IZRAA, Syria—Early one morning last December, Dr. Mamdouh Zoubi drove to a farm on the edge of this small town in southern Syria to collect the bodies in a newly found mass grave, one of more than 100 turned up across the country.
The new owners of the farm, which had been sold days earlier, shortly after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, had stumbled across the bodies that morning and alerted Dr. Zoubi, who is one of the only forensic specialists in the area. The burial site, now used as a tomato farm, was next to a military checkpoint that served for years as a base for Assad’s soldiers.
