In front of a hideous scene were the residents of the Tadamon district in Damascusafter his fall Bashar al-Assadas inside a flattened building they found dozens of human bones.
According to the residents of the neighborhood of Damascus, this is one of the places where Bashar al-Assad’s army mass-executed prisoners and dissidents. In the building, but also in a neighboring one, it seems that the army buried the dead en masse… Bone fragments, femur bones and part of a spine were found there.
The Tadamon district gained notoriety when a shocking video surfaced in 2022: A man dressed in military uniform was leading a group of unarmed men with their hands tied towards a ditch. He suddenly tells them to run and starts shooting at him as they approach the edge of the ditch or fall into it.
The video was from 2013, but residents told Reuters the killings continued in a similar fashion until the last few days: They regularly saw Syrian security forces bringing men into the area and heard gunfire, describing what followed. burning flesh…
A resident of the area noted that he often saw soldiers leading unarmed people down a narrow alley next to the scary building and noted: “At night you could hear them. Every shot went to a man” and added “this was the cemetery for all the corpses”.
Reuters found bones piled among garbage, burnt plastic and dirty clothes in two adjacent buildings. The Reuters camera recorded neighborhood children playing with the bones…
Another resident noted: “It was known as ‘execution street.’ Anyone who came this way was considered lost.”
The army often forced residents to dig mass graves: “These things will not leave our memory. Dead bodies all over the floor – it had become normal for us.’
No one reacted then. “We couldn’t say anything or they would burn your house or kill your son. It was ugly, ugly, ugly” noted one of the residents.
Hiba Zayadin, a Syria researcher at the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, noted that the site should be cordoned off so they can later identify the dead: “The families deserve to know what happened here,” she said.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s crackdown on protests against him escalated into a full-scale civil war.
“We found human remains, bones, part of skull, fingers, ribscattered throughout the area around the mass grave, which shows that a lot more really happened than we already knew,” Zayadin said.
It is noted that some told Reuters that earlier this year, they saw government forces removing some bones from the site.
It is alleged that they tried to empty it but for an unknown reason abandoned their plan.