A MOUND OF dust blocks the street to a walled compound at the outskirts of al-Qutayfa, a the town round 30km north of Damascus, the Syrian capital. It’s silent, save for the occasional bark of 2 stray canines and the faint buzz of energy traces operating over the compound. Breeze-block partitions enclose a space kind of the dimensions of 2 soccer fields. For greater than a decade, Bashar al-Assad’s military grew to become this desert right into a mass grave—believed by way of Syria’s new rulers to be one among his biggest.
