In the fall of 2018, top Syrian leaders convened at Bashar al-Assad's presidential palace to discuss strategies for concealing mounting evidence of mass graves and torture facilities linked to the regime, according to two individuals briefed on the meeting. The meeting, held at the palace overlooking Damascus, involved heads of security agencies arriving in convoys of black SUVs.

One proposal put forth by Kamal Hassan, a security official who ran an infamous arm of Syria, involved scrubbing the identities of Syrians who died in secret prisons from official records, the two people said. The aim was to eliminate any paper trail that could implicate the regime in human rights abuses. The reporters spent a year combing through thousands of pages of documents and talking to dozens of former Assad-era officials.

The alleged cover-up efforts came amid increasing international scrutiny of the Assad regime's human rights record during the Syrian civil war. Leaks detailing the scale of deaths in detention centers and the systematic use of torture had begun to surface, prompting concern from international human rights organizations and foreign governments.

The Syrian government has consistently denied allegations of widespread human rights abuses and has maintained that its security forces were engaged in legitimate counter-terrorism operations. State media outlets have portrayed reports of mass graves and torture as propaganda designed to undermine the government's legitimacy.

The current status of the alleged cover-up efforts remains unclear. However, the emergence of leaked documents and testimonies from former officials continues to fuel investigations by international bodies seeking to hold individuals accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Syrian conflict. Pictures of missing Syrians pasted on a monument in a public square in Damascus last January serve as a stark reminder of the unresolved fate of thousands of individuals believed to have been detained by the Syrian government.