Summary

Mass graves uncovered in Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow reveal evidence of systematic atrocities, with over 100,000 people tortured and killed in what a top war crimes prosecutor described as the worst abuses “since the Nazis.”

Assad’s regime operated a “machinery of death,” involving mass disappearances, torture, and secret burials.

Rebel forces freed thousands of political prisoners, but many remain missing.

International efforts aim to document war crimes, though Assad, now in Russia, is unlikely to face trial.

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    Really? Nothing else since WWII has been this bad? I can think of three off the top of my head! Syria’s neighbor is doing a holocaust right now. It’s like they’re pretending that nothing bad has happened since the Nazis were defeated.

    • Hubi@feddit.org
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      4 days ago

      There are 100.000 bodies in a single mass grave. And that is just one out of five. That’s kinda in a league of its own.

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            4 days ago

            Estimates are far higher than the official death toll - it’s hard to count bodies buried under the rubble.

            • blazeknave@lemmy.world
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              4 days ago

              Stop. Let the people of Syria be recognized for the horrors they lived through. Wtf is wrong with you?

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                4 days ago

                I will not allow Palestinians to be erased! Or any of the other mass murders of over 100,000 people! This disrespects every atrocity that has happened since the end of WWII, by saying those ones either aren’t real or don’t count.

                • teije9@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  4 days ago

                  so because theres already a genocide no other genocides can exist? Yes, the Palestina genocide is bad, but that doesn’t mean posting about any other genocide is hate towards Palestinians.

                  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                    4 days ago

                    You don’t get to say “the worst since WWII” when there were other genocides that compared or were worse since WWII. It’s erasing history.

                    “Worst” is what I’m taking issue with.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      After thinking about it, I’ve realized why they always use Nazis as the measuring stick: it’s the last event of this type that the majority of Americans are familiar with.

      Which I think says quite a bit about the education level of our populace

    • DankOfAmerica@reddthat.com
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      4 days ago

      The Cambodian Genocide

      The Cambodian genocide was the systematic persecution and killing of Cambodian citizens by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot. It resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly 25% of Cambodia’s population in 1975 (c. 7.8 million) reducing the nation’s life expectancy to a staggering 12 years in 1975.

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      I agree with your point but I think the Palestinian genocide is a bad example. Imo better examples from the top of my mind: the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides likely were far worse both in absolute numbers and as a % of the population, and the policies of Maoist China got many more people killed.

        • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Mao’s policies weren’t deliberate, the bird thing was an attempt to help his people. Idk why this is constantly brought up when it is no where in the same league as someone deliberately trying to kill people. It just reeks of stupid western propaganda.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        The Palestinian genocide is happening right now, is my point. We don’t have to crawl through history to find atrocities.

        Indonesia after the CIA coup is another good example, or Iraq when we killed over a million people. This stuff is way more recent than WWII.

        • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          And the Palestinian genocide and your other examples aren’t “worse” in any metric (yet). The use and misrepresentation of those examples just tells us that you’re a tankie who engages in whataboutism and spreads untruths to build a narrative.

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            4 days ago

            Between 500,000 to one million were killed in Indonesia and Iraq. The fuck you mean they aren’t worse?

            And the Palestinian genocide is at least within the same order of magnitude.

            Why are you erasing them?

    • Reyali@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      You’re angry about a headline that abbreviates the actual story.

      The very first paragraph of the article:

      Mass graves uncovered in Syria in the days since President Bashar al-Assad wasoverthrown are exposing evidence of some of the worst abuses since the Nazis, a top international war crimes prosecutor said. [emphasis mine]

      The article agrees with you. It’s only the headline that doesn’t.

      This kind of anger and engagement at headlines is exactly what the media thrives off of. Don’t let them win by doing just that.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        They win by getting you to click on the article. 🙄

        They don’t get to smuggle lies into headlines and then clarify in the article. They should be held accountable for that kind of click bait.

        • Reyali@lemm.ee
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          3 days ago

          So contact NBC with your concerns. Arguing with people who can’t change it just makes people who might otherwise agree with you frustrated with your point of view.

    • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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      4 days ago

      You mean the country that is claiming Syrian sovereign space like the Golan Heights for their illegal settlements since the 90s?

    • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Yes, nothing.

      No one here is claiming what Israel is doing isn’t horrible (hell, you’re the only one bringing it up). But, this is worse. Wild how there can be more than one bad thing and one being worse doesn’t make the other one not bad, isn’t it?

