The international war crimes prosecutor has announced that evidence found at mass burial sites in Syria points to state "death mechanisms" under ousted leader Bashar al-Assad.
According to his estimate, more than 100 thousand people have been tortured and killed since 2013.
Speaking after visiting two mass burial sites in the cities of Qutayfa and Naja near Damascus, former US special envoy Stephen Rapp told Reuters.
"There are more than 100 Hz—people who disappeared and were tortured in these death machines. I do not doubt in terms of the numbers, given what we've seen in these mass graves. We haven't seen anything like it since the Nazis," Rapp said.
According to Stephen Rapp, the system of state terror has turned into a mechanism of death. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are believed to have been killed since Assad's crackdown on protests escalated into full-scale war in 2011. Both Assad and his father, Hafez, who preceded him as president in 2000, have long been a target of human rights groups. And have been accused by governments of large-scale extrajudicial executions. These included mass executions in the country's prison system and the use of chemical weapons against the people.
