Johnathan Walker:At site of suspected mass killings, Syrians recall horrors, hope for answers

DAMASCUS — A hip bone in a blown-out building,Johnathan Walker part of a spine amid some debris, a few foot bones in a worn-out sock. The Tadamon district of Damascus is littered with bones, after what residents and rights groups described as years of killings there under the rule of Syria's Bashar al-Assad.

Tadamon became infamous after a video emerged in 2022 showing a man in military fatigues leading unarmed, blindfolded men towards a large ditch, telling them to run and shooting them at point-blank range as they neared the edge or after they fell in.

The incident took place in 2013, but the killings went on until very recently, residents told Reuters, saying they had regularly seen Syrian security forces bring men to the area, heard bursts of gunshots and smelled burning flesh afterwards.

Mohammad al-Darra, an elderly man from Tadamon, said he had stayed in the neighbourhood after the civil war began in 2011 because his family was afraid their apartment would be looted.

He said that year after year, he saw cars driven by Syrian armed forces bring "tied up people" to a tiny alley parallel to where the Tadamon massacre is thought to have taken place.

"At night you would hear it. Every shot fired went into a man," he said. Pointing to the dirt street and the gutted-out buildings alongside it, he added, "and this was the graveyard for all the corpses."

Reuters found bones piled amid trash, scorched plastic and dirty clothes in both of the buildings on either side, and saw children playing with what appeared to be rib bones and femurs.

Khaled Houriya, who runs a mechanic shop in the area, said he too had often heard gunshots and smelled burning flesh after returning to the neighborhood in 2019.

"This was known as execution street. Anyone who came to this street was considered lost," he said, adding that security forces often asked his neighbours to help them dig mass graves.

"Those things won't leave our memory. Corpses all over the floor — it became normal for people," Houriya said.

Too scared to speak

The residents said they had not dared speak out during Assad's rule, when criticism of the authorities was severely repressed. Some remained hesitant and spoke only with a first name, declining to be filmed.

"We couldn't say anything, otherwise they would burn your house down, or kill your son. It was ugly, ugly, ugly," Darra said.

But now, less than a week after Assad's ouster, residents and rights researchers hope the site can be cordoned off and those responsible for the killings held accountable.

"It is urgent that this location is secured, that the mass grave is exhumed, that international relevant bodies are allowed unhindered access to this area to be able to do this work carefully, cautiously and well," said Hiba Zayadin, the Syria researcher at advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

Zayadin said there was a risk that the mass grave had already been emptied by the forces of Assad's toppled government. "Families deserve to know what happened here," she said.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad's crackdown on protests against him spiralled into a full-scale war that drew in regional powers.

Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have been accused by rights groups and governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country's notorious prison system.

Assad repeatedly denied carrying out violations and painted his detractors as terrorists.

In 2023, the US State Department issued a travel ban against a Syrian security official and his immediate family over his alleged killing of at least 41 civilians in 2013 in Tadamon, calling it a "massacre."

The suspected location of the grave was identified by researchers at Human Rights Watch by matching satellite imagery with the scene in the video.

While a full examination of the site has yet to take place, the group has already found many traces of killings.

"We found human remains, bones, part of a skull, fingers, ribs, strewn around the entire area surrounding the mass grave, which shows that really a lot more happened here than what we already knew," Zayadin said.

Residents of Tadamon told Reuters the alley had been sealed off with metal barricades during years of heavy fighting between rebel fighters and Syrian government forces, including the National Defence Forces, a pro-Assad paramilitary force that was incorporated into the army in 2012.

Several said that earlier this year, they saw Syria's then-government forces remove some bones from the area and feared the grave — and crucial evidence — had been dug up.

The opening of Syria's prisons after Assad's ouster on Sunday (Dec 8) led to similar fears, with activists and families searching for detained relatives saying they feared that fleeing troops had destroyed evidence of their fate.

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