Syria Psyop Theater: Mass Graves, Mass Deceptions
Western media, U.S. government officials and allied NGOs promote evidence-free claims of Syrian government mass graves while ignoring documented HTS and ISIS mass graves. Part 2 of a 2 part series.
Read part 1 here.
For over a decade of color revolutions and destabilization plots in West Asia and North Africa, U.S. government officials with their allied NGOs and media outlets have summoned the spectre of mass graves to justify their interventionist policies.
“As President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action,” President Barack Obama declared in a March 2011 speech justifying Operation Odyssey Dawn, the U.S. airstrikes that led to the deposal and grisly murder of Libyan president Moammar Qadaffi.
“Why batter Colonel Qaddafi and not intervene on the side of the opposition in Yemen, Bahrain, perhaps even Syria?,” The Economist wondered.
From the earliest days of the Syrian crisis, Western media began to disseminate anonymously-sourced and unverified claims of mass graves, particularly in the cities of Homs and Deraa, while ignoring the presence of armed opposition groups and their killings of Syrian police and military personnel.
Father Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest who had spent decades in Syria before being murdered by armed opposition groups in 2014, wrote that “From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. The violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”
“The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order to blame the government,” he wrote in another report.
This sort of vital information was rarely included in reports, certainly not by mainstream media outlets and billionaire-funded human rights groups.
In June 2011, a Human Rights Watch report alleged, based on interviews with “more than 50” anonymous Syrians and “Jordanian nationals” (some conducted by phone), that multiple mass graves existed in Deraa. The only tangible evidence provided was a video produced by the Turkey-based opposition-affiliated Sham News Network, which received glowing coverage from CNN, of a shallow grave dug with a single corpse and three body bags visible. A single source, who was not in Syria, claimed the bodies were of his family members. The report failed to substantiate its claims, noting that “While we did our best to verify the names and circumstances of the killings with witnesses and family members, this was not always possible due to restrictions on access and communications in Syria.”
The only documented mass grave of the Syrian government is in the southern Damascus neighborhood of Tadamon.
Tadamon was a front line in the first years of the Syrian war, with the Syrian military and Palestinian faction Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command fighting against a collection of armed groups which journalist Charles Glass identified as “troops from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and its erstwhile allies the Nusra Front, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and other extreme Salafist militias.” The armed opposition was so brutal that, according a The New York Times report, Jabhat Al-Nusra militants captured an Alawaite family in Tadamon and forced a brother to rape his sister at gunpoint.
The anti-government armed groups, according to a March 2013 Amnesty International report, executed anyone they suspected of being informants for the Syrian government, and dumped their bodies into a “a large hole dug for the foundations of a building in Souk al-Talata,” called the “hole of death.” Among the victims was Palestinian refugee Ali al-Zamel. When the Syrian military temporarily regained control of the neighborhood around September 2012, it recovered bodies from the hole, but Jabhat al-Nusra once again ousted Syrian government forces in 2013.
However, this opposition mass grave was ignored while a a Syrian military intelligence mass grave was featured in an exposé jointly-published by the U.S. government-funded New Lines Institute, The Guardian, and Al Jumhuriyah, a staunchly pro-opposition Germany-based outlet, funded by the German and Norwegian governments, Open Society Foundation and Ford Foundation, among others, through a cultural institution. The exposé was done in collaboration with two researchers at the University of Amsterdam, one of whom wrote that she posed as a fervent support of the Assad government in order to lure an intelligence officer who participated in the massacre to confess his participation, and said it was done in “revenge,” apparently for the killing of his brother.
The report found that a small group of Syrian military intelligence officers executed 41 people in a mass grave, set their bodies alight, and then covered up their crime.
When the reports were published in 2022, the Syrian government arrested the confessed perpetrator, Amjad Yousef.
Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and ISIS mass graves
While Western media focus on the Syrian military’s mass grave in Tadamon, they have omitted the overwhelming majority of documented mass graves made by anti-government terrorist groups in Tadamon and throughout the country in territory that opposition forces had held.
