Syria’s mass graves: accounting for dead is crucial for the nation to heal

By Stefan Schmitt

Shortly after the fall of Bashar Assad in Syria in December 2024, reports emerged of mass graves being uncovered in liberated areas .

Grim as such discoveries are, they should come as little surprise. The scale of the regime’s torture and killings in its detention facilities became evident years earlier, when in January 2014 a forensic photographer defected and left the country with a cache of 55,000