In search of closure, Syrians work to unearth the secrets of Assad’s mass graves

DAMASCUS — There is life in the streets of Tadamon, a neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Damascus. People haggle with vegetable vendors, and children return home from school, making their way down dusty streets. But the past, with its ghosts, is never far away. Bombed-out buildings cast shadows, and loom over a narrow alleyway that leads to an empty plot. 

This alleyway was the site of what is known as the Tadamon massacre: the killing of 288 civilians by pro-regime militiamen in April 2013. Videos of the killings, filmed by the perpetrators, were leaked to researchers several years later and became public in 2022. The footage shows blindfolded men and women forced to run towards a freshly dug hole in the street, or thrown inside and shot, their bodies later burned and buried. 

In the year since the Assad regime fell, at least 66 mass graves have been found across Syria, including recent discoveries in Reef Dimashq, northern Homs and Hama. Each could hold answers about the fates of some of the more than 160,000 people who remain missing. 

Identifying the dead—and providing answers for the living—is one of the biggest challenges facing Syria’s new administration, and a central demand of thousands of families still searching for loved ones lost during the Assad era. 

A man holds a bone found in Damascus’s Tadamon neighborhood, the site of a 2013 massacre by pro-regime National Defense Forces (NDF) militiamen, 20/12/2024 (Anagha Subhash Nair/Syria Direct)

‘Like it was nothing’

Once, Tadamon was a frontline, the “last point” for Assad’s National Defense Forces (NDF) pitted against opposition fighters in a neighboring area, explained Abu Yazan, who owns a shop in the neighborhood. 

“There would sometimes be clashes here,” he recalled. Pro-regime forces were greatly feared in the neighborhood, he added, known to “kill people like it was nothing.” 

Abu Yazan and his family fled Tadamon for a safer area in 2012, and he was not present at the time of the 2013 massacre, which occurred a few hundred meters from his shop. In 2018, he decided to return. 

Around two years later, between 2020 and 2021, “forensic doctors came with patrols from the [security] branches,” Abu Yazan said. “They took [remains] from the surface of the ground, not from the pits,” put bones “in bags and took them.”

“We witnessed all this; it’s not like someone told us about it,” Abu Yazan said. A second Tadamon resident echoed his account. 

Around the same time, the Assad regime was secretly relocating tens of thousands of bodies from a known mass grave site near al-Qutayfa, a town east of Damascus, to a new site in Dumayr, a few dozen kilometers away. The reburial—and the cleanup Abu Yazan described in Tadamon—coincided with renewed efforts by the regime to rebuild its international standing. 

Still, after the regime fell on December 8, 2024, this part of Tadamon remained littered with bones: individual vertebrae and portions of human skulls. The number of human remains being found has greatly fallen in the year since, likely collected as part of ongoing efforts to identify the dead. 

‘A tough job’

In March 2025, Syria’s new government created the Syrian Identification Center (SIC), the country’s first such body working to forensically examine unidentified remains. 

From the outside, little distinguishes the center’s building from others around it in Damascus’s Baramkeh neighborhood. But on dusty tables in the many rooms within, a monumental task is underway.

Dr. Anas al-Hourani, a forensic odontologist and head of the SIC, explained how the center’s personnel regularly receive calls to retrieve remains for identification. 

“We receive reports of individual cases found at sites—maybe found on farmland, in the basements of residential buildings or above ground,” he told Syria Direct. The center has received multiple sets of human remains from Tadamon. 

Zeina Shahla, spokesperson for Syria’s National Commission for Missing Persons (NCMP), said “dozens” of sites containing human remains have been found over the roughly six months since the government body was established in May 2025. 

“We try to preserve and protect these sites, and also bring the remains to the identification center for preliminary findings,” she explained. But the task before them is daunting.  

“When the burial methods used on murdered individuals involve bodies being piled up and the bones become mixed after tissues decompose, you need to take a sample from each bone fragment,” the SIC’s al-Hourani explained. “This is a tough job, in terms of both time and costs.”

The Syria Justice and Accountability Center (SJAC), a human rights organization focused on accountability, stresses that suspected burial sites should not be disturbed until there are adequate resources in place to properly handle the remains.  

“As long as the grave sites are secure, ideally the remains should not be exhumed, because if you do not have the capacity to actually analyze and safely store the remains—and extract bone samples so you can establish a genetic profile—then you are kind of risking them actually being damaged,” the organization told Syria Direct.