In late 2011, Jabhat al-Nusra (which would go on to become Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), Ahrar al-Sham, Jaish al-Islam, and Jaish al-Fatah began to use the Idlib province’s Al-Habat quarry as a mass grave, according to a 2021 report by the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. Militants threw into the quarry Syrian soldiers, members of government-allied militias, people accused of collaboration with the government, people accused of apostasy, adultery, or homosexuality, and Shia Muslim residents of the village of Foua and Kefraya (condemned as “infidels”), earning it the title “the Al-Ahm death hole.”
Video uploaded by the “Idlib Special Operations Brigade”, a faction of the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army, shows militants with captured Syrian soldiers in a truck who, according to the report, were then killed and dumped in the mass grave.
By 2015, the Al-Ahm “death hole” contained at least 110 bodies, and by 2017, 30 more victims had been thrown in. While some had already been executed, others were thrown in alive, or blindfolded and told to run for freedom, only to fall to their death.
HTS reportedly ceased using the pit to dispose of its victims and began to use it as a garbage landfill for all of Idlib province, which it governed. However, the report documents further cases in 2020.
In 2011, anti-government militias dumped the “mutilated bodies of 10 security agents whose hands, head and feet had been cut off” in a mass grave in Jisr al-Shughur in Idlib province. “At least four of the bodies were beheaded or struck on the head with an ax,” according to an Associated Press reporter.
In November 2013, Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS attacked the ancient Chrisitan city of Sadad, ransacking the city, desecrating churches, and taking a man as a human shield before they murdered 46 Syrian men, women, and children and dumped their bodies in two mass graves.
"What happened in Sadad is the most serious and biggest massacre of Christians in Syria in the past two and a half years... 45 innocent civilians were martyred for no reason, and among them several women and children, many thrown into mass graves. Other civilians were threatened and terrorized. 30 were wounded and 10 are still missing,” Archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh said.
After the Syrian government’s army expelled Islamic state forces from Palmyra in 2016, they discovered a mass grave that contained 40 bodies.
The greatest concentration of mass graves was in eastern Syria, where ISIS held territory for years, from Raqqa to Albu Kamal and around Deir Ezzor.
In 2017, the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition, with U.S.-backed Kurdish forces fighting under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces, expelled ISIS from Raqqa, leveling 80% of the city. First responders and residents began to uncover mass graves there too.
Unlike the White Helmets, who are lavishly funded by the U.S., UK, and Qatar and were once called the “Islamic state fire brigade” by ISIS prisoner journalist John Cantlie, Raqqa’s first responders received little funding from the U.S. government.
According to a July 2018 Human Rights Watch report on the mass graves, the U.S. was hesitant to allocate funds to exhuming graves there because it did not want to offend Ankara, which considers Kurdish groups to be terrorists.
“One of the issues reported is that some international organizations are unwilling or reluctant to support local authorities for fear of alienating Syrian government authorities in Damascus or to jeopardize their relations with Turkey, both of which are hostile to the local authorities,” HRW wrote.
Despite having no training or experience and little equipment, they organized themselves from the Raqqa Civilian Council and volunteered to exhume human remains of civilians and fighters killed by ISIS and by anti-ISIS forces, hoping to help bring closure to families missing their loved ones, the report stated.
By July 2018, they had found nine graves in Raqqa, with “each one estimated to have dozens, if not hundreds, of bodies, making exhumations a monumental task,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, then HRW’s acting emergencies director.
However, the paltry support was insufficient for the job.
“If workers continue to exhume the graves without adequate technical training, equipment, and support, families may lose the opportunity to accurately identify the remains of their loved ones. Evidence regarding crimes in the area, including ISIS crimes, may be lost,” the HRW report added.
Despite its limitations, the teams managed to excavate 22 mass graves in the Raqqa environs, discovering 5,656 bodies, and 522 in northeast Deir Ezzor from 2018 to 2019.
A 2020 report by The International Commission on Missing Persons, titled “The Missing in North East Syria: a Stocktaking.” There, residents and researchers began to uncover mass graves, from which 3,797 human remains were exhumed.
