Mass Graves Discovered as Syrian Families Seek Answers to Loved Ones’ Disappearances Under Assad Regime

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to a grim reality that Syrians are facing after the toppling of the Assad regime: the discovery of mass graves across the country. According to the International Commission on Missing Persons, more than 150,000 Syrians remain unaccounted for after being held in Assad’s prisons. Many are believed to be buried in mass graves. The Syrian search and rescue group White Helmets has received reports of at least 13 mass grave sites across the country, eight of them near Damascus.

Human Rights Watch visited the site of one mass grave, also a mass execution site, in the Tadamon neighborhood of Damascus last week. The group was able to confirm the exact location of the grave after verifying and geolocating a previously leaked video from April 2013.

LAMA FAKIH: The video shows Syrian government forces and pro-government militia shooting 11 men in civilian clothing, blindfolded and bound. The victims’ bodies then fall into a pit. One of three perpetrators films, while the other two men carry out the executions, taunting and laughing at victims as they die.

Human Rights Watch was unable to travel to Syria when we were first made aware of this video, so we went through an extensive process to verify it. We gathered witness evidence, and by matching landmarks in the footage with satellite imagery, we identified the exact location of the mass grave. We established that these summary executions took place in the Tadamon area of Damascus on April 16, 2013.

Since the fall of the Assad government, we have been able to travel to Damascus to see the area for ourselves. We know the grave was a machine-dug pit between two buildings. It measured approximately three meters wide, seven meters long and two meters deep. In the footage, 13 bodies are visible in the pit. During the course of the six-minute, 43-second video, the gunmen kill 11 more.

In visiting the grave here, we also discovered today the presence of human remains in and around the site. These victims deserve a decent burial. Their families deserve to know what happened to them.

Today, the pit is filled in. Local residents told us that access to the square kilometer surrounding this mass grave was restricted by Syrian authorities for a long time. One resident told us that pro-government forces ordered him to bury bodies, some years after the executions. It’s unclear to what extent human remains in the area have been removed since 2013.

All this is evidence of just one of many atrocities carried out by the Assad government. In this case, Human Rights Watch has identified the man in the blue-gray uniform as Najib Halabi, who died later in the conflict. The other man, initially identified by the University of Amsterdam researchers who first sent us the video, worked for Syrian military intelligence as recently as March 2023. Any surviving perpetrators of this or other atrocities should be held accountable as part of a fair judicial process. The 2013 massacre documented on video is just one of many summary killings in the area.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re joined now from Amman, Jordan, by Hiba Zayadin, senior Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. She just returned from a week in Damascus.

Hiba, welcome to Democracy Now! If you could just begin by talking about what you learned from your time in Damascus and what you saw?

HIBA ZAYADIN: Absolutely. And thank you for having me on the show.

So, upon arriving in Damascus, one of the first sites that we decided to visit was that of the heinous 2013 Tadamon massacre, which a video of had leaked in 2021. We had been investigating this crime for a long time now. We had confirmed the exact location of the mass grave and decided to go confirm it for ourselves.

But what we found there, you know, we were not prepared for what we had found. We were not prepared for what we were going to see, even though we knew, from conversations with residents earlier in 2021, that it was the likely site of other summary killings, as well. But when we arrived, what we saw was scores of human remains, of fingers, of a part of a skull, pelvic bones, strewn across the surrounding neighborhood. We saw families — you know, families had brought to us bags that they had collected of bones from the rubble in dilapidated stores in the area. We saw children toying with these bones. It was not anything that we had expected, that we had expected to see.

And we spoke to more residents and found out that this was the site of so much more horror than we had expected. You know, I had spoken to a resident who was forced at the age of 15 — this was back in 2016 — to dig graves and to dump bodies, corpses into those graves. We had found — we had spoken to an ambulance driver who was tasked to retrieve bodies from that area in 2018 and 2019. I spoke to countless families who had missing loved ones that they did not know what had happened to and had no answers for.

And so, you know, it was really important that we highlight how imperative it is to protect and to secure this site and many others like it. There are mass graves across Syria, and this was just one of them. And we had visited others, as well. We had seen desperate families visiting these sites, sometimes taking matters into their own hands, digging the graves on their own, trying to find anything about this. We saw them at the morgue, where there were several unidentified bodies, families clutching pictures of their loved ones, pushing it into the camera to try and show it to the world, to try and get any sort of information.

We also visited some of the most notorious detention facilities, that we had for a long time worked on and documented abuses and torture in. And, you know, what we found there, too, was quite upsetting, in that there was intentional destruction of documents, of evidence. There was looting. There was total insecurity for the first couple of days that we were there, with people coming in, retrieving files, leaving with them, tampering with the evidence. And we know that the Assad government operated a chilling bureaucratic system whereby they documented every crime. They documented it in detail. And that evidence had existed in these detention facilities, in the military courts, in the prisons themselves.

