The difficult task of finding and assigning names to the dead

Less than 10 km (six miles) from the busy center of Damascus, in the northwestern suburb of Adra, an arid patch of land is enclosed by cement walls.

When you drive in, on the left side you can see a team of rescuers from the humanitarian organization “White Helmets” who are looking for mass burials.

Over the past few days, videos of mass graves where Bashar al-Assad’s regime buried those tortured to death in Syria’s notorious prisons have surfaced online.

In Adra, the White Helmets found a small hole where several large white plastic bags were filled with the remains of bodies.

The 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 considered missing. It will take time – a long time – to get closer to the truth about what happened to them,” he says.

“Today, after receiving a call about a possible mass burial here, we found the remains of seven civilians on the ground.”

He adds that all the necessary procedures were carried out “so that in the future we could identify those people who died.” The team is among a small number of people trained to document and collect forensic evidence.

Since 2011, more than 100,000 people have gone missing in Syria.

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

Human rights groups have concluded that more than 80,000 of the missing have died. A further 60,000 people are believed to have been tortured to death, according to the British military monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Local residents are reporting more and more mass graves across Syria, and the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based NGO, reports that around 100,000 bodies have been recovered so far.

The human rights group Human Rights Watch argues that such graves should be protected and investigated.

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

One local resident who witnessed the burial of bodies during Syria’s civil war says they were packed in refrigerated containers brought in by security forces.

The ground will be filled with bodies and then the site will be bulldozed, he told the BBC.

The religious leader of Qutayfa, Abdul Qadir al-Sheikha, witnessed one such mass burial.

The secret police asked him to come and conduct the funeral, he said. He tried to perform religious rites for the dead and prayed for them.

He tells me that at least 100 people are buried on these 30 square meters. After that, the police did not call him again, he adds.

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

The secret police did not allow people to pass the mass burial sites or even look out of the windows during the funeral, another witness who was forced to attend told me.

Many such mass burials exist in the suburbs of Damascus, the witness said.

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

As the Assad regime crumbled in the face of a rapid rebel advance, thousands of Syrian families rushed into prisons and detention centers in their wake, searching for their missing loved ones.

They should be closed and the dead should be honored and properly buried.

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

One woman was still looking for her brother who disappeared in 2014. The father was looking for his son, who was detained in 2013. No one is ready to give up the search.

But finding and protecting the mass graves and identifying the bodies they contain are tasks that few Syrians are currently capable of – and international experts are urgently needed to help with the process.