After losing hope find his two brothers among the released prisoners of the syrian prisonsZiad Aleiwi began an exhausting tour in possible common graves, pointed out by the inhabitants.
Near the town of Najha, southeast of Damascus, the man in his fifties shows a deep trench, surrounded by military observation posts.
While children play around, residents said that the area is frequently dug up.
From the fall on December 8 of the president Bashar al Assad“I looked for my brothers in all the prisons,” sighs this driver from the suburbs of Damascus.
“I studied all the documents that could give me clues. In vain,” he added.
According to residents of the sector, bodies of detainees who died under torture were found in at least three of those trenches, which could not be accessed in Assad’s time.
The fate of tens of thousands of prisoners and missing persons is one of the most painful aspects of the drama of a country exhausted by 13 years of devastating war, unleashed in 2011 by the brutal repression of pro-democracy demonstrations, and which caused more than 500,000 deaths.
“Were they killed?”
“We want to know where our brothers are. Were they murdered, are they buried here?” says Ziad Aleiui, whose brothers were detained between 2012 and 2014, as well as four cousins, whose fate is unknown.
“If the forensic doctors searched the place, that would help many people calm down and stop hoping for the return of a child who will never return,” adds the 55-year-old man.
“Well, there are not one, two or three people wanted, but thousands,” he added.
Aleiui asks the medical examiners of international organizations, in the absence of local experience, “to open these mass graves so that we can finally know where our children are.”
Many Syrians interviewed in recent days by AFP journalists expressed deep disappointment at not having been able to find a family member in the prisons opened since the rebels took power.
A few kilometers from Najha, about ten people, most dressed in white uniforms, carry small bags to larger ones, which have a number.
“Since the fall of the regime, we have received more than a hundred calls indicating the presence of mass graves. People think that there is one in every military site,” emphasizes Omar Al-Salmo, head of the Civil defense.
22 bodies
A reliable hypothesis, according to him, is that there are “few people who left prisons and there is a record of exponential number of missing people“.
There are no official figures on the number of detainees released from prisons in the last ten days, but it is surely not equivalent to those who have disappeared since 2011.
In 2022, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) considered in more than 100,000 people dead in prisons since 2011, especially under torture.
“We try to work (…) with our modest experience,” says Salmo. Members of his team work to obtain bone samples and perform DNA tests.
On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) He asked the new authorities to “protect the evidence and preserve it, especially those present in the mass graves.”
The NGO also invited cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), “capable of providing help (…) essential to protect” this evidence.
Days after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, HRW teams discovered “a significant number of bodies” in the Tadamon neighborhood, near Damascus, where a massacre was committed in 2013.
