The daunting task of searching for and naming the dead

A cement wall has sealed off a patch of dry land in the northwestern suburb of Adra, less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) from Damascus’s downtown core.

As you drive in, you can see rescue teams from the humanitarian organization White Helmets on the left searching mass graves.

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

On Adora, the White Helmets discovered a small hole filled with large white plastic bags filled with the remains of bodies.

The message simply read, “7 bodies, 8th grave, unknown.”

The team pulled out and found the body, skull and bones. DNA samples were collected. The body was placed in a black body bag for documentation and further analysis.

Ismael Abdullah, one of the rescuers, said they were carrying a heavy burden.

“Thousands of people are missing. It will be a long time before we get to the truth of what happened to them,” he says.

“Today, we discovered the bodies of seven civilians on the ground after receiving a report of a possible mass grave here.”

He added that all necessary procedures had been carried out “so that in the future we can identify those killed.” This team is a small group trained to document and collect forensic evidence.

More than 100,000 people are believed to be missing in Syria since 2011.

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

Rights groups have concluded that more than 80,000 of those missing are dead. A further 60,000 people are believed to have died from torture, according to the British-based war monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Local residents, as well as the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based NGO, are increasingly reporting the location of mass graves across Syria.

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

Further north-west of Damascus, in another part of the town of Qutaifa, SETF believes there is a mass grave that may contain the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by the Assad regime.

One local resident who witnessed the burial of bodies from Syria’s years-long civil war said the bodies had been stuffed into refrigerated containers brought in by security forces.

He told the BBC that the ground would be filled with bodies and then leveled with bulldozers.

Qutaifa religious leader Abdul Qadir al-Sheikha witnessed one such mass burial.

He said he was asked by the secret police to come and manage the burial. He performed religious ceremonies for the dead and prayed for them.

He said at least 100 people were buried in this 30 square meters. Police were never called on him again after that, he added.

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

Another witness who was forced to attend told me that the secret police prohibited people from walking past mass graves or even looking out of windows while burials were taking place.

Witnesses say there are many such mass graves on the outskirts of Damascus.

Elsewhere in Husseinye, along the road leading to Damascus airport, satellite images reveal differences in the landscape of the area where mass graves were discovered.

As Assad’s regime collapsed before the rapid advance of rebel forces, thousands of Syrian families flooded prisons and detention centers to search for their missing loved ones.

They need closure and they need to honor their dead with proper burials.

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

A woman is still searching for her missing brother who disappeared in 2014. A father is searching for his son, who was detained in 2013. No one is planning to give up on the search.

But locating and protecting mass graves and identifying the bodies contained therein is a task that few Syrians are currently capable of carrying out, and international experts are urgently needed to assist in this process. There is.