Damascus, May 17 (RHC)-- Thousands of bodies have reportedly been found in a mass grave in a northern Syrian town, which had been under the Daesh Takfiri terror group’s control for about a month.

Suluk, which lies less than a dozen miles away from the Turkish border, fell to Daesh in February.  The Kurdish People's Protection Units drove the terrorists back in March.

"We discovered thousands of bodies of innocent victims in the ravine,” the Kurdish forces’ commander Mohamed Jirkis said, referring to a gorge where the bodies had been dumped, according to a report in the British newspaper Daily Express.

The victims, made up of men, women and children, had reportedly been tortured before their deaths.  One eyewitness, recounting the horror, said: “They would bring those still alive to the precipice, blindfold them and shoot above their heads to scare them.  People would then start running and fall over the edge."

In early April, Syrian forces uncovered a mass grave bearing people killed by Daesh in the recently-liberated city of Palmyra in the Homs province.  Syria’s official news agency SANA quoted a field source as saying that 25 corpses, including five women and three children, had been recovered from the mass grave.

Syria has been gripped by a militancy it blames on several foreign governments, led by the United States.  According to a February report by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, the conflict in Syria has claimed the lives of over 470,000 people in total since March 2011.