Reckoning with the Assad Regime's 'Machinery of Death'
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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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We're back with The Sunday Story. I'm here with NPR correspondent Ruth Sherlock. Ruth, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much, Aisha. First, let me thank you for being here and, you know, for taking on what is like a close Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, Syrians have had so much to contend with. But in a way, I feel it's a privilege to be able to document this moment.
So since the start of the Syrian revolution 13 years ago, there have been reports about what's been going on in the country. Systematic disappearances, brutal repression of any dissent. The Assad family ruled for over 50 years, and then the regime just collapsed. I mean, like a house of cards in a matter of days, right? Just really everything changed. Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia. You went into Syria after that happened. What was it like?
I mean, it was just surreal. Just even being able to cross the border from Lebanon would have been, you know, almost impossible for a Western journalist. Syria had become such a closed country. But just a couple of days after the fall of the regime, we did just that. We drove across and, you know, we were stamped out of the Lebanese side.
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