The Holocaust of Our Time In Syria — chilling evidence presented by a grave digger at a trial in Koblenz Germany
Filmmaker Ronan Tynan currently completing ‘BRINGING ASSAD TO JUSTICE’ with Anne Daly remembers the chilling evidence of the grave digger at the trial of two of Assad’s agents in Koblenz, Germany for crimes against humanity after listening to the Branch 251 podcast on Holocaust Memorial Day.
Syria is the Holocaust of our time as a court case in the German town of Koblenz is proving through overwhelming and compelling evidence over the past few months where two Syrian secret service agents who worked in Al-Khatib or Branch 251, one of the Assad regime’s notorious security branches, are on trial for crimes against humanity. The two accused are Anwar Raslan who headed the investigations unit of Branch 251 in Damascus, and Eyad Al-Gharib who arrested protesters and took them to the branch’s prison.
In September last year a grave digger working, who helped bury tens of thousands most of whom were tortured, hanged or starved to death, offered among the most chilling testimony of how Assad has engaged in the extermination of many of his own people since 2011 in his bid to crush and eliminate all traces of the peaceful uprising that ignited when the Arab Spring reached Syria. In the twelve month period from 2011 to 2012 the witness claimed he helped bury over 50,000 victims with 10,000 of these coming from Branch 251 all of whom seem to show evidence of being tortured with bruises, electric shock and burn marks. After 2013 he claimed the numbers increased.
A state employee the grave digger originally worked at the Damascus burial authority and was recruited by two secret service officers to work in the mass burial of the victims of the regime at Najha and Al-Qutaifah, near Damascus. What was uniquely disturbing about the grave digger or witness Z 30/07/12 as he is now known, as he requested to give evidence without exposing his identity as his family were threatened in Syria, is how his description of what he witnessed so closely mirrored the Nazi Holocaust. While the scale of the Syrian holocaust may not be on a par with that perpetrated by the Nazis the horror they inflicted on Assad’s orders on their defenceless fellow citizens certainly is? Indeed what I found even more disturbing is the evidence suggests the victims even suffered more than the Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz because all of Assad’s victims seem have been brutally tortured before they died.
Witness Z recounted scenes of such horror that but for the credibility of his evidence which has been corroborated by others it might have seemed unimaginable. Thousands of bodies arriving every week for burial in trucks which could hold up to seven hundred. He was lucky he was employed as a driver and note taker because it meant unlike his colleagues they had to climb into the trucks to push the often rotting and decaying bodies into burial pits or ditches. These ditches were one hundred metres long and six metres deep.
Witness Z said he stayed away from the “bodies from the secret service branches…because they smelled so bad and it was almost impossible to get away from that smell of decay. He said it even stayed in his nose even after he went home and the first time he had been at the mass burials he could not eat or drink for days he was disturbed by what he saw and what he smelled,” said reporter Hannah el-Hatami who covers the trial for the Branch 251 podcast said.
When they opened the truck doors it sounded like a scene from hell as blood and maggots first spilled out and then the witness’s colleagues had to climb up into the truck and push the bodies into the ditch. One especially egregious memory he has is when he and his colleagues noticed a man among the dead bodies was still breathing and when their superior superior also noticed he ordered a bulldozer to drive over the survivor.
He has had many and continuing nightmares but one scene made him fall apart he claimed when he saw a woman holding a baby among the bodies. Assad torture prisons are notorious for holding not only men but many women and children all of whom seem to be tortured and even raped often in front of fathers or husbands.
The witness also gave evidence was about being able to tell where the bodies for burial had come from by their smell. The bodies from Saydnaya were regularly executed at night and had to be buried the day after so they did not have a smell. These bodies he described as having marks on their necks where they had been hanged and he saw the bruises and their finger nails had sometimes been pulled out and some had the marks of electric shocks. Amnesty International has described Saydnaya as “human slaughterhouse” in a comprehensive report underlining the organised and systematic nature of Assad’s extermination of anyone deemed opposed to his dictatorship.
That systematic and organised way in which people are annihilated is a key test in establishing a case for crimes against humanity against the accused. Hence, witness Z’s ability to give such detailed evidence of the burial system and the fact that he recorded where the bodies came from and drove back to his office and wrote all of that information into a notebook which he said was stored in a safe is crucial. Even more so as he outlined how after he recorded the information about each burial he forwarded that information to his superiors.
Reporter Hannah el-Hitami expressed amazement at the level of detail the secret service sought to record about each burial apparently to give a sense of legality to their crimes against humanity: “That a government would conduct mass killings and at the same time keep orderly lists of these killings and give each dead person three numbers defining the number of each inmate and the branch they were killed in. You would think that a secret service would not be that interested in documenting their own crimes but at the same time it almost gives their crimes the appearance of being legal because they are documented at every step in a very bureaucratic official way.”
Ironically the commitment of Assad’s notorius security branches in keeping such detailed record will help ensure that someday he too will be successfully tried for crimes against humanity ideally by Syrians in Syria.
