Syria 'gravedigger' who witnessed thousands of people tortured to death by Assad reveals identity

A Syrian man known for years only as the "gravedigger" revealed his identity on Sunday, drawing attention to the killing of thousands of people carried out by the deposed regime of Bashar al-Assad. 

The official Syrian news agency SANA reported that the "gravedigger" identified himself during a speech at the Arab Conference held at Harvard University in the US as Mohammed Afif Naifeh, a resident of Damascus.

In his remarks on Sunday, Naifeh called for the lifting of the economic sanctions on Syria, sanctions that his testimony had helped bring about due to the regime’s crimes. However, with Assad now banished from power, Naifeh believes the time has come to scrap the sanctions so that the new Syria can rebuild without hindrance.

He highlighted that the Syrian people are suffering under these sanctions, even though four months have passed since the regime’s fall, while stressing the need to bring all perpetrators of crimes against Syrians to justice.

Naifeh was known by the alias "gravedigger" due to threats against him and his family after his defection. He is considered a key eyewitness to war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Assad regime and its allies.

Before the war, he worked for the Damascus municipality, overseeing civilian burials, which is the inspiration for his macabre codename.

But in mid-2011, following the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution, regime intelligence officers enlisted him to help dispose of bodies of anti-Assad civilians from detention centres and camps.

This continued until his escape in 2018.

Witness to crimes

In his testimony before US Congress in 2022, he described trucks arriving twice a week from security branches, prison facilities, and military hospitals, each carrying between 300 and 600 bodies of people tortured to death, including children, for burial in mass graves.

In total, Naifeh witnessed the burial of at least 6,000 bodies, all of whom had been murdered by Assad's forces. 

In 2020, he served as a central witness in Germany’s first war crimes trial related to Syria, which resulted in the conviction of former intelligence officer Anwar Raslan. Raslan was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity—crimes the court described as part of a systematic policy of murder and torture under the Assad regime.

Naifeh's testimony helped bring global attention to the Assad regime's human rights abuses alongside documentary evidence provided by Chief Warrant Officer Farid Nada al-Madhhan, a former forensic officer in the Damascus military police, known by his alias "Caesar",  who revealed his identity in February this year.

Assad, Syria's dictator for nearly a quarter of a century, fled to Russia in December last year, following his overthrow by rebel forces. 

The new Syrian government has called for Assad, and hundreds of other officials of his fallen regime who have also fled, to be brought to justice in Syria.