Zaman al-Wasl obtained satellite images and video footage of a cemetery holds 500 pro-Shiite fighters inside the Assad Military Academy in Aleppo province.
A well-informed source confirmed that most of the slain fighters were from the Shiite villages of Nubl and al-Zahraa in Aleppo’s countryside. The villages were evacuated in in 2018 in Iranian deal with the former al-Qaeda group.
After burying the villagers inside the Assad Academy of Military Engineering, the regime no longer allowed their families to visit their graves except on a few occasions and days, according to the same source.
One of the facts revealed by the graveyard is that the regime pursues Syrians in sectarian discrimination even post-mortem, manifested by the interest in the dead from areas that provide more human resource and are considered as more loyal.
Bashar al-Assad's quite attentive towards the fellow Alawites fighters and troops of the coastal region, as he tries in various ways to transfer their bodies to their areas to be buried among their families, whatever the cost, while the bodies of dead from the mentioned towns are buried in a graveyard behind impregnable military walls.
While the regime buries the rest of its soldiers west of Aleppo, holding thousands of dead, only hundreds of meters away from the walls of the Academy.
According to the source, the regime has displaced these fighters from their villages and towns to fight alongside its forces in the burning fronts of Aleppo, only for those who are killed to be buried in a cemetery prepared for them inside the walls of the Military Academy based on their sect, so as not to “burden” the regime with returning their corpses to their villages.
The source revealed that the burial in the Academy’s cemetery began in 2013, and continued until the siege of the towns of Nubl and al-Zahraa in 2016, confirming that it holds about 500 bodies of people from these two towns belonging to one sectarian group. Each line of the graveyard, as shown by the aerial photos, holds about 40 bodies.
Although the cemetery reveals the extent of the losses suffered by Assad forces, this number does not include all the dead from these two towns. Many of the dead that were possible to be moved to or who died near their villages were buried in there in private cemeteries. Not counting the dozens who are still unaccounted for (missing) with families still looking for news about them.
One of the nurses working in Aleppo military hospital revealed that the bodies inside the graves do not necessarily match the recorded names. In many cases, the regime's army and security staff used to bury unidentified persons under the names of people who had been confirmed dead, whose bodies were destroyed on the battlefield and it was difficult to identify their features, to avoid the trouble of answering their families about their fate.
The Alawites-dominated areas are still the main manpower supply for Bashar al-Assad's regime.
More than 130,000 pro-regime forces have been killed in seven years of brutal war, according to local monitoring groups.
The conflict in Syria has killed more than 560,000 people and displaced 6.5 millions since the revolution erupted in 2011 with the brutal repression of protests against Bashar al-Assad.
Zaman Al Wasl
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