Simona Foltyn:
Well, Geoff, it was quite grim, and these mass graves really bear witness to just how systematic the killing was under Assad’s government, and the details are only just beginning to come out.
The first site we went to was in Tadamon, which is a suburb in the south of Damascus, and it is known for a massacre that occurred there in 2013, alongside a series of other extrajudicial executions.
Essentially, this neighborhood had been turned into a killing field, and when we went there, residents pointed us to several shallow graves that had been dug in between the homes. We saw human remains and bones sticking out of the ground, children playing on these sites.
So it was quite jarring to see also how accustomed people had become to living near these mass graves, which haven’t been secured at all. Now, the second site we went to was quite different. It was in a rural area close to the prison of Sednaya, which has been, as we know by now, dubbed the human slaughterhouse of Syria.
And this site is probably where many of the thousands of people who perished in Sednaya were buried. It was a lot more organized. You could tell that the site had been planned out. It had been segregated into sections, and the vaults had been lined with concrete.
So it was quite shocking to see how much planning and effort the government had exerted into disappearing and killing people. It was not really something that happened randomly or in an isolated manner. It was very much a function of the state.