And every minute that passes where there is inaction, where these documents, these sites are not being preserved and not being secured, is just one more family possibly never knowing what happened to their loved ones. And it also means that there are officials who have perpetrated some of the most horrific atrocities over the past decade that will go free and that will not be brought to justice because of just how quickly a lot of this evidence is disappearing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I’d like to read from a Financial Times article headlined “The Syrian neighbourhood at the heart of Assad’s killing machine,” which is the neighborhood that you’ve just spoken about, Tadamon. The article begins saying, quote, “In Tadamon, the children know the difference between a human jaw and a dog’s. So inured are they to decomposing remains, a consequence of living in this desolate Damascus suburb, that the boys casually toss around skulls and fractured femurs.” So, Hiba, if could speak — you just talked about the importance of protecting these sites. I mean, many have said that Assad’s regime has just fallen, and this work is only just beginning, the work of excavating these mass graves. Are there concerns that these sites will not be protected? And if not, where will the — who will damage them? How will they somehow be disrupted?

HIBA ZAYADIN: Definitely, there are concerns right now. I mean, we have seen that for transitional authorities, this has not been a top priority. And our presence in Damascus was to call for the preservation of this evidence, was to make it clear to transitional authorities that this must be a priority and that it is of the utmost urgency, because now is the time — yesterday was the time, a week ago was the time to be protecting these sites. And as I had said earlier, every day that passes, we’re losing more valuable information. And, you know, it is a priority, or it should be a priority, to transitional authorities not just because of justice and accountability efforts, but also because you have thousands upon thousands of families who are seeking answers, who deserve answers, and who have no idea what the transitional authorities are doing about this right now.

They need to be raising awareness about what it means to tamper with this evidence, what it means to retrieve documents from an area without preserving the chain of custody, because, you know, once you take these documents out without documenting exactly who and how and from where they were taken, none of this is going to stand in court. And this is what we’ve been impressing upon transitional authorities. This is what we’ve been calling for U.N. bodies, relevant bodies to arrive at the scene as soon and as urgently as possible. We’ve been calling on international rescue teams to also arrive on site and for Syrian groups to really be at the forefront of this, of this massive, massive effort.

AMY GOODMAN: This is State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller speaking earlier this week.

MATTHEW MILLER: When you look at the evidence that is coming out of Syria in the now 10 days since the Assad regime fell, it continues to shock the conscience. And I’m referring not just to the mass graves that have been uncovered, but information that we have been gathering inside the United States government, including information that’s not yet publicly known.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond, Hiba, to these remarks, in particular, Matt Miller suggesting more will be revealed about abuses by the Assad regime?

HIBA ZAYADIN: So, I mean, absolutely, more will be revealed. And I think, you know, there have been documents in detention facilities that remain intact. And there is movement. You know, we have seen a bit more of a stepping up in the security of some of these detention facilities. But there is no coordinated effort right now to preserve these documents. And it is really important to stress that these documents belong to the Syrian people. This evidence belongs to the Syrian people, and they need to be at the forefront of these efforts to preserve and secure — obviously, with the help of U.N. relevant bodies, obviously, with the help of international actors. But these documents belong to the Syrian people. The evidence belongs to them and needs to remain with them and in their hands. And that’s what I would stress in response to some of these remarks.

AMY GOODMAN: Hiba, what is Human Rights Watch looking out for when Israel intensifies the attacks on Syria, expanding its occupation of the Golan Heights? You’ve said that Israel bombed the only facility in Syria that had DNA equipment that would allow for the identification of remains in these mass graves. Can you explain?

HIBA ZAYADIN: Yes. So, I mean, Israel’s strikes in Syria come on the heels of its brutal military campaigns in Lebanon and in Gaza, where we’ve documented war crimes, crimes against humanity and, as my colleague has just been saying on your show, acts of genocide in Gaza specifically. You know, Syria is right now in a very fragile state, and the Israeli strikes have almost completely decimated its defense capabilities.

But also this has had repercussions and consequences for the issue that we’re speaking of right now, the preservation of evidence. Some of these strikes have hit vital facilities, including the Air Force intelligence branch, you know, the institute where these DNA machines were being housed, other security branches, military security branches, that contain vital evidence. And so, these strikes are also adding to the quite upsetting situation that we currently find ourselves in, in terms of just preserving evidence, making sure that some day, hopefully, every family can learn what the fate of their loved ones had been, where they may have been buried, and to really be able to give them a decent burial.

AMY GOODMAN: Hiba Zayadin, I want to thank you so much for being with us, senior Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. She’s just returned from Syria.