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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 88 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 19.
Appearances
Muaz Mustafa from the Syrian Emergency Task Force watched this site on Google Earth for years and saw it change into what it is now.
Mustafa 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.
As the sun sets, we leave. And in the car, Mustafa calls up the grave digger who testified and now lives in Germany. Mustafa interprets. On the phone, he tells us even more details about how this mass grave site worked. The trucks would come at night. This man says he oversaw a group of men whose job it was to drag the bodies into the grave.
He says the trucks brought people from a military hospital in Damascus that seemed to be a gathering point for corpses of people killed in Syria's many intelligence branches. But the bodies of people killed in Sednaya prison, they arrived separately. NPR's Jawad Rizalla takes over interpreting.
His account tallies with what our witnesses, the former prisoners at Said Naya, told us, right down to the timings. They said the killings happened on Wednesday nights and he says the bodies often arrived on a Thursday.
Both the gravedigger and Abu Fadi, the excavator driver, said they were horrified by their work, but too terrified for their safety to stop. The gravedigger 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 happened. I know it! Abu Fadi realises he knows the guy on the phone, the gravedigger. In the middle of these grim stories, a sort of reunion, there's a kind of joy, almost hilarity in the car. It feels maybe like a release after the horror. Mustafa interprets for us.
They're in tears at this point, and remember the plots they hatched, small rebellions against this awful work.
Perhaps for these men it's about not being so alone in reliving this period of their lives and about connecting in this shared realisation that it is all over. Assad is gone.
The thing about the Assad government is that they kept meticulous notes. So every person that was detained and disappeared and what happened to them, all of that was written down in every intelligence branch. And there are dozens of them, even just around Damascus. There are these piles of documents with all this information about what happened to these people.
But the thing is, it's hard for the new authorities to secure all that. One of the problems is manpower. And also there's so much else going on in that moment. And the problem is these documents are exposed. I think some places have been secured now. But when we were there, you know, in Sednaya prison, there was documents just flying around and people trampling all over them.
In one case, I heard about some Bedouin sheep herders had used some documents they found to kind of burn a fire to keep warm outside. And this is a possible trove of evidence if it can be secured in time. And a lot of that will be extremely valuable to be able to, you know, hold trials and bring those responsible for these atrocities to justice.
Of course, you know, this is one of the pressing issues for Syrians. But there's all these different complicated layers when it comes to justice in Syria that you have to think about. There is, you know, the question of whether Assad himself, who has fled to Russia, whether Russia might consider sending him back for prosecution to Syria one day.
There's the question of those high level security officers and what should happen to them. I mean, many of the officials from the regime will have fled or gone into hiding. And even to people with no power who are kind of unwillingly forced into doing the bidding of the regime.
And since those first days when Assad fell, the new authorities in Damascus have been calling for calm, trying to stop acts of revenge with civilians taking matters into their own hands. And they say that they are seeking to prosecute top officials. And then there's the question of the whole fabric of society in Syria, the kind of neighbor to neighbor question.
This is a place with many different religions. And during the war, we did see sectarian killings. There were villages where people were slaughtered in their homes, both Sunni Muslims and Alawites. And there's real trauma here and hatred. You know, I think many Syrians know that kind of going down that route of sectarian revenge killings would be a disaster for the country.
But at the same time, they're going to have to find a way to live with each other and potentially find a path towards meaningful reconciliation.
The baby girl was born just minutes before rescuers found the migrant boat in the Atlantic Ocean trying to reach Spain's Canary Islands from northwest Africa. Spanish rescuers posted a photo on social media showing a naked baby amid the dozens of people crowded on board.
The baby was born during Spain's Epiphany holiday, when children traditionally receive presents to honour the biblical story of the three kings meeting baby Jesus. The crew of the ship that rescued the newborn baby and her mother wrote on social media, Christmas ends in the Canaries with the rescue of a baby born in the middle of a journey at sea.
Aid groups say last year more than 9,000 people died trying to make this journey. But this baby and her mother, who were transferred to a hospital in Lanzarote, are said to be both doing well. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Rome.
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