Syria mass graves: Grim task of searching for and naming the dead

1 week ago 3

Less than 10km (six miles) from the busy Damascus city centre, in the north-western suburb of Adra, an arid stretch of land is sealed off with cement walls.

As you drive in, on the left-hand side, a team of rescuers from the White Helmets humanitarian organisations are seen searching for mass graves.

Over the past few days, several videos were posted online about mass graves where Bashar al-Assad's regime buried victims of torture inside Syrian prisons.

The White Helmets rescuers have found a small hole on one block where several big white plastic bags are filled with remains of bodies.

A message simply reads: "Seven bodies, eighth grave, unknown".

The team have started pulling out the remains, skulls and bones, which they collected. DNA samples are being put separately in black body bags for documentation and further analysis.

Ismael Abdullah, one of the rescuers, says they are carrying a heavy burden on their shoulders.

"Thousands of people are missing. It is going to take time - a lot of it - to get anywhere near the truth about what happened to them," he tells me.

"Today, after receiving a call about possible mass grave here, we found on the ground the remains of seven civilians."

He adds that all the necessary procedures were carried out "so in the future we can identify those people who were killed".

The team are among a few those who have been trained on documenting and collecting forensic evidence.

Human rights groups say more than 100,000 people have disappeared in Syria since 2011.

In the past week, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebels - who ousted Assad - opened up several prisons and detention centres across Syria.

Rights group have concluded that more than 80,000 of the missing are dead. Another 60,000 are believed to have been tortured to death, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Locals are reporting more and more locations of mass graves across Syria, and the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based non-governmental organisation, says that nearly 100,000 bodies have been found.

Human Rights Watch says such graves should be protected and investigated.

At another site in Qutayfah town, north-west of Damascus, the SETF says thousands of bodies are believed to be buried in different mass graves.

One local resident, who witnessed the burial of the bodies during the years of the war, says they were packed in refrigerated containers brought in by security forces.

The ground would be filled with bodies - and then the site would be flattened by bulldozers.

Qutayfah's religious leader Abdul Kadir al-Sheikha witnessed one such mass burial.

He was asked by secret police to come and manage the burial. He tried to give the dead the religious rituals and prayed for them.

He tells me that in these 30 sq m (323 sq ft), at least 100 people were buried. After that he was never called in again by the police, he adds.

"They called them terrorists who didn't deserve burial. They didn't want anyone to witness what they were doing," Abdul Kadir says.

The secret police prevented people from passing by any mass grave sites or even looking out from their windows when they carried out the burial, another witness who was forced to take part in the burial told me.

In the suburbs of Damascus and near a detention centre, there are many mass graves that are scattered around, the witness adds.

Some satellite images show differences in the landscape of areas where mass graves have been discovered at another site in Husseiniyeh, on the road that leads to the Damascus airport.

Thousands of families rushed to prisons and detention centres following the fall of the regime in search for their missing loved ones.

People need to have closure by honouring their dead with a burial.

At one detention centre, hundreds of IDs are scattered on the ground for those who were detained by Assad's forces.

One woman is still searching for her missing brother who disappeared in 2014; a father is looking for his son who was detained in 2013. Many more are still looking for their beloved ones and do not want to give up their desperate search.

But locating and protecting mass graves, as well as identifying the bodies, are the tasks that Syrians can't perform on their own - and international experts are urgently needed to help with the process.

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