“We are talking about a system of state terror," Stephen Rapp, former U.S. war crimes ambassador at large, said of how people lived in Syria under the Assad regime.
Summary
Mass graves uncovered in Syria after Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow reveal evidence of systematic atrocities, with over 100,000 people tortured and killed in what a top war crimes prosecutor described as the worst abuses “since the Nazis.”
Assad’s regime operated a “machinery of death,” involving mass disappearances, torture, and secret burials.
Rebel forces freed thousands of political prisoners, but many remain missing.
International efforts aim to document war crimes, though Assad, now in Russia, is unlikely to face trial.
Why didn't they compare it to Stalin? His worst abuses were after Nazis and it would've tracked more anyway because of the political angle and because both Stalin and al-Assad committed crimes on their "own people".
I'm on-side with socialism - but to be fair, most of the real world examples that call/called themselves socialist do have a pretty bad track record of descending into totalitarianism/authoritarianism.