A TORCH FOR A TORCHED SYRIA

In Damascus, the scars of Assad's regime are still fresh, but a fragile hope is blooming amid the ruins

- ANAGHA SUBHASH NAIR

"WAIT, LOOK, here is another one!"

We walked gingerly to where Hassan was calling us. In his right hand was a rag, and in his left, what seemed to be a human bone. We were in Hassan's home district of Tadamon, an area in Damascus that held, and still harbours, some of the ousted Bashar al-Assad regime's darkest secrets.

In 2022, horrifying footage, as reported in The Guardian, emerged of a 2013 massacre in the district-where blindfolded detainees were led to a brutal death in an execution pit. The jarring visuals were leaked by a rookie in the Syrian military who chanced upon the video and decided to speak out about the atrocities of the regime. The regime stayed in power until rebel forces, headed by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), overthrew Assad in a lightning offensive in December.

We asked some residents where the suspected mass graves were. "There's one here," they would say, pointing to our feet. "One there," pointing about 30 metres away. "One behind that building," gesturing towards a destroyed building just across the street. "There are mass graves all around us."

The veil of death and destruction shadows Damascus even after its perpetrators fled. There were piles of rubble and mud perhaps four metres high, allegedly created by the Assad regime to hide their bloody activities. Hidden among the piles were bones. Residents I met were convinced that under the mounds of mud there are many, many more.

"We would sometimes see a big bus full of people being brought to the area," says Hassan. "In about three hours, we would smell burning flesh."

My colleague mentioned the footage we had seen on The Guardian website, and one of the men we were with said he knew the exact location where the video was filmed. We made our way through winding paths, laced on each side by old or destroyed buildings.