According to a leading international war crimes prosecutor, mass graves discovered in Syria in the days following President Bashar al-Assad was deposed are providing proof of some of the biggest atrocities since the Nazis.
After touring two mass burial sites in the towns of Qutayfah and Najha near Damascus, former U.S. war crimes ambassador at large Stephen Rapp told Reuters on Tuesday that the state-run machinery of death tortured and executed over 100,000 people.
Rapp, who oversaw prosecutions at the war crimes tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone and is currently assisting with the documentation of evidence of war crimes in Syria, stated, “Given what we’ve seen in these mass graves, I don’t have much doubt about those kinds of numbers.”
A request for comment from Rapp, who also talked to BBC News, was not immediately answered.
Pictures of Syrian Civil Defense teams, referred to as the White Helmets, retrieving the remains of people interred in some of the nation’s mass graves have surfaced. Some of the images depict heaps of bones and heads in body bags. Large burial sites have also been identified by previous satellite photography.
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