Skulls and body bags: the search for the missing in Syria

Adra is a strange neighborhood cemetery – two lone graves stand on empty, uneven, grass-covered ground.

For years, the area has been tightly controlled by the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

Now, a week after their escape, a concrete slab in one corner of that empty cemetery has been moved to reveal a shallow grave containing at least half a dozen white bags labeled with names and prison numbers.

Khaled al Hamad, a nearby resident, was desperately pulling out his bags when we arrived.

He shows us three that he has already discovered. Each contains a human skull and bones. The inscriptions on the bags suggest that these are the remains of two female and one male prisoners.

It is unclear how they died, or whether this is evidence of criminal abuse by the Assad regime.

But Khaled needs no convincing. He is looking for his two brothers, Jihad and Hussein, captured by Assad’s notorious air force intelligence a decade ago. Since then, they have not been heard from.

“Some people were taken to a zone called “driving school” and eliminated there,” he said. “I guess it happened to my brothers. They may be in some of these sacks buried here.’

We shared this information with Human Rights Watch in Syria, which said it was investigating reports of prisoner remains dumped in similar bags elsewhere.

Assad’s fall has sent a tsunami of hope to families who have been left without a chance to find out what happened to their loved ones for decades.

“If you ever walked through here (under Assad), you couldn’t stop, you couldn’t look up,” Khaled said.

“Cars used to drive by. When you stopped, they came up to you, put a plastic bag on your head and took you away.”

Tens of thousands of families like his are now searching for relatives who have disappeared into Assad’s notorious prison system or his military interrogation centers.

Some were taken to Maze military airbase in Damascus.

This place, once a key buffer between Assad and rebel forces, has been deserted. Discarded military boots litter the airstrip, a war missile lies on the ground, the only signs of life are new guards at the gate: young militiamen from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that took control of Syria last week.

They show us the torture chamber used by Assad’s forces – including a metal pole to fasten the legs of prisoners for beatings and a set of wires next to an electric shield.

“They used to electrocute the prisoners here,” guard commander Abu Jarah tells me. “These are electric cables – the investigator sits here, the guard puts them on the prisoner’s body and turns on the electricity.

“The prisoner loses his mind and confesses everything. They tell the investigator to write whatever he wants in the hope that it will stop.”

Abu Jara also said that the 400 women held there were regularly raped and that children were born in the prison.

The only thing more painful than finding your parent or child among the entries here is not finding them at all.

In a nearby building, families are desperately sorting through miniature photographs scattered in piles on the concrete floor – face after face looking bleak and empty, silent witnesses to the years of Assad’s rule.

Among them, the mother of Mahmoud Said Hussein, a Kurd from Al-Qamishli, was crying.

“Yesterday we saw that he was on the air base prison,” she told me. “We arrived but could not find him. I was looking for him for 11 years, going from prison to prison.”

“They all look like my son,” she cried, pointing to stacks of photos on the floor. “May God burn Assad’s heart as he burned ours.”

Behind them, three rooms come out one after the other, stuffed to the rafters with files. Several people are squatting on a mountain of documents several feet high that covers the floor.

The Assad regime has carefully documented its brutality – a vast bureaucracy of terror that makes the scale of its operations all too obvious, but in which individual stories are often lost or silenced.

– What are these notes? – raged one woman. “Nobody helps us. We want someone to come and check these documents with us. How can I find him among all these prison files?’

The lack of any orderly system means that crucial evidence is being lost every day at sites across Syria – information on the missing, but also potentially any links between the Assad regime and foreign governments such as the US or UK, both of which are accused of using the American policy of extraordinary rendition, in which terrorism suspects were sent for interrogation to countries that used torture.

Human rights groups have accused the British government of turning a blind eye to US practices during the so-called war on terror, when America sent detainees to several Middle Eastern countries, including Syria.

Outside, the air base’s silent hangars are littered with the charred remains of Russian-made planes and radars damaged by repeated Israeli airstrikes last week.

Assad’s departure has changed the delicate balance of power between the warring groups in Syria and their various international backers, including Turkey, Iran and the United States.

It wasn’t just a war in Syria, and outside forces are still involved in what’s going on here.

Syrians firmly believe that the time has come for them to rule themselves, with no one telling them what to do.

As we leave, a young HTS fighter climbs onto the roof to cut down the portrait of Assad that hangs above the interrogation building.

He smiles at his comrades, who are watching from below as photos and documents from the regime’s military affairs float by their boots.

Assad’s fall has left unanswered questions about Syria’s future, but it has also left unanswered many questions from the past.