In January and February 2019, they exhumed 793 human remains in Raqqa’s Panorama Park “believed to contain a large number of bodies killed by the Global Coalition, including ISIS fighters.”
The Al Fakhikha Grave south of Raqqa City was exhumed from January to June of 2019 and contained 673 bodies.
Al Tala’a Camp Grave, south of Raqqa City, is the largest documented mass grave, containing 815 bodies. Excavation began in June 2019 and lasted until September 18.
The most shocking mass grave, which is believed to contain thousands of bodies, is in the Al-Houta gorge, which had been a popular hiking and tourist destination north of Raqqa city, near the town of Hammam al-Turkman.
According to Human Rights Watch, a terrorist group known as the al-Qadsiya Brigade, led by a local man named Faysal al-Ballo, attacked and overcame a Syrian government checkpoint in July 2013. The brigade had originally pledged allegiance first to Ahrar al-Sham, then to the Free Syrian Army, and finally to Jabhat Al-Nusra. The fighters executed at least 16 Syrian soldiers, the celebratory aftermath of which is shown in the video below, and then reportedly dumped their bodies in the Al-Houta gorge. This practice was continued by ISIS, which dumped bodies of hundreds of Syrian military personnel, religious minorities including members of the Muslim Ismaili sect, and anyone accused of collaborating with the enemy.
According to the ICMP report, under the command of a security chief whose nom de guerre was “Abu Yasser al-Iraqi,” ISIS killed members of the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army, at least 20 government soldiers, and Kurdish YPG fighters.
They not only disposed of dead bodies by the car-full into the gorge but also employed sadistic methods of murder, sometimes throwing people alive to their deaths, executing victims at the edge to allowing their bodies to fall in, or having victims “brought blindfolded and told to run to their deaths, under the pretense that they were being released and running to their salvation,” the same practice used as the Al-Ahm “death hole.” The report does not give a specific number of victims but believes it to be in the thousands.
When local residents complained to ISIS authorities of the stench and possibility of diseases from decomposing remains, ISIS dumped crude oil into the gorge and burned it.
Human Rights Watch published footage of militants executing prisoners and throwing bodies into the gorge, which a researcher had obtained from a worker at a computer repair shop who found the footage on a computer left by an ISIS militant and clandestinely sent it to the group.
In 2020, Human Rights Watch also documented the Al-Houta mass grave, with its researchers flying a drone into the depths of the gorge and revealing three corpses in pools of oil at its bottom.
‘Lack of political will’ to investigate HTS/ISIS mass graves
Any hopes that the families who had lost loved ones might have had of finding their missing relatives were dashed by the October 2019 Turkish-backed invasion of Kurdish-held areas in northeastern Syria, greenlighted by the Trump administration. Since then, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army has held the area. There have been no attempts to recover the bodies from the gorge nor international pressure to begin such a process, whether on the SNA itself or its Turkish sponsors, which have long supported the HTS and ISIS terrorists that dumped the bodies in the gorge.
“The families of the missing who spoke with Human Rights Watch said they had hoped that the territorial defeat of ISIS would quickly lead to information about their loved ones. However, a series of delays and an apparent lack of political will placed significant obstacles in their path,” HRW wrote in its report, entitled “Kidnapped by ISIS Failure to Uncover the Fate of Syria’s Missing.”
In 2019, HRW again noted that there were no efforts from the various forces, mostly foreign, to investigate these mass graves.
“At the time of writing, the extent of the control by the Syrian government, Turkey, NES, and the US-led coalition in former ISIS-held areas remains unclear, making it more difficult for families to identify who to speak to and recovery efforts more precarious… Regardless of who currently controls these areas, these developments highlight the urgency with which authorities should act on any leads available to learn what became of those missing at the hands of ISIS,” the report stated. “Thus far, authorities on the ground have not coordinated or systematized the limited local efforts to take up this issue.”
Legacy media ignore documented mass graves, promote evidence-free claims of Syrian government-filled mass graves
While mass graves in former al-Nusra and Islamic state-held territory in eastern Syria generated little interest in Western media, these outlets have promoted specious claims of mass graves perpetrated by the Syrian government.
