The Assad government carried out a two-year clandestine operation to truck thousands of bodies from one of Syria’s largest known mass graves to a secret location more than an hour away in the remote desert, a Reuters investigation has found.

The conspiracy by former President Bashar al-Assad’s military to excavate the mass grave in Qutayfah and create an enormous second mass grave in the desert outside the town of Dhumair has not been previously reported.

To uncover the location of the Dhumair grave site and detail the vast operation, Reuters spoke to 13 people with direct knowledge of the two-year effort to move the bodies, reviewed documents produced by officials involved, and analysed hundreds of satellite images of both grave sites taken over the course of several years.

The operation to transfer bodies from Qutayfah to another hidden site dozens of kilometres away was called Operation Move Earth and it lasted from 2019 until 2021.

The purpose of the operation was to cover up the Assad government’s crimes and help restore its image, the witnesses said.

Reuters informed the government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa of the findings of this investigation on Tuesday. The government didn’t immediately respond to questions for this report.

The news agency is not revealing the site’s precise location here, to reduce the likelihood that intruders may tamper with the grave. A forthcoming Reuters special report will detail the story of how the Assad government executed the clandestine operation and how reporters uncovered the scheme.

With at least 34 trenches measuring 2 kilometres long, the grave in the Dhumair desert is among the most extensive created during the Syrian civil war, Reuters has found. Witness accounts and the dimensions of the new site suggest that tens of thousands of people could be buried there.

Assad’s government began burying the dead at Qutayfah around 2012, early in the civil war. The mass grave contained the bodies of soldiers and prisoners who died in the dictator’s prisons and military hospitals, the witnesses said.

A Syrian human rights activist exposed Qutayfah by releasing photos to local media in 2014, revealing the grave’s existence and its general location on the outskirts of Damascus. Its precise location came to light a few years later, in court testimony and other media reports.

For four nights nearly every week from February 2019 to April 2021, six to eight trucks filled with dirt and human remains travelled from Qutayfah to the Dhumair desert site, according to the witnesses involved in the operation.

Reuters could not confirm if bodies from elsewhere also arrived at the secret site and found no documentation mentioning Operation Move Earth or mass graves more generally.

Everyone directly involved vividly recalled the stench, including two truckers, three mechanics, a bulldozer operator and a former officer from Assad’s elite Republican Guard who was involved from the earliest days of the transfer.

Former President Assad, who is in Russia, and several military officials identified by witnesses as playing key roles in the operation could not be reached for comment.

After the dictatorship’s fall late last year, Assad and many of his aides fled the country.