‘It’s a slaughterhouse, a machinery of death,’ says Syrian Emergency Task Force director

We spoke to Mouaz Mustafa, executive director of the Syrian emergency taskforce, and asked how certain he was that his uncle was one of those buried in the mass graves of Al-Qutayfa.

Our conversation contains extremely graphic and distressing descriptions of torture.

Mouaz Mustafa: If he is, and we believe he is, unfortunately. I’ve searched everywhere in Damascus for him and American citizens and others as well. Qutayfa would be where he would have been thrown alongside the hundreds of thousands, frankly, of bodies that have been buried in mass graves by the Assad regime.

Matt Frei: What was he arrested for?

Mouaz Mustafa: Just like every other Syrian, if you do humanitarian work, if you do medical work, if you try to help besieged civilians, that’s a much bigger crime in the eyes of the Assad regime than if you carry arms. And my uncle worked very hard to provide ventilators for poor people in Eastern Ghouta, the suburbs of Damascus, that were besieged because he knew and because he had seen soldiers with gas masks, that gas could be used. He also was someone who would help organise protests and write graffiti on the walls, saying, ‘we call for democracy, we call for an end to tyranny.’

Matt Frei: It’s so hard for us to imagine what it’s like to have a relative, a loved one, just disappear off the face of the earth.

Mouaz Mustafa: They didn’t just take him. They took my uncle, they took his one-year-old Omar, his four-year-old daughter Maria, his 14 -year-old daughter Sally and my aunt, his wife. And I even had sent another female cousin to go check on them – they took her as well. Thank God we were able to get the women and the children out. I went to every place where my uncle could have been. And I went to Sednaya, where he would have been last, and I was not able…to find any evidence of him.

Matt Frei: I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what you’re going through at the moment. Do you still hold out any hope at all that he might still be found alive?

Mouaz Mustafa: I know objectively that 99% he’s gone, and 99% that’s a high percentage. You know, pretty much, let’s have a funeral, let’s move on, and so on. You cling on to that 0.1% chance. And so it’s a weird thing because I know – and I would be telling somebody else that that would have been in my place – ‘listen, he’s gone, open a court case, have a funeral. Move on. He’s in heaven right now, watching the liberation of Syria happen from afar.’ But as a human being, as someone who loves someone else, I still want to cling on to that 0.001% because I don’t have a body. And that’s the story of so many families.

Matt Frei: Do you think there can ever be any form of justice for what happened to your uncle and to so many others?

Mouaz Mustafa: I believe so. I believe in justice no matter how long it takes. Look, we’re 14 years of war. The world ignored chemical weapons, cluster bombs, barrel bombs, Russian bombardment, torture and rape of men, women, children – literally everyone. And they let it go. But after 14 years, the Syrians liberated themselves without any outside support. And, you know, maybe that was for the best. The world should be ashamed of it. But the same thing applies to justice. No matter how long it takes, we will get each one of these people, starting with Bashar al-Assad, no matter how long it takes.

Matt Frei: What happened to your uncle is a deep personal tragedy for you and your family and for his friends. But the scale of the atrocities, the size of these mass graves, 100,000 people perhaps, or more, buried in these pits, that is something truly historic, isn’t it?

Mouaz Mustafa: The scale of these atrocities is not only gigantic, but how they died. Imagine pulling the fingernails out of little babies’ hands, imagine using a drill into people’s kneecaps, imagine taking an elderly man, cutting him open and throwing salt in his wound. That’s how these people died. It is a slaughterhouse – a machinery of death. But death in the worst ways possible. And we always say never again. Well, it just happened. Maybe from now we can start with ‘never again’. Not just for Syria, but for the rest of the world. For our world order.