DAMASCUS: For more than a decade, tens of thousands of people living in Syria would disappear without explanation. They were picked up off the street. Plucked from university classes. Yanked out of stores as they bought groceries, and from taxis on their way home from work. Relatives were never told what had happened – but they knew. Many of the disappeared had been thrown into President Bashar Assad’s vast network of prisons, where they were tortured and killed on an industrial scale.
Now, with the overthrow of the Assad regime, families of missing Syrians are hoping that they may be reunited with loved ones, or at least learn what happened to them.
On Sunday, they rushed to one of the most notorious prisons in Syria, Sednaya, in search of news. Then on Tuesday, hundreds descended onto the morgue at a hospital in Damascus, where 38 bodies discovered at the prison had been taken.
In desperation, some forced open the steel doors of the mortuary refrigerators, yanking out large drawers and pulling off the blankets and tarps covering the bodies. Others clambered to get inside the room where forensic examiners were taking photos of the dead and cataloging them. The conditions of many of the bodies offered silent testimony to the brutality the prisoners had endured.
Sednaya sits atop a hill on the outskirts of Damascus, surrounded by barbed wire and fields riddled with land mines. Rebels who entered the prison complex Saturday night set the fields ablaze in an effort to set off the mines. Within hours, hundreds of prisoners were walking out of Sednaya’s gates, stunned. Rumours of secret cells three stories underground soon circulated, setting off a mad dash to free anyone who might still be imprisoned. For two days, rebels and rescue workers hammered at concrete floors and tore them apart with excavators. But in the end, they declared the rumours false: No secret cells were found.
As forensic examiners toiled inside the morgue at Al-Moujtahed Hospital, families outside waited for news, even if they dreaded it. But most of the faces in the photos released were too gaunt, the cheeks too sunken. “How can we recognise them?” one woman asked.
Gazing at photos of corpse after corpse, many were suddenly confronted with a reality they had long tried to keep out of mind. Most of the bodies were emaciated, the skin hanging off their bones. The shoulders of one man was covered in the scars of puncture wounds. Another had a thick red scar around his neck – a rope burn, examiners believed. Yet another man was missing his eyes. “Our children are martyrs,” a woman yelled. Others left silently, with blank stares. “Our children, our children. They’re dead,” a woman cried.