatred. You know, I think many Syrians know that kind of going down that route of sectarian revenge killings would be a disaster for the country. But at the same time, they're going to have to find a way to live with each other and potentially find a path towards meaningful reconciliation.

Thank you so much, Ruth, for this incredible reporting and documenting this moment in history. Well, thank you so much for having me on the show. That's NPR correspondent Ruth Sherlock. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yan. It was edited by Ginny Schmidt. Gilly Moon mastered the episode. Special thanks to Jawad Rizala.

And Emily Bogle.

The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our senior supervising producer, Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.