Skulls and body bags: in search of the missing Syrians

Adra is a strange sort of neighborhood cemetery: two isolated graves lie in an empty expanse of bumpy earth, barely covered with grass.

For years, this area was tightly controlled by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Now, a week after their escape, a concrete slab in a corner of this empty cemetery has been moved to reveal a shallow grave containing at least half a dozen white bags, labeled with names and prison numbers .

Khaled al Hamad, a local resident, was desperately taking out bags when we arrived.

He shows us the three he has already opened. Each contains a human skull and bones. Markings on the bags suggest they are the remains of two female prisoners and a man.

It is unclear how they died, or whether this is evidence of criminal abuse by the Assad regime.

But Khaled doesn’t need convincing. He is searching for his two brothers, Jihad and Hussein, captured by Assad’s air force intelligence a decade ago. Since then, we haven’t heard anything about it.

“Some people were taken to an area called the ‘driving school’ and liquidated there,” he said. “I guess this happened to my brothers. Maybe they’re buried here in some of these bags.”

We shared this information with Human Rights Watch in Syria, which said they were investigating reports of prisoners’ remains being dumped in similar bags elsewhere.

Assad’s fall has unleashed a tsunami of hope among families who have been left for decades with no way of knowing what happened to their loved ones.

“If you ever passed by here (during the Assad era), you couldn’t stop, you couldn’t look up,” Khaled said.

“The cars were speeding by. If you stopped, they would come up to you, put a plastic bag over your head and take you away.”

Tens of thousands of families like hers are now searching for missing loved ones in Assad’s notorious prison system or his military interrogation centers.

Some were taken to the Mazzeh military airbase in Damascus.

This site, once a key buffer between Assad and rebel forces, is deserted. Abandoned military boots are scattered across the runway, a live rocket lies on the ground, the only signs of life are the new guards at the gate: young militiamen from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that took control of Syria. last week.

They show us the torture room used by Assad’s forces – including a metal pole to secure prisoners’ feet before beating them, and a set of wires next to an electrical panel.

“Here, they electrocuted the prisoners,” the commander of the guards, Abu Jarrah, told me. “These are electric cables – the investigator sits here, the guards put them on the prisoner’s body and turn on the power.

“The prisoner loses his mind and confesses everything. They tell the interrogator to write whatever he wants, hoping it stops.”

Abu Jarrah also said that the 400 women detained here were regularly raped and that children were being born in the prison.

The only thing more painful than finding your parent or child among the files here is not finding them at all.

In the next building, families desperately scratch at miniature photos scattered in piles on the concrete floor – face after face, dark and empty, silent witnesses to the years of Assad’s rule.

Among them, sobbed the mother of Mahmoud Saed Hussein, a Kurd from al-Qamishli.

“Yesterday we saw that he was registered at the air base prison,” she told me. “We came but we didn’t find him. I’ve been looking for him for 11 years, looking for him from one prison to another.”

“They are all like my son,” she cried, pointing to the piles of photos on the floor. “May God burn Assad’s heart, as he burned ours.”

Beyond, three rooms filled with files open onto each other, one after the other. Several people are squatting on a mountain of documents several meters high which cover the ground.

The Assad regime has meticulously documented its brutality – a vast terrorist bureaucracy that makes the scale of its actions all too clear, but in which the stories of individuals are often lost or submerged.

“What are these grades?” a woman was angry. “No one is helping us. We want someone to come check these documents with us. How can I find him among all these prison files?”

The lack of any orderly system means that crucial evidence is being lost every day at sites across Syria – information on the missing, but also potentially on links between the Assad regime and foreign governments like the US. United States or the United Kingdom, both of which have been accused of benefiting from the American policy of extraordinary renditions, under which terrorist suspects were sent for interrogation to countries that used torture.

Human rights groups have accused the British government of turning a blind eye to American practices during the so-called war on terror, when the United States sent detainees to several Middle Eastern countries, including the Syria.

Outside, the air base’s silent hangars are strewn with the charred remains of Russian-made planes and radars, hit by repeated Israeli airstrikes over the past week.

Assad’s departure has shifted the delicate balance of power between Syria’s warring groups and their various international backers, including Turkey, Iran and the United States.

It’s never just about a war in Syria, and outside powers always have a stake in what happens here.

Syrians are convinced that the time has come for them to govern themselves without anyone telling them what to do.

As we leave, a young HTS fighter climbs onto a roof to carve the portrait of Assad hanging above the interrogation building.

He smiles at the comrades watching from below, as photos and documents from the regime’s military files float around their boots.

Assad’s fall posed unanswered questions about Syria’s future, but it also left many questions from the past unanswered.