By Daphné Psaledakis and Simon Lewis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is working with a number of United Nations agencies to ensure the Syrian people get answers and accountability for mass graves, detention sites and torture sites in Syria , the State Department said Tuesday.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, at a regular news conference, called for answers for the families of those who disappeared, tortured and killed in Syria and for accountability for those who committed these acts.

President Joe Biden’s administration has been working with the Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, among other United Nations agencies, Miller said.

An international war crimes prosecutor said Tuesday that evidence from mass grave sites in Syria revealed a state-run “death machine” under the rule of deposed leader Bashar al-Assad, in which, according to him, more than 100,000 people have been tortured and murdered since 2013.

“When you look at the evidence that has come out of Syria in the ten days since the fall of the Assad regime, it continues to shock the conscience,” Miller said, referring to the mass graves as well as reports that the government American gathered. , including information that he said was not yet publicly known.

“We just continue to see more and more evidence of how brutal they have been in mistreating their own people, murdering and torturing their own people,” Miller said.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on protests against his rule escalated into a full-scale civil war.

Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, are accused by Syrians, rights groups and other governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions in within the country’s infamous prison system.

Assad has repeatedly denied that his government has committed human rights violations and portrayed his critics as extremists.

(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Simon Lewis, editing by Rosalba O’Brien)