Syria’s mass graves haunt loved ones a year on from Assad, as hunt for clues finally starts

Anywhere you dig, you will stumble upon a body. That is the warning Hamza, 42, gives as he tentatively examines a bone he has just walked over. It looks like it might be part of a hip.

The Syrian father-of-three spent 11 years as a political prisoner, disappeared in the dungeons of Bashar al Assad’s prisons during the bloody civil war.

Then, in December 2024, rebel forces led by Islamist fighter (now president) Ahmed al-Sharaa, tore open the jails and set him free.

Hamza’s first act of freedom was to come to this patch of wasteland in his hometown near Sayyidah Zeinab, southeast of the capital Damascus. The local community believes as many as 1,000 bodies of people killed by regime fire or forces were hastily dumped across three mass graves here.

Together with a former cellmate Fouad Naal, another political prisoner swallowed into Assad’s prisons for 21 years, they founded an association of freed detainees and their families to try to seek justice. Step one is identifying the dead.

“Of course we don’t know who many of them are or who their relatives might be,” Hamza says, explaining how they have already documented and reburied 400 people in long lines at one corner of the field.

And they keep finding more. Just a few days before we arrive, they had stumbled upon the latest body in a blood-smeared body bag.

It held the corpse of a man, his femur snapped, his teeth smashed in, an electrical cable wound around his neck: telltale signs of torture and execution.

All they could do was take photos, perform funeral prayers and notify the authorities.

“Some of the families of the missing are, even now, clinging on to the hope that their loved ones are still alive and just being imprisoned somewhere else,” Hamza adds in desperation.

“What I saw in prisons was an indescribable number of people dying or being murdered.”

It has been a whole year since Bashar al Assad, who ruled Syria with an iron grip for decades, was ousted from power. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights at least 181,000 people remain unaccounted for.

Many are thought to be buried across hundreds of mass graves, which still need to be unearthed, documented and recorded. That is a Herculean task in a country so gutted by 13 years of civil war, hefty western sanctions and decades of authoritarian rule that the World Bank estimates it will cost over $216 billion to rebuild.

Dr Anas al Hourani, a forensic dentist and head of the Syrian Forensic Identification Centre in Damascus, says these reasons mean they lack the proper equipment and mechanisms.

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