Middle East & Africa | Syria’s horrors

One of Assad’s mass graves is found, with as many as 100,000 bodies

But justice for the victims of the Assad regime will be slow

White Helmets recover bodies from mass grave in Damascus containing sacks of human remains
Photograph: Getty Images
|AL-QUTAYFA

A MOUND OF dirt blocks the road to a walled compound on the outskirts of al-Qutayfa, a town around 30km north of Damascus, the Syrian capital. It is silent, save for the occasional bark of two stray dogs and the faint buzz of power lines running over the compound. Breeze-block walls enclose an area roughly the size of two football fields. For more than a decade, Bashar al-Assad’s army turned this wasteland into a mass grave—believed by Syria’s new rulers to be one of his largest.

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