DHUMAIR, Syria -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 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 analyzed hundreds of satellite images of both grave sites taken over the course of several years.

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