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 lot – 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 were killed.” The team is one of 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 rule by his family, 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 claims that such graves should be protected and investigated.
