How Assad's Syria moved the bodies of its victims

Under Bashar al-Assad, a Syrian government operation to move bodies to mass graves was so massive that truckers, including those carrying ice cream, meat and produce, were forced to hand over their vehicles and get their hands dirty to keep the killing machine moving.

In interviews with Middle East Eye, Syrians forced to work as drivers, as well as diggers and cemetery overseers, describe industrial-scale activity under the cover of darkness for years.

A former trucker and heavy machinery operator who was forced to bulldoze areas later used for burials told MEE the government used a menagerie of confiscated trucks “to meet its needs for quickly disposing of victims’ bodies without raising suspicion”.

Yousef Obeid, a former Damascus municipality worker forced to dig graves, remembers a small ice truck delivering corpses to Najha, the now infamous mass grave site south of Damascus. 

“From that moment on, I swore off ice cream,” he said. 

Details of how the Assad government moved bodies come as a Reuters investigation has uncovered a secret, two-year operation under the Assad government to move bodies from Qutayfah, long considered one of Syria’s largest known mass graves, to the Dhumair desert an hour away.  

The operation, called “Operation Move Earth", ran between 2019 and 2021 and aimed to help Syrian authorities cover up their crimes and rehabilitate Assad’s image as he attempted to make a comeback on the world’s stage.

Despite the attempted coverup, Assad’s ouster by rebel groups in December has allowed more details to emerge about how his government murdered and disappeared more than 160,000 people over more than a decade of civil war.

Truck drivers have told MEE that early on in the war, there were so many bodies being moved from prisons and military hospitals that the government confiscated commercial refrigerator trucks to transport them. 

Some of the trucks confiscated by the government had once moved meat and vegetables between the Gulf and Syria, and were taken as political disputes escalated with Gulf states. 

'As soon as they drove up, a foul smell filled the air. It was the unmistakable smell of dead bodies'

- Yousef Obeid, former Damascus municipality worker

Other trucks had previously transported cargo between Syria and Turkey during the economic boom when Assad first inherited the presidency from his father in 2000.

Their owners, who were from opposition strongholds in Idlib and Aleppo, were arrested as the revolution unfolded, their trucks seized.

Trucks were also used from the fleet owned by the Katerji brothers, Assad loyalists who made a fortune during the war through a vast smuggling network. 

The former trucker later forced to bulldoze gravesites said drivers were summoned through traders at al-Hal market in Damascus, and told to report to security branches that sent them on to military hospitals to collect bodies. 

“These operations were mostly conducted at night, especially before dawn, to evade notice, without clear coordination between the security branches,” he said.

The driver also said that smaller buses, enclosed trucks and meat transport vehicles were used as various security branches fulfilled Assad’s orders to dispose of the bodies. 

'The unmistakable smell'

The government's operations also required diggers and overseers, turning local government employees into cogs in its bureaucratic death machine overnight. 

Before the revolution against Assad's rule began in 2011, Yousef Obeid had previously overseen the demolition of buildings that had been constructed without permits in the capital. 

But after the uprising broke out, Obeid said air force intelligence officials told him he was being transferred from public works into security. 

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On his first day, he was taken to the desolate end of a cemetery in Najha and told to dig a hole that was 10 by 15 metres across, and three metres deep.

Around sunset, he said, a Mercedes carrying an air force officer arrived along with refrigerator trucks full of decomposed and bloated bodies.

“As soon as they drove up, a foul smell filled the air. It was the unmistakable smell of dead bodies,” Obeid said.

He estimated that each refrigerated truck carried between 200 and 250 bodies. “Every 40 bodies they offloaded, they made me shove them into the hole,” he said. 

The bodies were stacked on top of each other, four levels deep. “There was no place to stand and they were forcing me to keep going. I was involuntarily stepping on hands and faces, those poor souls,” he said.

After emptying two refrigerator trucks, he said workers came and poured concrete over the mass graves and constructed new public graves on top of them to cover up evidence.

The work that he did at night was a secret Yousef would keep from his friends and family. In total, he believes he personally buried 100,000 bodies.

He wasn’t the only one keeping secrets: Muhammad Afif Nafieh, another former municipal worker also at Najha, was forced to dig mass graves for seven years, a fact he hid from his family.

Mass grave fills up

From 2011 until early 2018, Nafieh said he worked relentless, seven-day work weeks in which he oversaw the burial of an increasing stream of bodies.

The bodies were frequently delivered in 16-metre refrigerator trucks which he said could carry up to 400 corpses at a time, and often with signs of torture.

Before the refrigerator trucks started rolling up, Nafieh said he had never seen a corpse before.

“When I saw them, I’d imagine in my mind how much pain this person had endured to get to the point of execution, how much he died before he reached us. He died a hundred deaths before reaching that final one.”

Nafieh’s job was to meticulously document the burial of the bodies, including noting which security branch they had come from and how many were put into the ground. “Bashar al-Assad knew everything that was going on in the branches,” he said.

Once Najha was filled with bodies, Nafieh said he began working at Qutayfah and here the refrigeration truck deliveries increased.

“In Qutayfah we would get one or two refrigeration trucks a week. Then it became two trucks, twice a week. We’d get four trucks,” he said.

In 2018, Nafieh fled Syria with his family for Germany where he testified in the first international trial on Syrian state torture which resulted in the conviction of two Syrian officials and also in which further details of the mass graves came to light.

A former Republican Guard officer told Reuters that it was late that same year that the idea to move the bodies from Qutayfah to the desert site emerged and was then carried out between 2019 and 2021.

Based on witness accounts and the site’s dimensions, Reuters estimates that tens of thousands of bodies may have been reburied at the new Dhumair site.

The government's newly established National Commission for Missing Persons has said that the way the bodies were moved to the site will make it even more difficult to identify the victims.