By Daphne Psaledakis and Simon Lewis
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is engaged with a number of United Nations bodies to ensure the Syrian people get answers and accountability when it comes to mass graves, detention sites and torture sites in Syria, the State Department said on Tuesday.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller at a regular news briefing called for answers for the families of those who had been disappeared, tortured and killed in Syria and accountability for those who did it.
The administration of President Joe Biden was engaged with the Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, among other UN bodies, Miller said.
An international war crimes prosecutor said on Tuesday that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has exposed a state-run “machinery of death” under toppled leader Bashar al-Assad in which he estimated more than 100,000 people were tortured and murdered since 2013.
“When you look at the evidence that is coming out of Syria in the now 10 days since the Assad regime fell, it continues to shock the conscience,” Miller said, referring to the mass graves as well as information the U.S. government has been gathering, including information he said was not yet publicly known.
“We just continue to see more and more evidence pile up of how brutal they were in mistreating their own people, in murdering and torturing their own people,” Miller said.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on protests against his rule grew into a full-scale civil war.
Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, are accused by Syrians, rights groups and other governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country’s notorious prison system.
Assad repeatedly denied that his government committed human rights violations and painted his detractors as extremists.
(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Simon Lewis, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)