Dhumair: A chilling new chapter in Syria’s long civil war has come to light, revealing a meticulously orchestrated operation by the Assad regime to erase evidence of mass atrocities. According to a comprehensive Reuters investigation, former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military executed a covert two-year mission codenamed Operation Move Earth to relocate thousands of bodies from one of the country’s largest known mass graves in Qutayfah to a hidden desert site near Dhumair.
Witnesses describe the initiative as a deliberate attempt to conceal the regime’s brutal past and rehabilitate Assad’s image on the global stage. “The goal was to erase Qutayfah entirely,” said a former Republican Guard officer involved in the operation.
The investigation, built on testimonies from thirteen individuals with direct knowledge, official documents, and hundreds of satellite images spanning several years, paints a grim picture of the scale and method of the operation. From February 2019 to April 2021, nearly every week, six to eight trucks laden with human remains and soil traversed more than an hour from Qutayfah to the secret desert site.
At least 34 trenches, each stretching two kilometers, were prepared in the Dhumair desert, making it one of the largest mass graves of the Syrian conflict. Witnesses estimate that tens of thousands of bodies could be buried there, a haunting testament to the scale of human loss under Assad’s regime.
The original Qutayfah site had been used since 2012 to bury soldiers and prisoners who perished in Assad’s prisons and military hospitals. Its exposure in 2014 by a Syrian human rights activist brought the grim reality of the mass grave to local attention, yet international access remained virtually nonexistent.
“The stench was unbearable,” recounted truckers and mechanics involved, their memories still vivid years later. Speaking out at the time was a death sentence. “No one would disobey the orders,” one driver said. “You yourself might end up in the holes.”
As Assad approached the brink of victory in 2018, the plan to relocate the graves was conceived to position himself for renewed international legitimacy, despite widespread sanctions and allegations of brutality. By the time the regime fell late last year, all 16 trenches documented at Qutayfah had been emptied.
Syria’s new leadership, which assumed power after Assad’s departure, faces the monumental task of addressing the country’s missing and buried. More than 160,000 individuals disappeared under the old regime, many presumed to lie in mass graves. The government has announced initiatives to establish a DNA bank and a centralized platform for families of the missing, though experts caution that resources and trained personnel are urgently needed.
“There is a bleeding wound as long as there are mothers waiting to find the graves of their sons, wives waiting to find the graves of their husbands, and children waiting to find the graves of their fathers,” Syrian Minister of Emergency and Disaster Management Raed al-Saleh told the semi-official al-Watan news site.
Human rights groups warn that the haphazard relocation of bodies from Qutayfah to Dhumair will make it nearly impossible to restore remains to grieving families. Mohamed Al Abdallah, head of the Syria Justice and Accountability Center, called the transfer “disastrous,” noting that piecing together the remains for proper identification would be a monumental and complex task.
As Syria reckons with its dark past, the full scale of Operation Move Earth underscores the lengths to which the Assad regime went to obscure the truth. The Reuters investigation will soon release a special report detailing the clandestine operation and the painstaking work of uncovering the desert grave, revealing one of the most disturbing episodes in modern Syrian history.