Assad regime secretly moved mass grave over two years to cover up killings

By Reuters 14 October 2025, 8:41 pm

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Syrian President Bashar Assad gives an interview to Foreign Affairs magazine in Damascus, January 26, 2015. (AFP)

Then-Syrian president Bashar al-Assad gives an interview to Foreign Affairs magazine in Damascus, January 26, 2015. (AFP)

DHUMAIR, Syria — The Assad government carried out a two-year clandestine operation to truck thousands of bodies from one of Syria’s largest known mass graves to a secret location more than an hour away in the remote desert, a Reuters investigation finds.

The conspiracy by former president Bashar al-Assad’s military to excavate the mass grave in Qutayfah and create an enormous second mass grave in the desert outside the town of Dhumair has not been previously reported.

To uncover the location of the Dhumair grave site and detail the vast operation, Reuters spoke to 13 people with direct knowledge of the two-year effort to move the bodies, reviewed documents produced by officials involved, and analyzed hundreds of satellite images of both grave sites taken over the course of several years.

The operation to transfer bodies from Qutayfah to another hidden site dozens of kilometers away was called “Operation Move Earth,” and it lasted from 2019 until 2021. The purpose of the operation was to cover up the Assad government’s crimes and help restore its image, the witnesses say.

Reuters informed the government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa of the findings of this investigation on Tuesday. The government didn’t immediately respond to questions for this report.