For remains that are unburied or partially buried and “protruding on the surface, you want to have those exhumed and protected,” SJAC added. “Otherwise, they risk being damaged, whether by animals, the natural elements or people.” 

Dust from a recent examination spots a table inside the Syrian Identification Center’s preliminary analysis room in Damascus, 27/11/2025 (Anagha Subhash Nair/Syria Direct)

In November 2025, the NCMP signed an agreement to collaborate with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations’ Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria. 

The NCMP is currently working to compile a national database of Syria’s missing, based on information the families are providing about their loved ones, Shahla said. 

“We take information about the person, their characteristics—everything that can be used to identify them, including where they were lost, and any information about the person after they were detained,” she told Syria Direct.

Estimates for the number of people missing in Syria range from more than 160,000 since 2011 to as many as 300,000 over more than five decades of Assad family rule, and include foreign nationals.

SJAC emphasizes the importance of collecting antemortem data—information about individuals’ bodies and appearances when they were alive, such as tattoos, broken bones or dental work—to facilitate identification.

“That would help later in the forensic analysis process, when you eventually have a skeleton, or a set of skeletal parts, that you are trying to reconstruct,” the organization explained.

A shortage of forensic experts has limited identification efforts so far, preventing the opening of additional SIC branches, al-Hourani said. The center currently has facilities in Aleppo and Suwayda, alongside its headquarters in Damascus.

He pointed to “past reluctance to enter this specialty, which is far removed from the daily work of doctors and dentists.” In the future, “if there is a larger number of students entering this specialty and more doctors graduating, we might open branches in other provinces,” he added. 

‘All I wish for’

For families of the missing, finding and identifying their loved ones is a matter of closure, something that has eluded Bassam Nasser Ali, 49, over the 12 years he has been searching for his brothers. 

Bassam Nasser Ali, 49, speaks at his home in Sayyeda Zainab, a town south of Damascus, 14/11/2025 (Anagha Subhash Nair/Syria Direct)

In 2013, Syrian security forces took his brother, Ahmad Suleiman Ali, then 17, from the family’s home in Sayyeda Zainab, a town south of Damascus. At the time, the area was largely controlled by pro-Assad Shiite militiamen from countries including Yemen, Iraq and Iran, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

Ahmad was finishing high school when he was detained, and had never been involved in fighting between opposition forces and the Assad regime, Ali said. Another brother, Assem Nasser Ali, fought with opposition forces in the Yarmouk camp in south Damascus. He disappeared in 2018, when he was 23, after he was arrested at a regime checkpoint in the village of Khirbet al-Ward.

The brothers’ father, Nasser Mahmoud Ali, went to a number of security branches searching for them, including the Department of Military Intelligence’s notorious Branch 235, also known as the Palestine Branch, to no avail.

In 2015, a military judge notified the father that Ahmad’s body was at Damascus Hospital, but he could not risk going to collect the body and confirm it was his son’s. “We told him not to leave [our area], as those who walk into institutions don’t come out,” Bassam said. “We didn’t know if it was a trap.” 

Because the family never saw a body, and did not believe the information they were given, they kept searching.

The back of a written request for Ahmad Suleiman Ali’s whereabouts that his father, Nasser Mahmoud Ali, took to multiple security branches while looking for his sons, 14/11/2025 (Anagha Nair/Syria Direct)

As Ali spoke, his father walked in holding a sheet of paper, slightly torn and showing signs of the many hands it has passed through: a missing person’s report he filed in 2017. The back of the document is covered in stamps from different security branches he visited during his fruitless search. Typically, he was told his sons were not there and to come back later. 

“Each stamp is from a security branch. And for each stamp, we had to pay money,” one relative said. 

The family believes all their relatives who were detained have died, including Ali’s brothers. Still, finding them would provide a measure of peace. “I hope we find their remains,” he said. “Even if we could just put them in a bag, that’s all I wish for.”

For al-Hourani, the painstaking work of identifying remains and bringing closure to families of the missing is a “humanitarian duty,” more than a profession. “Despite all the psychological, material and physical pressures, just imagine the joy of a family that finally finds its son,” he said.

“When this person is found, the burial procedures are carried out properly, they can recite al-Fatiha and carry out the official legal procedures,” al-Hourani added. “This is the beginning of the end of their grief.”