The fall of Syria's leader in December opened the doors to a vast network of detention centers and prisons across the country, uncovering further evidence of the true scale of killings under former president Bashar al-Assad. On this episode of The Sunday Story, NPR's Ruth Sherlock takes us to a notorious prison where thousands were detained and killed, and she visits a suspected mass gravesite outside Damascus. She meets former prisoners and those forced to play a role in what has been called the regime's "machinery of death."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. In late December, NPR correspondent Ruth Sherlock drove from the Syrian capital Damascus into the open, flat scrubland outside the city. It's a desolate place where stray dogs roam and where, eventually, a dirt track led to an area closed off by high cement walls.
There's these metal gates between the walls, but it's barricaded by a mound of earth. But the gate has opened a crack, so we're going to climb over the mound to get inside.
Inside, it seemed at first there was very little, just dirt and some Russian military trucks. But that's because what is here lies hidden below ground. This is a mass gravesite, one of dozens that Syrians are discovering across the country, a remnant of Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime.
There's a bone here. The weather has worn a lot of it away. It's white and partially eroded. I just want to take a moment and
really think about what we're doing here because it's easy to not comprehend the truth of what this place could be but when you hear the stories you hear every day truck after truck after truck piled high with corpses of people who'd been executed or died in detention under the Syrian regime were brought here and it's chilling to think that many of those people might be under this ground
Today, Ruth Sherlock joins us on the podcast. She's been covering the outpouring of grief and anger from Syrians coming to terms with the extent of the mass killings and the questions they now face over retribution, reconciliation, and the future of their country. A warning, this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence. We'll be right back.
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