The New York Times in 2022 published a report entitled “Mass Graves Identified in Syria Could Hold Evidence of War Crimes.” This misleadingly titled article contained no evidence of mass graves, relying instead on grainy and vague satellite photos of a field, described as a “suspected” grave, and an image of the Najha cemetery.
This was packaged with interviews from four Syrian men, two of whom were in Germany, another in Lebanon, and another in Syria. The Times granted them all anonymity for “fear of retribution by the Syrian government” despite the fact that all but one of them had left Syria.
One of the men who was interviewed participated in a trial against Anwar Raslan, a Syrian government official who defected to the opposition and was granted asylum in Germany. There, he gave lurid accounts about mass-torture in government prisons but was then convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison despite significant doubts about his testimony, and the participation of the CIJA.
The New York Times, however, ignored those details and offered no evidence to support its allegations of mass graves or whom might have been buried in the graves, admitting that, “The Times could not independently corroborate all the details in their accounts, including the total numbers of bodies they recalled seeing.”
Another one of the men interviewed appeared masked in the U.S. Congress, calling himself “the gravedigger,” spinning lurid tales of mass murder and pressing to ramp up sanctions on Syria.
His March 2022 congressional testimony was promoted by The Holocaust Memorial Museum, which had on its board ex-U.S. government official Elliot Abrams. He oversaw massacres in Latin America and was convicted of unlawfully withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal.
The “gravedigger” character appeared in Congress again in June 2022 and April 2023, and in numerous media outlets including a September 2022 Vice interview. Each time, however, the “gravedigger” appears to be a different person.
The New York Times also referenced a Human Rights Watch report that cited two anonymous defectors, interviewed in Lebanon and Turkey, who claimed to have served at military hospitals. The Times did not clarify if they relied on the same sources that HRW relied on.
“The two defectors Human Rights Watch interviewed who served at military hospitals said that soldiers transported the bodies to mass graves located on military land in the greater Damascus area, including near the Najha cemetary, near the Third Brigade military base, and near the Dhamir military airport. Human Rights Watch was not able to confirm these claims.”
While the Times alleged Qutayfah to be the largest mass grave, it was not mentioned in the 2017 Amnesty International “Human slaughterhouse” report that first claimed the Assad government was “exterminating” tens of thousands of prisoners and burying them in mass graves.
Staging a mass grave?
Outside of Damascus, graves may have been tampered with to produce the desired imagery.
Multiple reports documented an alleged mass grave in Adra, located near Damascus, which was being exhumed by the White Helmets, who have participated in numerous summary executions themselves and have demonstrated their capability to stage scenes.
A report by Turkish-state media outlet TRT showed the White Helmets at work, finding several bags of human remains in crypts. Correspondent Randolph Nogel made no effort to investigate and stated that they were all victims of Assad. However, an AFP report casually suggested that the graves were tampered with. According to Diab Serriya, co-founder of the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison, “the bags of bones were probably brought from other graves" and "probably this grave contains detainees but also former regime or opposition fighters killed in battle.”
Neither report notes that Jabhat al-Nusra and other terrorist groups overran Adra in December 2013 and massacred Syrians soldiers and civilians from religious minority groups.
Assad falls and the narrative takes hold
The “gravedigger” was accompanied by Mouaz Mustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a regime-change outfit funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Since the earliest days of the crisis, Moustafa has played a central role. In 2013, he arranged for and accompanied neoconservative senator John McCain to illegally enter Syria to meet with anti-government militants who had kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shia pilgrims.
As soon as the Syrian government collapsed, Moustafa met with Biden administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan – who infamously wrote that “AQ [al-Qaeda] is our on side in Syria” – and then headed to Damascus along with his staffer Celine Kasem.
Moustafa apparently furnished multiple western media outlets with access to the alleged mass graves and interviews.
Days later, Channel 4, a British state-funded media outlet, published a report called “True scale of Assad’s slaughter revealed at Syrian mass grave,” showing what it claims are two mass graves in Qutayfah, east of Damascus, including one in which “around 150 thousand people may have been buried.”
