AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The horrors committed under ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad are still being uncovered. Ordinary Syrians are now able to speak out about what they saw and, in many cases, were forced to do. NPR's Ruth Sherlock and producer Jawad Rizkallah have the story of one man, a bulldozer driver, who was made to help dig mass graves for the victims of Assad's regime. And a warning, it includes some graphic descriptions of dead bodies.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: I meet the excavator driver at a hotel in Damascus.
(Speaking Arabic).
He's clearly nervous at first to talk. He asked to be known only by his nickname, Abu Fadi.
MOUAZ MOUSTAFA: (Non-English language spoken).
SHERLOCK: We're introduced by Mouaz Moustafa from the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a group who, for years, made contact with people who can testify to the brutality of the Assad regime. Moustafa interprets, as Abu Fadi tells us, in 2012, regime officials showed up at the municipality where he worked.
ABU FADI: (Through interpreter) They told me that you have a mission you need to go to.
SHERLOCK: He was sent to a cemetery near Damascus.
ABU FADI: (Through interpreter) They told me, dig three big holes. So we dug three holes. It was, like, 4 meters by 5 meters, about 5 to 6 meters deep.
SHERLOCK: It was night by this point. He says the workers were told not to touch their phones or even smoke a cigarette. The officers wanted pitch darkness.
ABU FADI: (Speaking Arabic).
SHERLOCK: And that's when three tractor trailers arrived, filled with bodies. Abu Fadi watched as the funeral workers pulled the corpses from the trucks into the trenches he'd made. Then the security officers ordered a man operating a bulldozer to cover the filled trenches with soil.
ABU FADI: (Through interpreter) The three holes were so filled with bodies that there wasn't enough dirt to reach the other side to cover.
(Speaking Arabic).
SHERLOCK: So the bulldozer driver stopped. But the intelligence officials ordered him to continue. They told him to roll on the exposed corpses to flatten them into the trench.
ABU FADI: (Through interpreter) It was just such a horrific scene. For weeks after when I wanted to, like, eat, I couldn't eat. Like, I couldn't function normally.
SHERLOCK: But soon, regime officials summoned Abu Fadi again, this time to an area of flat scrubland near the town of Qutayfah, outside of Damascus. He became one of the workers creating a new mass grave. For a year and three months, he says, he was told to dig new trenches. He says he believed it was too dangerous to refuse.
ABU FADI: (Through interpreter) They make it pretty clear that it's not really a choice to not come back.
SHERLOCK: Abu Fadi's own brother was disappeared by the regime, and he was a soldier in the Syrian army, so Abu Fadi doesn't know why he was taken.
In searching for your brother, did you go to the mass grave site?
ABU FADI: (Speaking Arabic).
SHERLOCK: He tells me he showed his brother's photo to other grave diggers to ask if they'd seen him among the dead.
ABU FADI: (Speaking Arabic).
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR CLOSING)
SHERLOCK: The next day, Abu Fadi takes us to the mass grave site. We reach an open, desolate place where stray dogs roam and head down a track to an area surrounded by cement walls.
There's metal gates between the wall, but it's barricaded by a mound of earth. But the gate is open a crack, so we're going to climb over the mound and to get inside.
No one knows for sure, but it's thought tens of thousands of people could be buried here in this place.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
ABU FADI: (Speaking Arabic).
SHERLOCK: Fadi walks along the barely visible traces of the trenches he says he dug.
ABU FADI: (Speaking Arabic).
SHERLOCK: NPR's regional producer, Jawad Rizkallah, interprets.
ABU FADI: (Through interpreter) Easily. It's, like, tilled ground, the place where the trench is. So there's - it's easier for shrubs to grow.
SHERLOCK: Right.
ABU FADI: (Through interpreter) So that's how you know where the trenches are and where they aren't.
SHERLOCK: So where there is shrubbery, that's where there's a trench.
JAWAD RIZKALLAH, BYLINE: Yeah, like, where's there's a line of shrubbery.
SHERLOCK: Like this one here?
RIZKALLAH: Yeah, for example.
SHERLOCK: Standing at this site, Abu Fadi says, of course, he feels guilty. And he still wonders if his own brother is buried here underneath this soil.
ABU FADI: (Speaking Arabic).
SHERLOCK: Mouaz Moustafa, from the Syrian Emergency Task Force, watched this site on Google Earth for years and saw it change into what it is now.
MOUSTAFA: You could see it in the satellite imagery after undisturbed ground, parallel lines of mass graves.
SHERLOCK: Moustafa brought a grave digger who'd worked at this site to testify before the U.S. Congress. He says after that, the regime seemed to get nervous, and that's when it erected the high walls and, he says, flattened the earth to make this place look less conspicuous.
MOUSTAFA: It looks like it's just an open area without any real markers of what's underneath our feet right now.
SHERLOCK: As the sun sets, we leave. And in the car, Moustafa calls up a man known as the grave digger. It was his job to oversee the men who pulled the bodies into the trenches at this mass grave site. Moustafa interprets.
MOUSTAFA: (Non-English language spoken).
SHERLOCK: On the phone, the grave digger tells us the trucks would come at night, filled with the bodies of people killed in Syria's many intelligence branches and from Sednaya, the notorious detention center where witnesses say the regime executed thousands of prisoners. Both the grave digger and Abu Fadi, the excavator driver, said they were horrified by their work but too terrified for their safety to stop. The grave digger on the phone eventually managed to flee the country, and Abu Fadi says he did what he could to work slowly and poorly until eventually he was fired.
It's right about now, during this phone call in the car on the way back from the mass grave site, that the strangest thing happens.
MOUSTAFA: Know each other.
(LAUGHTER)
SHERLOCK: Abu Fadi realizes he knows the guy on the phone, the grave digger.
ABU FADI: (Speaking Arabic).
SHERLOCK: In the middle of these grim stories, a sort of reunion.
UNIDENTIFIED GRAVE DIGGER: (Non-English language spoken).
SHERLOCK: There's a kind of joy, almost hilarity, in the car. It feels maybe like a release after the horror.
ABU FADI: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED GRAVE DIGGER: (Laughter).
SHERLOCK: Moustafa interprets for us.
ABU FADI: (Through interpreter) I knew it was you right away. I thought you might not remember me. I was, like, of course, I remember you (laughter).
SHERLOCK: They're in tears at this point and remember the plots they hatched, small rebellions against this awful work.
MOUSTAFA: "How many times did we break the bulldozer and the excavator together so they won't let us dig more graves," he says.
SHERLOCK: Perhaps for these men, it's about not being so alone in reliving this period of their lives and about connecting in this shared realization that it is all over. Assad is gone. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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