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 days ago

        Don’t argue with a .ml user when they move the goalposts to be “America bad” without any context. It’s a losing battle.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        This isn’t worse! The official death toll is a massive undercount, the real death toll is probably in the same order of magnitude.

    • perestroika@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      It’s going to take some time (and digging) to find out.

      However… events that unfolded in Cambodia will almost certainly have exceeded what is going to be discovered in Syria.

      Most likely the same can be said about things that happened in Indonesia.

      Events that continue to happen in North Korea may possibly exceed - once the place collapses and access becomes possible - which may take a century - what Bashar and his father managed to organize.

    • Eheran@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      The Russians never stopped doing such things. Before, during and after WW2.

      • LustyArgonian@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Yeah, from what I’ve gathered, Putin has enslaved and trafficked his own people (and in some cases killed and grave robbed them) for money and blackmail. Remember the monkey torture video rings? Well, it seems like Putin was doing that with his own people along with prisoners and trafficked people from other countries, to make every kind of video you could think of, to sell to influential people worldwide to gain blackmail on them. He also likely had irl experiences that people like Trump engaged in.

        In Michael Wolff’s Fire&Fury podcast and book, he asserts Russia has pictures of Trump with topless minors. Katie Johnson also said he raped her and another girl when they were 13 and 12, and hit them afterwards for not performing good enough. This is absolutely a man who would engage in disturbing behavior overseas, and Epstein himself called Trump depraved and said there was nothing he couldn’t do. You can listen to Epstein himself say it in the podcast.

        There’s also the Active Measures documentary with John McCain and Hilary Clinton. And Unger’s book American Kompromat.

        So yeah, it’s likely the snuff videos from Russia you’d see on 4chan and Instagram were state sponsored media meant to get money and blackmail. It’s likely the extreme Russian torture videos were state sponsored. It’s likely that Tulsi, Elon (who admitted in court this year he has a kink roleplay account on X of his toddler XAE, who he took to meet Erdogan and keeps kidnapped from his mom), JDolphin Vance, RFK Jr, Tucker “a demon scratched me in bed not my dogs and no Putin isnt blackmailing me to say this as a wink towards what im being blackmailed for” Carlson, and all the rest, have SERIOUS SERIOUS blackmail on them.

        All at the expense of Russian people and enslaved people.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      How “whatabout” that.

      Stop trying to shove this news under the carpet with your “I know worse but I won’t tell you!!1!”

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        I’m trying to point out that history didn’t start and end in WWII, and pointing to something just as bad happening right now.

        • Valmond@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          Oh, I didn’t see that you’re an “ml”

          Whatever works in your fantasy world and makes you happy 🤷🏼‍♀️

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            4 days ago

            I expect nothing less from reddit.world 🙄

            Do you really think 100,000 people haven’t been killed in any since conflict since WWII? Cuz that’s the implication.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        The official toll isn’t over 100,000 (can’t count people under the rubble) but estimates put it over 100,000 i.e. same order of magnitude. Gaza being smaller just makes these estimates even more horrifying.

        But also, not just talking about Gaza. Lots of other atrocities have lead to mass death on this scale and larger.

    • wewbull@feddit.uk
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      4 days ago

      I don’t think we need to play Topp Trumps Genocide Edition. Can we just agree that it’s horrific what Assad (and by extension, Putin) have been doing in Syria?

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        No, we need to acknowledge that Assad is not the worst since WWII, otherwise we erase all the other atrocities that have happened.

        Other genocides have happened. Worse genocides have happened. History didn’t start and end in WWII.

        • wewbull@feddit.uk
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          3 days ago

          You do realise that saying “… it’s not the worst that’s happened” is also a form of erasure.

          …but of course, you do.

    • john89@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      You must not know what the definition of “worst” means.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        I must not! I’m pretty sure “worst since the Nazis” means " nothing between now and then was worse". As far as I was aware, worst means worse than everything else.

        Worse than Indonesia. Cambodia. Algeria. Iraq. Korea. Vietnam. Yugoslavia. Evidently no atrocities have happened since WWII! 🙄

        • john89@lemmy.ca
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          4 days ago

          It’s like they’re pretending that nothing bad has happened since the Nazis were defeated.

          That’s different from saying you think worse things happened.

          Might want to brush up on your reading comprehension, buddy.

          • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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            4 days ago

            If something is “the worst” then nothing worse happened, ergo, they’re pretending that all the other worse things didn’t happen. Evidently, the million people that were killed in Iraq and Indonesia just aren’t as important.

            • john89@lemmy.ca
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              4 days ago

              If something is “the worst” then nothing worse happened

              Yes. That’s different from “nothing bad has happened.”