The report contained no evidence and relied on drone footage of the open field that the New York Times alleged is a mass grave in its 2022 report using satellite photos and claims from the Syrian Emergency Task Force. The Channel 4 report also contains testimony from figures who claimed to have witnessed the disposal of bodies.
At a formal cemetery, the town’s former mayor, Mohammed Abdel Magid, estimates 300 to 400 bodies were dumped in a mass grave. The Channel 4 report additionally interviews a man named Esam Saad, who claimed to have been involved in covering up bodies.
The report also featured Moustafa, who speculated that his uncle may be buried there.
On December 17, Reuters reported that “a mass grave outside of Damascus contained the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by the former government of ousted President Bashar al-Assad,” explicitly referencing Moustafa.
"One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate" Moustafa claimed. "It's a very, very extremely almost unfairly conservative estimate."
However, Reuters was forced to admit that it was “unable to confirm Moustafa's allegations.”
A separate Reuters video report visited the Najha cemetery, which the 2022 New York Times article flippantly described as a mass grave without providing evidence. Reuters shows a neatly dug trench that appears to have been recent, but there are no human remains or any other evidence visible to prove their claim.
A man looks inside a hole dug under a marked grave, what Reuters reported is a “mass grave.” No evidence is visible. Source: Reuters
The X account Levant_24_ published images of Najha cemetery taken the same day that Reuters visited (evidenced by the armed man visible in both the video and photos), incorrectly describing it as located in Qatana and claiming it to be a mass grave of 100,000 of Assad’s victims.
A report from Qatari-state media Al Jazeera also interviewed Qutayfah’s former mayor and a man named Issam Ali Saad who identified himself as the owner of a construction business. He said that the Syrian government borrowed his machinery to bury tortured prisoners in Qutayfah. Also interviewed was a man named Abdo Sheikh, who identified himself as the graveyard’s keeper and claimed the government buried around 100 people there, a fraction of the amount alleged by the former mayor in the Channel Four report, identifying all of them as innocent civilians. This report too shows no evidence of its claims.
The Free Press, a neoconservative outlet run by Zionist cancel-culture queen Bari Weiss, published another video entitled “Exclusive: Syria's Largest Mass Grave,” produced by the Center for Peace Communications. This outlet also interviewed Saad on the same day (as evidenced by his clothing) but identified him as a gravedigger (it is possible but seems unlikely that he is both.) The report alleged that 200,000 victims were buried in Qutayfah but, like all other reports, showed no evidence.
Al Jazeera also published a report from a cemetery in Homs, claiming it to be a mass grave. The report contains footage of preparation for a mass grave but insists that the Assad government lied that some were Syrian soldiers. The report shows what it says is the cemetery register of bodies delivered from the military hospital but does not investigate the identities of any of those in the graves.
Hailing the mass murderers, memory-holing their mass graves
Since the Assad government’s ouster, the former opposition forces that used rape as a weapon of war, carried out summary executions, and threw thousands of bodies into mass graves have been transformed into heroic forces.
“When rebels overran portions of Tadamon early in the civil war, the district became an emblem of the resistance. Then when evidence emerged of mass killings, it seemed to encapsulate the sadism of Assad’s security forces,” Nabih Bulos wrote in the Los Angeles Times, making no mention of the atrocities carried out by HTS of any of its allied armed groups.
In the immediate aftermath of the coup, Democracy Now hosted Human Rights Watch researcher Hiba Zayadin in a segment entitled “Mass Graves Discovered as Syrian Families Seek Answers to Loved Ones' Disappearances Under Assad.” Zayadin spoke at length about the Tadamon massacre as Democracy Now showed drone shots of the Qutayfah field alleged to be a mass grave. However, she made no mention of the HTS “death hole” mass grave in Tadamon, or any of the other numerous mass graves in Syria, many of which were documented by HRW itself, that could not be attributed to the Assad government but to its opponents.
