The arduous task of searching for and naming the dead

Less than 10 kilometers (six miles) from Damascus’ busy city center, in the northwestern suburb of Adra, an arid stretch of land is closed off with concrete walls.

Upon entering, on the left, you see a team of rescuers from the White Helmets humanitarian organization searching for mass graves.

In recent days, videos have been posted online of mass graves where Bashar al-Assad’s regime buried those tortured to death in Syria’s notorious prisons.

In Adra, the White Helmets had found a small hole where several large white plastic bags were filled with remains of corpses.

One message simply reads: “Seven corpses, eighth grave, unknown.”

The team was removing the remains, skulls and bones they found. DNA samples were collected. The remains were placed in black body bags for documentation and later analysis.

Ismael Abdullah, one of the rescuers, says they carry a heavy burden on their shoulders.

“Thousands of people are missing. It’s going to take time – a lot – to get to the truth about what happened to them,” he says.

“Today, after receiving a call about a possible mass grave here, we found the remains of seven civilians on the ground.”

He adds that all the necessary procedures were carried out “so that in the future we can identify the people who were murdered.” The team is among a small number of people who have been trained to document and collect forensic evidence.

More than 100,000 people are believed to have gone missing in Syria since 2011.

Last week, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel group, which overthrew Assad after more than 50 years of rule by his family, opened prisons and detention centers across Syria.

Human rights groups have concluded that more than 80,000 of the missing are dead. Another 60,000 people are believed to have been tortured to death, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Local people are increasingly reporting the locations of mass graves across Syria, as is the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based NGO.

The human rights group Human Rights Watch says such graves should be protected and investigated.

Elsewhere in the city of Qutayfah, further northwest of Damascus, the SETF believes there is a mass grave that could contain the bodies of at least 100,000 people killed by the Assad government.

A local resident, who witnessed the burial of the bodies during the years of Syria’s civil war, says they were packed in refrigerated containers brought by security forces.

The ground would be littered with bodies and then the site would be bulldozed, he told the BBC.

The religious leader of Qutayfah, Abdul Kadir al-Sheikha, witnessed one such mass burial.

The secret police asked him to come and arrange the burial, he said. He tried to perform religious rituals for the dead and prayed for them.

He tells me that at least 100 people were buried in those 30 square meters. After that, the police never called him again, he adds.

“They called them terrorists who didn’t deserve to be buried. They didn’t want anyone to witness what they were doing,” Sheikha says.

The secret police prevented people from passing through the mass graves or even looking through the windows when they carried out the burial, another witness who was forced to participate told me.

There are many mass graves of this type in the suburbs of Damascus, the witness said.

Elsewhere in Husseiniyeh, on the road leading to Damascus airport, satellite images show differences in the landscapes of areas where mass graves have been discovered.

As the Assad regime crumbled in the face of rapidly advancing rebels, thousands of Syrian families rushed to prisons and detention centers to search for their missing loved ones.

They need closure and honor their dead with a proper burial.

At one detention center, hundreds of IDs of Syrians detained by Assad’s security forces were scattered on the floor.

A woman was still searching for her missing brother in 2014. A father was searching for his detained son in 2013. No one is willing to give up the search.

But locating and protecting mass graves and identifying the bodies they contain are tasks that few Syrians are currently capable of performing, and international experts are urgently needed to help in the process.