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With the fall of Assad in Syria, a new wave of human rights investigations into his regime’s crimes can finally take place on the ground. What my colleagues have been finding in recent days is disturbing.
They were able to visit a mass crime scene in the southern Damascus neighborhood of Tadamon last week. They were drawn to that location by following the clues in a previously leaked video, taken in April 2013, showing summary executions by Syrian government forces and affiliated militia. Only now, 11 years later, could independent investigators examine the site.
Our colleagues retraced the final moments of 11 blindfolded victims shown in the video who were all shot at close range and pushed into the machine-dug grave, alongside the bodies of 13 other people.
Researchers also spoke to a current resident of the area who said a pro-government paramilitary group forced him and other residents to bury bodies in pre-dug graves in 2015 and 2016.
In Tadamon last week, our researchers found scores of human remains both at the location of the April 2013 massacre and strewn throughout the surrounding neighborhood. These included teeth and skull, jaw, hand, and pelvic bones on the ground and in a bag collected by residents.
Human remains are also scattered on the floor of buildings next to the mass grave, leading researchers to conclude other people were most likely killed or buried in the same location.
Human Rights Watch could not confirm whether the remains found are those of the victims in the video, nor whether more bodies are buried there. It is unclear whether or the extent to which bodies were taken out of the area.
The danger now is that, at this site and others, vital evidence is just lying around, unprotected. Without efforts to secure sites like this, there’s a risk of losing essential evidence needed to uncover the fate of thousands of missing Syrians, and prosecute and convict perpetrators.
In other words, this is a crime scene, and it needs to be treated like one.
There should be immediate efforts by the transitional Syrian authorities, with international support, to secure and preserve likely sites of mass crimes for coordinated exhumations and forensic investigations.
As HRW’s Hiba Zayadin says: “The loved ones of people so brutally killed here deserve to know what happened to them. The victims deserve accountability.”
