'I feared I'd end up in the trench like the other bodies'

Reporting from the site of a mass grave around 25 miles from the Syrian capital, Bel Trew speaks to a man who dug out the trenches before realising the horror of what was happening

- Bel Trew

It was only when the stench seeping out of the ground became unbearable that Ahmed* realised the full horror of what he was being made to dig each day.

In a remote location, around 25 miles (40km) northeast of the Syrian capital Damascus, regime officials had ordered the excavator to dig trenches 100 metres long, four metres wide, and three metres deep. It was 2012 – just one year after the start of the revolution in Syria over the regime of Bashar al-Assad – and the start of what would become a decade-long, bloody civil war.

Ahmed, now 47, who worked the morning shift, was told it was “military work” – no questions could be asked. The ground was hard, and the diggers strained against the rocky earth. “I only discovered what was happening here after I had dug about four trenches. Then I realised it was a mass grave,” he tells The Independent at the site in Qutayfah, now walled off but still untouched after the fall of the Assad regime just a week beforehand.

Four armoured vehicles, mounted with satellites and containing what appear to be Russian manuals and belongings, are stationed at each corner. A few objects, which look like bones, are scattered on the ground of the otherwise empty, scrubby patch of land.

After digging the fourth trench, Ahmed says he noticed that the holes he had dug were being inexplicably covered up by a different team who clearly worked the later shift. Then the smell started. One month in, the workers could only toil with scarves around their noses and mouths.

“The smell coming from the ground was so bad we realised it must be from bodies. Every day I dug I realised that a different bulldozer would come later to cover it,” Ahmed says, a little dazed. Horrified, he tried to quit but was threatened by regime soldiers who insisted he continue the work. “I feared I would end up in the trench like the other bodies,” he says.