Mass grave found near Syria’s capital could contain thousands of bodies
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/17/mass-grave-found-near-syrias-capital-could-contain-100000-bodies
A mass grave that could contain the remains of thousands of people has been found outside Syria’s capital Damascus, as the new interim government promises to hold accountable those responsible for atrocities under the ousted President Bashar al-Assad.
The site at al-Qutayfah, located 40km (25 miles) north of the capital, was one of several mass graves identified across the country after the collapse of the decades-long rule of the al-Assad family.
Twelve mass graves were also discovered in southern Syria. At one site, 22 bodies, including those of women and children, exhibited signs of execution and torture.
Al-Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, are accused of killing hundreds of thousands through extrajudicial killings, including in the country’s notorious prison system.
Body bags lie on a field after a mass grave was discovered on agricultural land in Izra, in Syria's southern Deraa province
Corpses, men who don’t know their names: Scenes from a Damascus hospital
In the furthest room of the Mujtahid Hospital basement in Damascus, a frail young man with jet-black hair crouches on the floor. He holds his face in his trembling hands as people walk in and out.
People come in to look at him, hoping he might be their lost relative. When they manage to convince the man to look up, his face stares not at them, but through them, his eyes calm but distant.
A young doctor, who asked to remain anonymous, at the reception desk says: “They don’t recognise anyone. “He only remembers his name, and sometimes it’s the wrong name. It may be the name of one of his cellmates.”
The staff here say the man was tortured at the Red Prison at Sednaya, the most brutal and notorious of prisons the regime of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad operated.
He is one of many who have been tortured to the point of forgetting their own identities, according to the doctor.
Crouching on the floor of a hospital room, this man does not know who he is any more after the torture he lived through
Hospital staff said sometimes families will come and claim a former detainee as a family member. “Sometimes 10 different people believe the same patient is their relative or their son,” he said. “A person’s features change after he stays in prison for a long time.”
What happens far too often, though, is that the family will later discover that the person they brought home is not their relative and they return them to the hospital so their actual families can find them. It’s hard to say if any of this has an effect on the detainees, however.
The Assad regime detained or forcibly disappeared at least 136,000 people since March 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. About 31,000 of those people have been released from prisons, meaning 105,000 people are still missing.
As mass graves are being uncovered and investigated around the country, including in Damascus’s outskirts, a ghoulish task rears its head: figuring out who is in there.
“I can state with confidence that the majority of these individuals have tragically perished under torture,” Fadel Abdulghany, executive director of the SNHR, told Al Jazeera on December 14, nearly a week after al-Assad’s prisons had been liberated.
These atrocities have been documented and known about for years, yet several states had been making moves to normalise relations with the Assad regime.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/12/17/syrians-damascus-hospital-disappeared
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