The government of former Syrian President Bashar Assad carried out a two-year clandestine operation to truck thousands of bodies from one of the country's largest known mass graves to a secret location more than an hour away in the remote desert, a Reuters investigation has found.
The conspiracy by Assad’s military to excavate the mass grave in Qutayfah and create an enormous second mass grave in the desert outside the town of Dhumair has not been previously reported.
To uncover the location of the Dhumair grave site and detail the vast operation, 13 people with direct knowledge of the two-year effort to move the bodies were spoken to, documents produced by officials involved were reviewed, and hundreds of satellite images of both grave sites taken over the course of several years were analyzed.
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