Evidence of mass graves uncovered in Syria as families continue to desperately search for relatives
ITV News' team in Syria has discovered what appears to be a mass grave close to the capital Damascus, filled with human remains crammed into bags. John Ray's report contains scenes and eyewitness accounts, that you may well find distressing.
Warning: This video and article contains scenes and details some might find distressing
Words by George Coote, Content Editor
At first glance, there is little to define this patch of bare earth, save for the wall the Syrian army have built around it.
A gatehouse, a few concrete structures - open to the elements, but otherwise nothing to distinguish this place from any other flat expanse of soil.
A grim rumour has brought us here, to Adra, just a short distance from Damascus.
As we pass through the gatehouse and exit our vehicles, we meet Riyad Mansour. He and his brother have something they want to show us - not above the earth, but rather below it.
Riyad leads us to a large flagstone covering a concrete lined pit.
He lowers himself into the ground, ducks beneath the jutting flagstone and reemerges cradling what looks like a white grain bag.
He passes it to his brother and disappears once again to retrieve another.
There are seven bags in all, and in each bag, there is a body.
We peer inside the bags, they contain only bones - few clues as to who these people may have been, what lives they led and how they came to be here - packed together in pits beneath the Syrian soil.
On the first bag is written a name: Raad al Joud - a woman. Beneath her name, another detail: Prisoner 125.
The second bag holds Prisoner 121, Amere al Nickri.
Others are simply marked "unknown".
Near the pit, we find a bloodstained blanket, a shoe with a bullet-hole.
As we walk around the site, our eyes discern that the pit is just one of many, arranged in long straight trenches.
Historic satellite imagery reveals the construction here. Excavators dug shallow trenches, which were lined with concrete blocks and covered with flagstones and soil.
There are no gravestones here - this place has not been built as a place to remember the dead, but rather a place to forget them.
Riyad explains that the Assad regime have for years kept locals away but tells us he has seen trucks coming and going.
“We saw big lorries,” he tells us, “they were covered - and there was a terrible smell coming from them. Like something dead.”
Using a drone, we view the site from the air. There are many pits, many trenches. The scale of the place has a dreadful implication.
“Every grave has ten bodies,” Riyad says, gesturing around us. “Count how many graves. Ten, ten, ten and on and on and on. There are probably thousands.”
Where did these people come from? Riyad and his brother don’t know. They suggest they could be the remains of those who’ve died in the infamous Adra prison, just a few miles away.
We return to our vehicles and leave.
The prison is a ruin now - abandoned by its guards and emptied of its inmates - broken free by locals as the Assad regime collapsed.
The rebel fighters that control this area allow us in to search, but much of the prison has been burnt, torched by the inmates that were interred here.
Our driver nods in understanding, a former detainee himself. “They burnt the bad memories,” he says.
We know what happened in places like this, to men like Mohammed, who we meet in a Damascus hospital.
Accused of delivering food to rebel factions, he was detained and tortured for ten months. He believes he was lucky to survive.
“They would electrocute us on our private parts, they would get cigarette butts and put them on our nipples, or tongue, or on the ear. They had all different ways of torturing.”
“They would bring 70 or 80 people and they would torture two of them to death and they would tell the rest of us ‘if you don’t confess your crimes, that’s what going to happen to you'.”
At another hospital, we find Raoda Abd al Rasaq.
She and her companion Nolah are searching for her Raoda’s brother, Riad.
She tells us that eight years ago, he took a telephone call late at night, stepped outside, and was never seen again.
He was taken to Sednaya prison - the same prison where Raoda’s husband was killed.
We ask if she thinks her brother is alive. “I don’t know,” she tells us, “maybe I wish he is dead - because of the things they do to prisoners, but then again I want him to be alive so our mother can see him before she dies.”
There is no sign of him in the hospital, nor in the mortuary. But there are other hospitals, and we ask if we can join her on her search.
As we weave through Damascus, she tells me about her nephew, Riad’s son, who for eight years has grown up without his father.
Soon, we pull up at the gates of the next hospital, a man approaches and leans into the window of our van.
He’s looking for his father, he says, but there are no detainees or bodies here, already claimed by relatives in recent days.
They compare notes, and he suggests a different hospital for Raoda to visit.
This hospital is outside the city, just a few kilometres from the Adra mass grave site.
A faded portrait of Bashar al Assad shrouds the upper floors.
Raoda approaches the rebel fighters on guard at the hospital’s gate, but they turn her away.
There are no detainees here either.
Desperate, Raoda and her companion confer, but to no end. They turn to us and admit they have run out of hospitals, and ideas.
“Where are the rest of the prisoners?” Raoda demands. “They’ve either been hidden somewhere or they’ve been cut up and thrown in mass grave yards. There’s no other option”
“We really hoped we would see him - where did Assad hide him?
“The day the prisons opened, I told my nephew ‘I am going to get your dad'. What can I tell him now? That I can’t find him? Everybody is waiting to see him.”
Raoda and Nolah drive off into the countryside. Like so many other broken Syrian families, they have no closure, and little hope for justice.
The answers they seek may lie hidden beneath the Syrian soil.
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