Mass Grave Believed to Contain 70 Corpses Uncovered in Southern Syria

Forensic teams are carrying out an investigation after finding a mass grave in Syria's southern province of Daraa.

The remains of over thirty corpses were uncovered on Monday in the village of Izraa, with the expected number of corpses believed to reach seventy.

Relatives said they initially had hopes they would find their loved ones in a prison. "But we didn't find anyone and it broke our hearts. They were burned alive here after being doused in fuel,” said Mohammad Ghazaleh at the mass grave site.

Following the ouster of Bashar Assad’s government earlier in the month, relatives of prisoners rushed to prisons all over Syria in hopes to find their loved ones.

Syria's prisons have been infamous for their harsh conditions, and many locations were never identified before the fall of Assad. Torture was systematic according to human rights groups, whistle-blowers, and former detainees. Secret executions have been reported at more than two dozen facilities run by Syrian intelligence.

At the mass grave in Izraa, Moussa Al-Zouebi, the head of the village's health directorate, said some of the people whose remains were uncovered were executed by "shooting in the head, in the eye, or by burning.”

The new authorities in Damascus have designated a hotline for people and ex-prisoners to identify locations and secret prisons used by Assad's government to find any trace of missing persons.

Since the fall of Assad nearly two weeks ago, insurgents freed thousands of prisoners in cities including Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Damascus.

Syria's southern province of Daraa is where the 2011 uprising against Assad's government first erupted.