Mounds of bare, turned earth stretch near agricultural fields south of Damascus, one of multiple mass graves around the country believed to hold the bodies of tens of thousands of Syrians killed under Bashar Assad's rule. With his ouster, residents, forensic teams and international groups face what could be a yearslong task of unearthing the dead.
In this site alone, by the town of Najha, several tens of thousands of bodies could have been buried, said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues who was visiting the site Tuesday. Some are believed buried under already existing graves of a regular cemetery nearby, he said.
