At a mass grave on the outskirts of Damascus, some families learn the fate of missing loved ones

Audio By Carbonatix

Enlarge

OTAIBA, Syria (AP) — Search teams on Friday pulled some 25 bodies out of a mass grave believed to contain the remains of at least 175 people in a suburb of the capital, Damascus.

Officials said the bodies found in an agricultural field in the suburb of Otaiba belonged to people who had been killed in an ambush by the forces of then-president Bashar Assad. They were fleeing the besieged enclave of eastern Ghouta, which was then under the control of opposition forces.

It was the latest grim remnant to surface from the country’s nearly 14-year civil war that ended with Assad’s ouster in a lightning rebel offensive in December.

Family members with missing loved ones came to the site in hopes of finding answers. Among them was Samira Alloush, who was looking for her son, Anas Ahmad Alloush, who had been among those besieged in Ghouta. He was 19 when he went missing in 2014.

His mother had held out hope that he would turn out to be alive and in prison and that he would resurface when the prisons were emptied after Assad’s fall. Instead, she found a different answer. Among the dirt-encrusted clothes on the ground, she recognized her son’s jacket.

“I had hope that he would come out of prison and we would sit together again,” she said through sobs. “Goddamn you, Bashar.”

Amer Fahed, commander of operations in the Damascus countryside for the civil defense group known as the White Helmets, said the grave was believed to contain around 175 bodies, but so far only the ones near the surface had been removed.

“We haven’t yet begun to excavate or exhume the mass grave until a specific mechanism is determined by the National Commission for Missing Persons,” he said.

Ammar al-Issa, an official with the missing persons’ commission who was present at the scene, said the number of bodies could be higher, as 200 to 300 people were believed to have been killed in the February 2014 ambush.

“Currently, our response will be only to recover the bone remains found on the ground and the related clothes and in coordination with the Public Prosecution to close and secure this place as a crime scene, until the scientific and systematic exhumation takes place,” he said.

Hundreds of bodies have been found in mass graves scattered around the country since Assad’s fall, but many more likely remain to be uncovered.

An estimated 150,000 people were detained or went missing in Syria since 2011, when mass anti-government protests were met by a brutal crackdown and spiraled into civil war. Many of them are likely buried in unmarked mass graves.

Syria’s interim government formed the national commission tasked with investigating the fate of the missing in May. The commission is now trying to build a national database, but progress has been slow and the number of cases for investigation has continued to grow as more families have come forward since Assad’s fall.

Family members of disappeared Syrians have held demonstrations in Damascus and elsewhere, calling for accountability and for more effort in the ongoing searches so they can finally learn the fate of their loved ones.