Similarly, the U.S. government-funded PBS Newshour published a report from correspondent Simona Foltynon on alleged mass graves. She visited an alleged Assad government massacre site and a rubble-covered area that she claimed was actually a mass grave where “countless souls perished in summary executions” carried out by the Syrian government. The only evidence shown is a single mandible on top of a street. The rest of the human remains, she alleged, were buried under the rubble after the Syrian military blew up the area to cover the evidence.
Foltyn interviewed a man identified as a neighborhood resident who claims to have witnessed heavy “massacres,”but also admits that the neighborhood was the “front line in the fight for Damascus,” although neither Foltyn nor the man interviewed mention the extremist nature and shocking brutality of the armed opposition groups. Like HRW’s Zayadin, Foltyn made no mention of the HTS’s “death hole” mass grave in Tadamon or any other mass graves the new HTS regime or ISIS were responsible for throughout the country.
Executing a long standing plan
At the center of the supposed evidence collection is CIJA, the aforementioned organization that paid huge sums to have false documents smuggled out of Al-Qaeda and ISIS-controlled territory.
CIJA’s chair is Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. congressman appointed by the Obama administration as Ambassador-at-large for Global Justice. The position was created by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously justified the killing of half a million Iraqi babies.
“We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” Rapp said following visits to the alleged mass graves in Qutayfah and the Najha cemetery. In a CNN interview, he called the Assad government’s crimes “The worst atrocities of the 21st century,” likening them to the Holocaust.
Rapp is an overtly political actor and has been a vociferous supporter of regime change in Syria, appearing at a 2014 Atlantic Council event called “Making the Case Against Assad.”
More recently, Rapp defended Israel from international criticism, saying that evaluation of its actions in Gaza is “extremely complex,” denied the extermination of Palestinians there amounts to genocide, and admitted he advised Israel to feign internal investigation as a “magic bullet” to avoid international prosecution.
The Washington Post, like virtually all top legacy media outlets, published a report on Assad’s alleged mass graves in Qutayfah and Najha too, entitled “Mass graves shed a light on Assad’s ‘killing machine’”. Authors Loveday Morris and Suzan Haidamous noted that the alleged mass graves “will provide evidence for future war crimes trials.”
CIJA’s public relations figure Nerma Jelacic stated in an interview with Al Jazeera
that the alleged mass graves “are being ransacked by a variety of actors for a variety of reasons” – a similar excuse was given for the lack of forensic evidence for allegations of Hamas mass rape on October 7, 2023 – but insists prosecutions will go on using the already discredited evidence in Europe.
Two days after the Assad government was overthrown, the ICMP, funded by the UK and Germany specifically for its Syria project, produced a report called “Syria’s Disappeared: Justice Must be Secured for Hundreds of Thousands of Victims and Survivors of the Assad Regime,” using hyper-politicized language and making no mention of the HTS and ISIS mass graves throughout the country.
The ICMP’s work on Syria was collected in a document called “Addressing the Issue of Mass Graves in Syria” by its Policy Coordination Group (PCG) for Syria’s Missing and Disappeared, a project specifically funded by the UK and Germany.
Ironically, the report’s only evidence was of the HTS and ISIS mass graves. The document referenced its 2020 report on HTS and ISIS mass graves but tacked on the aforementioned New York Times article that failed to provide evidence for its allegations, and a report from Al Jumhuriya that details, similar to the ICMP report, mass graves in Raqqa under HTS (then called Jabhat al-Nusra) and ISIS.
It is not only Rapp, CIJA, and ICMP that are involved in the whitewash. A United Nations investigative team known as the “International, Impartial, and Independent Mechanism for Syria” stated that the new HTS Syrian government is receptive to prosecuting Assad government officials but made no mention of HTS or ISIS mass graves.
Clearly, a nefarious and deceptive political agenda seeks to whitewash the new ISIS-in-suits HTS regime rather than bring closure to long suffering families, provide a semblance of justice, and build towards a better future. Instead these “human rights” outfits and the mainstream media cherrypick and distort reports on mass graves, as Syria spirals into another civil war.
Thank for the great information! Poor Syria!