Ruth Sherlock
speaker
937 appearances
123 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Ruth Sherlock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 88 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 19.
Appearances
Talal's cell was close to the shower rooms used by the guards. He says after the long killing nights, he could hear them shouting at each other.
Abu Hassan remembers Thursdays were less violent.
And this routine of gathering prisoners from Saturday and then executing them by Wednesday, it came to rule prison life.
Well, these interviews are not the first to talk about Sednaya being essentially a killing factory. The US State Department said it believed executions were happening there and even published at one point the satellite footage of the prison showing a smokestack coming out of one of the buildings that they suggested could be evidence of an incinerator.
And some years ago, Amnesty International published a report in which they had similar accounts to those that we gathered saying And they said that as many as 13,000 people were killed. But the testimony in their report ended in 2015. And so the accounts we've gathered show these executions continued right up until last year. And they really demonstrate how this was apparently systematic.
And this is the question we looked at, too. Where did the bodies go? Rights groups have been tracking possible mass grave sites in Syria remotely for years. And in the days after the regime fell, locals in Damascus began taking reporters to places where they believed bodies were buried.
That's right. But I had an important contact. His name is Muaz Mustafa, and he leads this group, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, based in Washington, D.C. He's maybe best known for bringing a man known as Caesar before the U.S. Congress. Caesar presented lawmakers with tens of thousands of photos that he'd smuggled out of Syria that showed...
the torture that was happening in these regime detention centers. And Mustafa, he's also in touch with lots of people who were inside this regime system and witnessed the brutality. And it just so happened that he and I were staying in the same hotel in Damascus. And then when I went up to him and I asked him if he could connect me with people associated with the mass graves, he said, yes.
And that is just what happens. Here's my report. A couple of hours later, a man arrives at the hotel. He seems in his 50s, weathered looking, not surprising since he's spent his life working outdoors. He's friendly, but clearly also nervous. We sit down with coffee to chat. He asks to be known by his nickname, Abu Fadi, and then he really opens up. Mustafa interprets.
Abu Fadi dug trenches in one of Syria's biggest mass graves. He's a municipal worker. In 2012, he says, Syrian intelligence came to speak with his boss. They summoned him and other workers for a job at a cemetery near Damascus.
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 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.
But the intelligence officials ordered him to continue. They told him to roll on the exposed corpses, to flatten them into the trench.
Soon, regime officials called Abu Fadi again, this time to an area of flat scrubland near the town of Kotefa, 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'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. He eventually learned his brother had been jailed in Sednaya, the detention centres where prisoners were executed in groups. And then Abu Fadi had no more news. In searching for your brother, did you go to the mass grave site?
He says he took his brother's photo to the manager of the site and showed other grave diggers. He asked them if they'd seen him among the dead. As we speak, I notice that Abu Fadi rarely references the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad by name. Is it hard to say? Is it strange to talk about his name to the media?
As we wrap up our interview, Abou Fadi agrees to take us to the site of the mass grave he helped to dig. So the next day we head out there. No one knows for sure, but it's thought tens of thousands of people could be buried here. At the site, Fadi walks along the barely visible traces of the trenches he says he dug. Abou Fadi
So where there is shrubbery, that's where there's a trend?
Like this one here?
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.
Showing 861–880 of 937 · page 44 of 47
← Previous
Next →