Medics identifying remains of mass graves in Syria

“These,” says Dr. Anas Al-Hurani, “are made of mixed mass grave.”

The head of the newly opened Syrian identification center stands up to two tables covered with hip suits. There are 32 of the human thigh bones on each laminated white tablecloth. They were neatly aligned and numbered.

Sorting is the first task for this new connection in the long chain of crime to justice in Syria. “Mixed mass grave” means that the corpses were thrown at each other.

The chances are that these bones belong to some of the hundreds of thousands that are believed to have been killed by the regimes of the procured President Bashar al -Assad and his father, Hafez, who have been running Syria for more than five decades.

If so, says Dr. Al-Haurani, they were among the newer victims: they died no more than a year ago.

Dr. Al-Haurani is a forensic odontologist: teeth can tell you a lot more about the body, he says, at least when it comes to identifying who was the man.

But with the femur, laboratory workers in the basement of this Squat Gray building in Damascus can begin the task: they can learn the height, gender, age, what work they had; They can also be able to see if the victim has been tormented.

The gold standard in identification is of course DNA analysis. But, he says, there is only one DNA test center in Syria. Many were destroyed during the country’s civil war. And “because of the sanctions, many of the predecessors of chemicals we need for the tests are currently not available.”

They are also informed that “parts of instruments can be used for aviation and for military purposes.” In other words, they could be considered “dual use” and thus are misled by many western countries of export to Syria.

Add to this, the price: $ 250 (£ 187) for one test. And, says Dr. Al-Haurani, “in a mixed mass grave you have to do about 20 tests to collect all parts of one body.” The laboratory relies entirely on funding from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The new government of the Islamist rebels, turned into conversations, says that what they call “transitional justice” is one of their priorities.

Many Syrians who have lost their relatives and lost any trace of them have told the BBC that they remain inconspicuous and disappointed: they want to see more effort than the people who most finally pursued Bashar al-Assad by power Last December after 13 years of war.

In those long years, conflicts were killed and millions of displaced. And one estimate of over 130,000 people had forcibly disappeared.

At the current speed, it can take months to identify only one victim of a mixed mass grave. “This,” says Dr. Al-Haurani, “will be the work of many, many years.”

Eleven of these “mixed mass graves” are dug around a beautiful, barren hill outside Damascus. The BBC is the first international media to see this site. The graves are quite visible now. In the years since they were dug, their surface has sunk into a dry, rocky land.

By accompanying us Hussein Alawi al-Manfi, or Abu Ali, as he is also called. He was a driver in the Syrian military. “My load,” says Abu Ali, “were human bodies.”

This compact man with salt and pepper beard was followed by the tireless investigative work of Muaz Mustafa, a Syrian-American CEO of the Syrian Emergency Group based in the United States for advocacy. He had convinced Abu Ali to join us, to testify to what Muas calls “the oldest crimes of the 21st century.”

Abu Ali has been transporting truck loads from corpses to multiple sites for more than 10 years. It comes to this place on average, twice a week for about two years at the beginning of the demonstrations, and then the war, between 2011 and 2013.

The routine was always the same. He will head to military or security. “I had a trailer with 16 m (52 ​​feet). It was not always filled to the edge. But I would have, I guess, on average from 150 to 200 bodies at every load.”

From his load, he says he is convinced that they were civilians. Their bodies were “tortured and tortured.” The only identification he could see were numbers written on a corpse or glued to the chest or forehead. The numbers identified where they died.

There were many, he said, from “215” – an famous center for detention of military intelligence in Damascus, known as “Branch 215”. This is a place we will visit again in this story.

Abu Ali’s trailer did not have a hydraulic elevator to rotate and throw away his load. When he pulled away, the soldiers would pull the bodies into the hole one after the other. Then the front load tractor will “equalize them, compress them, fill in the grave.”

Three men arrived with tired faces from a neighboring village. They confirm the history of regular visits to military trucks to this remote location.

And as for the man behind the wheel: how can he do this week after week, year after year? What did you say every time you got into your taxi?

Abu Ali says he has learned to make a hearty servant of the state. “You can’t say anything good or bad.”

As the soldiers threw the corpses into the freshly dug pits, “I would just move away and look at the stars. Or look down at Damascus.”

Damascus is where Malak Auda recently returned after years as a refugee in Turkey. Syria may be released from the suffocation of the Assads dynastic dictatorship. Malak is still serving a life sentence.

For the past 13 years, it has been closed in the daily life of pain and longing. It was 2012, a year after some of the people in Syria dared to protest their president, her two boys disappeared.

Mohammed was still a teenager when he was drawn to Assad’s army, as the demonstrations spread and the deadly repression of the regime caused a full war.

He hated what he saw, says his mother. Mohammed began to hide and even continued the demonstration himself. But he was traced.

“They broke his arms and beat his back,” his mother says. “He spent three days unconscious in hospital.”

Mohammed went aul again. “I told him he was gone,” Malak says. “But I was hiding it.”

In May 2012, Mohammed’s luck was expired for the 19-year-old youth. He was caught with a group of friends. They were shot. Malak says there was no official notice. But she always suggested that he had been killed.

Six months later, the smaller brother of Mohammed Maher was dragged by a school by officers. It was Maher’s second arrest. He had gone to the protests in 2011, at the age of 14. This led to his first arrest. When he was released from detention, he was in his underwear a month later, covered, says his mother in burns in cigarettes, wounds and lice. “He was horrified.”

Malak believes Maher disappeared from school in 2012 because the authorities have found that she was hiding his bigger brother. Now, for the first time in 13 years, Malak is returning to this school, desperately to get some idea of ​​what happened to Maher.

The new director produces several battered red books. Malak follows the ranks of names with a finger, and then finds his son’s name. December 2012 The record strongly reads: Maher was expelled from school as he failed to show up for two weeks.

There is no explanation that the state has disappeared. However, there is something else: Maher’s school records have been found. Its cover is decorated with a picture of a wise Bashar al-Assad, who looks thoughtfully in the distance. Malak picks up a pen from the head of the head teacher and scratches over the photo. Six months ago, this gesture could be deadly.

For years, the only tracks that Malak had to cling to were two men who say they saw Maher in Branch 215 – the same military detention that produces so many corpses for Abu Ali for transportation.

One of the witnesses told Malak that the boy had told her something about his parents, which, his mother says, only he could know. It was definitely him. “He asked this man to tell me that he was doing well.” Malak rises and tears flow, stuffs torn tissue in the corners of the eyes.

For Malak, like so many Syrians, the fall of Assad was not just a day of joy, but of hope. “I thought there was a 90% probability of Maher to get out of prison. I was waiting for him.”

But she even failed to find her son’s name on prisons lists. And so the pulsation of pain continues to move through it. “I feel lost and confused,” she says.

Her younger brother Mahmoud was killed by a reservoir shooting civilians in 2013.

“At least he had a funeral.”