A daunting task to search for and name the dead

Less than 10 km (six miles) from Damascus’s busy city center, in the northwestern suburb of Adra, a dry patch of land is cordoned off with concrete walls.

As you drive in, on the left you can see a team of rescuers from the humanitarian organization “White Helmets” searching for mass graves.

In recent days, videos of mass graves where Bashar al-Assad’s regime buried those tortured to death in Syria’s notorious prisons have been published online.

In Adra, the White Helmets had found a small hole in which several large white plastic bags were filled with corpse remains.

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

The team pulled out the remains, skulls and bones they had collected. DNA samples were placed separately in black body bags for documentation and further analysis.

Ismael Abdullah, one of the rescuers, says they carry a heavy burden on their shoulders.

“Thousands of people are missing. It will take a lot of time to get anywhere near the truth about what happened to them,” he says.

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

He adds that all necessary procedures have been carried out “so that in the future we can identify the people who were killed.” The team is part of a small group trained to document and collect forensic evidence.

It is estimated that more than 100,000 people have disappeared in Syria since 2011.

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

The human rights group has concluded that more than 80,000 of the missing are dead. According to the British-based war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), another 60,000 people are believed to have been tortured to death.

Locals are reporting increasing locations of mass graves across Syria, and the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based NGO, says nearly 100,000 bodies have been found so far.

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

Elsewhere in the city of Qutayfah, further northwest of Damascus, thousands of bodies are believed to be buried in various mass graves, according to the SETF.

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

The ground would be filled with bodies – and then the site would be razed by bulldozers, he told the BBC.

Qutayfah’s religious leader Abdul Kadir al-Sheikha witnessed one such mass burial.

He said he was asked by the secret police to come and organize the funeral. He tried to perform religious rituals for the dead and prayed for them.

He tells me that at least 100 people are buried in these 30 square meters. He added that he was never called by the police again after that.

“They called them terrorists who didn’t deserve a funeral. They didn’t want anyone to witness their actions,” says Mr Sheikha.

Another witness who was forced to attend told me that the secret police prevented people from walking past mass graves or even looking out of the window during the funeral.

There are many such mass graves in the suburbs of Damascus, the witness said.

Elsewhere in Husseiniyeh, on the road leading to Damascus airport, satellite images show differences in the landscape of the areas where mass graves were discovered.

As the Assad regime collapsed in the face of rapid rebel advances, thousands of Syrian families streamed into the prisons and detention centers that followed them to search for their missing loved ones.

They need closure and must honor their dead with a dignified burial.

At a detention center, hundreds of ID cards belonging to Syrians held by Assad’s security forces lay scattered on the floor.

A woman was still searching for her missing brother who disappeared in 2014. A father was looking for his son, who was arrested in 2013. Nobody is ready to give up the search.

But locating and protecting mass graves and identifying the bodies they contain are tasks that only a few Syrians can currently handle – and international experts are urgently needed for this.