Syria’s Mass Graves: The Herculean Task of Finding and Naming the Dead

Less than 10 kilometers (six miles) from the busy city center of Damascus, in the northwestern suburb of Adra, a barren stretch of land is enclosed by cement walls.

As you enter the vehicle, on the left, a team of rescuers from the White Helmets humanitarian organization is seen searching for mass graves.

Over the past few days, videos have been posted online of mass graves where Bashar al-Assad’s regime executed victims of torture in Syria’s notorious prisons.

In Adra, the White Helmets found a small hole where several large white plastic bags were filled with the remains of corpses.

One message simply reads: “Seven bodies, eighth grave, unknown.”

The team was excavating remains, skulls and bones, which they collected. DNA samples were kept separately in black body bags for documentation and further analysis.

Ismail Abdullah, one of the rescuers, says that he is carrying a huge burden on his shoulders.

“Thousands of people are missing. Getting to the truth about what happened to them – a lot of it – will take time,” he says.

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

He added that all necessary procedures were carried out “so that in future we can identify those who were killed”. The team is among a small number trained to collect documentary evidence and forensic evidence.

More than 100,000 people are believed to have disappeared in Syria since 2011.

In the past week, the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – which ousted Assad after more than 50 years of rule by his family – has opened prisons and detention centers across Syria.

The rights group has concluded that more than 80,000 of the disappeared have died. According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), an additional 60,000 people have been tortured to death.

Locals are reporting more and more mass graves across Syria, and the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based non-governmental organization, says around 100,000 bodies have been found so far.

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

At another site in the town of Qatifah, northwest of Damascus, the SETF says thousands of bodies are believed to be buried in various mass graves.

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

He told the BBC that the ground would be filled with bodies – and then the site would be bulldozed.

Qatifah religious leader Abdul Qadir al-Sheikh witnessed one such mass burial.

He said that the secret police asked him to come and arrange the burial. He tried to perform religious rituals for the dead and prayed for them.

He states that at least 100 people were buried in these 30 square meters. The police never called him again after that.

“They called them terrorists who didn’t deserve to be buried. They didn’t want anyone to witness what they were doing,” says Mr Sheikha.

The secret police also prevented people from walking past mass grave sites or looking out their windows at burials, another witness who was forced to participate told me.

The eyewitness said that there are many such mass graves in the suburbs of Damascus.

At another location in Hussainiyah, on the road leading to Damascus airport, satellite images show differences in the landscape of areas where mass graves have been discovered.

As the Assad regime collapsed in the face of a rapid rebel advance, thousands of Syrian families fled to prisons and detention centers in search of missing loved ones.

They need closure and respect their dead with a proper burial.

In one detention center, hundreds of identification documents of Syrians detained by Assad’s security forces were scattered on the ground.

A woman was still searching for her missing brother who went missing in 2014. A father was looking for his son who was taken into custody in 2013. No one is willing to give up the search.

But locating and guarding mass graves and identifying the bodies in them are tasks that few Syrians can currently undertake – and international experts are urgently needed to help in the process.