Written by Maya Gebaili
DAMASCUS (Reuters) – A hip bone in a destroyed building, part of a spine in some rubble, and some foot bones in a worn sock. The Tadamon neighborhood in Damascus is littered with bones, after what residents and human rights groups described as years of killing there under the rule of Syria's Bashar al-Assad.
Solidarity became notorious after a video surfaced in 2022 showing a man in military fatigues leading unarmed and blindfolded men towards a large trench, telling them to run and shooting them at point-blank range when they approached the edge or after they fell into it.
Residents told Reuters that the incident occurred in 2013, but that killings continued until very recently, saying they regularly saw Syrian security forces bringing men into the area, heard gunshots and smelled burning flesh afterwards.
Muhammad al-Daraa, an elderly man from Tadamon, said he stayed in the neighborhood after the civil war began in 2011 because his family feared their apartment would be looted.
He said that year after year he saw cars driven by the Syrian armed forces bringing “bound people” to a small alley parallel to where the Tadamon massacre is believed to have taken place.
“At night you would hear it,” he said. “Every shot that was fired hit a man.” Pointing to the dirt street and the destroyed buildings next to it, he added, “This was a cemetery for all the bodies.”
Reuters found bones piled among trash, burnt plastic and dirty clothes in both buildings on either side, and saw children playing with what appeared to be rib bones and femur bones.
Khaled Houria, who runs a mechanic shop in the area, said he also heard gunshots often and smelled burning flesh after returning to the neighborhood in 2019.
“This street was known as Execution Street. Anyone who came to this street was considered lost,” he added, adding that security forces often asked his neighbors to help them dig mass graves.
“These things will not leave our memories,” Houria said. “The bodies on the ground – it has become normal for people.”
Too afraid to speak
Residents said they did not dare to speak out during Assad's rule, when criticism of the authorities was severely suppressed. Some remained hesitant and spoke only by first name, refusing to be photographed.
“We couldn't say anything, otherwise they would burn your house, or they would kill your son. It was ugly, ugly, ugly,” Dara said.
But now, less than a week after Assad's ouster, residents and human rights researchers hope the site will be cordoned off and those responsible for the killings held accountable.
“It is necessary to secure this site, exhume the bodies from the mass grave, and allow the relevant international bodies unimpeded access to this area so that they can carry out this work carefully, carefully and well,” said Heba Zayadin, a Syrian researcher at the United Nations Human Rights Center. Advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
Zayadin said there was a danger that the forces of the ousted Assad government had already emptied the mass grave. “The families deserve to know what happened here,” she said.
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed since 2011, when Assad's crackdown on protests against him turned into a full-scale war that attracted regional powers.
Human rights groups and governments accuse Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, of committing widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions inside the country's notorious prison system.
Assad has repeatedly denied committing any violations and described his critics as terrorists.
In 2023, the US State Department issued a travel ban on a Syrian security official and his immediate family over his alleged killing of at least 41 civilians in 2013 in Tadamon, calling it a “massacre.”
Human Rights Watch researchers identified the suspected location of the grave by matching satellite images to the scene in the video.
While a full examination of the site has not yet been carried out, the group has already found several traces of the killings.
“We found human remains, bones, part of a skull, fingers, and ribs, scattered throughout the area surrounding the mass grave, showing that a lot more had actually happened here than we already knew,” Ziyadin said.
Tadamon residents told Reuters that the alley had been closed off with metal barriers during years of heavy fighting between opposition fighters and Syrian government forces, including the National Defense Forces, a pro-Assad paramilitary force that was integrated into the army in 2012.
Several of them said that, earlier this year, they saw then-Syrian government forces removing some bones from the area, and they feared that the grave – and crucial evidence – had been dug up.
The opening of Syrian prisons after Assad's ouster on Sunday has led to similar concerns, with activists and families searching for their detained relatives saying they fear fleeing forces have destroyed evidence of their fate.
