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oneNo matter where you dig, you’ll stumble upon a body. That was the warning Hamza, 42, gave as he tentatively examined a bone he had just stepped on. It looks like it might be part of the hip.
The Syrian father of three was missing in Syria after being held as a political prisoner for 11 years Bashar al-Assad prison dungeon during the bloody civil war.
Then, in December 2024, rebels led by Islamist fighter (and current president) Ahmed al-Sharaa, Tear open the prison and free him.
Hamza’s first act of freedom was to this wasteland near Sayida Zeinab, southeast of his native capital. damascus. Local communities believe that as many as 1,000 bodies, killed by regime fire or the army, were hastily dumped in three areas. grave here.
Together with former inmate Fouad Nal, another political prisoner held in Assad’s prisons for 21 years, they formed an association of released detainees and their families to try to seek justice. The first step is to identify the deceased.
“Of course, we don’t know who many of them were or who their relatives were,” Hamza said, explaining how they recorded and reburied the 400 people who lined up in a corner of the site.
They keep discovering more. Just days before we arrived, they stumbled upon the latest body in a blood-stained body bag.
Inside was the body of a man with a broken femur, smashed teeth and a cable wrapped around his neck: all signs of torture and execution.
All they could do was take photos, say funeral prayers and notify authorities.
Hamza added desperately: “Even now, some families of missing persons still hold out hope that their loved ones are still alive and just being held elsewhere.”
“I saw an unspeakable number of people die or be murdered in prison.”
It’s been exactly one year since Bashar al Assad took office. Syria Decades of iron-fisted rule, Ousted. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, at least 181,000 people are still missing.
Many people are believed to be buried in hundreds of mass graves, which still need to be excavated, recorded and recorded. It’s a daunting task for a country devastated by 13 years of civil war, crippling Western sanctions and decades of dictatorship, with the World Bank estimating that reconstruction costs will exceed $216 billion.
Dr. Anas Al-Hourani, a forensic dentist and head of the Syrian Forensic Identification Center in Damascus, said these reasons mean they lack the proper equipment and mechanisms.
His cupboards were filled with skulls and bones salvaged from the Damascus area. In the first six months alone, the center received more than 150 bodies.
As Syria has yet to begin large-scale excavation of mass graves, Dr Harouni’s team has been dealing with bodies found dumped on the ground.
“We also encountered problems during the retrieval. It was not done in a scientific way. Body parts were mixed up,” he explained.
The ICRC helped provide tools such as dissecting tables, kits to compare bone types and photography equipment, he said.
But the real key to finding the missing is a DNA testing center, which does not yet exist.
Currently, they rely on more simulation alternatives, such as examining jaws or ribs.
“But at least it’s a glimmer of hope for the families of the missing. They’re starting to believe it’s possible,” he said, studying the latest skeleton.
“Finding the remains or graves of their loved ones is like a new lease of life for these families who have been waiting for years for even the smallest piece of news.”
For more than half a century, the Assad family has operated an industrialized system of disappearances, detentions, torture and summary executions of critics. This incident took place in an extremely complex “Château d’If” prison network.
Of the six facilities visited independentevidence of torture is still visible. There are countless windowless single cells underground, so big that there is no place to even lie down.
The regime often takes pains to document the atrocities it commits. Military photographer and defector, codenamed Caesar, 11,000 bodies of detainees photographed showing signs of tortureBetween 2011 and 2013, the images were so horrific that they prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to impose tough sanctions on Syria.
Those sanctions were temporarily suspended since Assad’s fall but were not fully lifted until earlier this month. Mouaz Moustafa of the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), which initially helped smuggle Caesar out of Syria, explained that being “in Caesar’s shadow” has undermined the work of major international organizations.
“It blocks the high technology needed and prevents companies from clearing the rubble or conducting forensic analysis. It blocks long-term financial commitments,” he added.
The SETF has been working to repeal those sanctions that they helped push for in the first place. In December, the U.S. Senate voted to permanently remove them. A day later, Trump signed the final repeal order.
This will hopefully remove some of the barriers to finding missing people.
In the interim, the country under its new rulers has attempted to begin identifying the dead.
In May, the new government established a National Commission on Missing Persons to collect evidence of enforced disappearances under Assad.
Zeina Shahla, the committee’s media adviser, acknowledged that progress was slow but that the process was complex.
The committee met with Syrian advocacy groups and some families. In November, a cooperation agreement was signed with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Commission on Missing Persons, which has global expertise on the issue.
Shahra told Reuters that next year the committee hopes to use documents from prisons and other locations to build a database of all missing persons. But she added that digging mass graves would require more technical expertise and might not be possible until 2027.
Fouad said Assad’s victims also want the establishment of a special court affiliated with the United Nations.
“If you want a country based on law and justice, you have to have proper trials, you have to have rights,” he explained.
Fouad’s own story is unimaginable. He was arrested in the early 2000s for criticizing the state.
Regime interrogators kidnapped his then-four-month-old daughter and wife, imprisoned them and used them as a method of torture against him, forcing him to sign a blank confession. He collapsed when they made him listen to his baby girl cry all night because she was left hungry and cold in the solidarity cell next door. He was brutally tortured for years.
“The most painful thing about being in prison is missing my children growing up. For 21 years, I couldn’t hug or see my children,” he said through tears.
“I won’t forgive what happened to me, but I won’t retaliate either,” he continued. “Everyone with blood on their hands must face justice.”
Back in Sayida Zeinab, Hamza continues his mission to identify the dead in mass graves known to the community. If they could find the right equipment and team, he said, they could find “more than 1,000 people buried here alone.”
“These people have names, they have families, they have people who care. They need closure,” Fouad added, looking at the trenches behind him.
“We need justice in the new Syria.”