'Assad's regime men used to dig graves at night,' Ahmed Accan tells Anadolu
A Syrian man said he had seen the Assad regime's atrocities in 2011 when two people got out of a car carrying a cooling tank that was dropped off daily in Damascus and piled bodies on top of one another before burying them in a larger pit.
Ahmed Accan, 26, who lives near a mass grave discovered behind Damascus International Airport on December 15, told Anadolu that he and his father witnessed the bodies piling up in 2011 and burying them in a much larger pit than the current one.
During the civil war, the overthrown regime forces forcibly removed his family from his village, and they were unable to return for three years, Accan said.
"When we returned, we noticed that instead of one vehicle, 4-5 vehicles were transporting bodies every day. Assad's regime men used to dig graves at night," he explained.
As part of the ongoing search efforts across the country following the overthrow of the Bashar Assad regime, a mass grave was discovered on December 15 in the Husseiniya district, just behind Damascus Airport in the southeast of the capital, as seen by Anadolu's ground crew.
Accan believes his brother, who was detained by security forces in 2016 and later found in the notorious Sednaya Prison, is buried in the mass grave. "My mother recites Fatiha every day, feeling he's here," he said while expressing his grief over losing his brother during Syria's long civil war.
Three years after his arrest, military police issued his brother's death certificate, revealing that he only lived for 7 months and 25 days in custody.
Bashar Assad, Syria's leader for nearly 25 years, fled to Russia after anti-regime forces seized control of Damascus on December 8, bringing an end to the Baath Party regime that had been in power since 1963.
*Writing by Beril Canakci
