BBCAdra is a wierd type of neighborhood cemetery: two solitary graves stand in an empty stretch of rugged land, sparsely coated with grass.
For years this space was tightly managed by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
Now, every week after their escape, a concrete slab in a single nook of this empty cemetery has been moved to disclose a shallow grave containing not less than a half-dozen white baggage, labeled with names and jail numbers.
Khaled al Hamad, a close-by resident, was desperately unpacking his baggage once we arrived.
He exhibits us the three he has already opened. Each comprises a human cranium and bones. The writings on the baggage counsel that they’re the stays of two feminine prisoners and a male.
It is unclear how they died, or whether or not that is proof of legal abuse by the Assad regime.
But Khaled would not want convincing. He is looking for his two brothers, Jihad and Hussein, who had been captured by Assad’s notorious air power intelligence ten years in the past. Nothing has been heard of it since then.
“Some folks had been taken to an space known as ‘the driving college’ and liquidated there,” he stated. “I suppose this occurred to my brothers. Maybe they’re in a few of these baggage buried right here.”
We shared this data with Human Rights Watch in Syria, who stated they had been investigating experiences of prisoner stays dumped in related baggage elsewhere.
Assad’s fall unleashed a tsunami of hope amongst households left for many years with no manner of discovering out what had occurred to their family members.
“If you ever handed by right here (in Assad’s time), you could not cease, you could not lookup,” Khaled stated.
“Cars had been dashing by. If you stopped, they might come as much as you, put a plastic bag over your head and take you away.”
Tens of 1000’s of households like hers at the moment are looking for lacking relations in Assad’s infamous jail system or his army interrogation facilities.
Some had been taken to the Mazzeh army air base in Damascus.
This web site, as soon as an vital buffer between Assad and insurgent forces, is abandoned. Abandoned army boots are strewn on the runway, a rocket lies on the bottom, the one indicators of life are the brand new guards on the gate: younger militiamen from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that took management of Syria final week .
They present us the torture room utilized by Assad’s forces, which features a steel pole to safe prisoners’ toes earlier than beatings and a sequence of cables subsequent to {an electrical} panel.
“Here they electrocuted the prisoners,” the commander of the guards, Abu Jarrah, tells me. “These are electrical wires: the investigator sits right here, the guards put them on the prisoner’s physique and activate the ability.
“The prisoner loses his thoughts and confesses every thing. They inform the interrogator to put in writing no matter he needs, within the hope that he’ll cease.”
Abu Jarrah additionally stated that the 400 girls held right here had been often raped and that infants had been born within the jail.
The solely factor extra painful than discovering your mother and father or youngsters among the many paperwork right here will not be discovering them in any respect.
In the constructing subsequent door, households desperately scratch at miniature pictures scattered in piles on the concrete ground – face after face wanting darkish and empty, silent witnesses to the years of Assad’s rule.
Among them, the mom of Mahmoud Saed Hussein, a Kurd from al-Qamishli, was additionally sobbing.
“Yesterday we noticed that he was booked into the air base jail,” he informed me. “We got here however we could not discover him. I’ve been in search of him for 11 years, from one jail to a different.”
“These all appear to be my son,” she cried, pointing to the stacks of pictures on the ground. “May God burn Assad’s coronary heart, as he has burned ours.”
Beyond them, three rooms stuffed to the ceiling with information open onto one another, one after the opposite. Several persons are crouched on a mountain of paperwork a number of meters excessive that covers the ground.
The Assad regime has been meticulous in documenting its brutality: an unlimited terror paperwork that makes the scope of its actions all too clear, however wherein the tales of people are sometimes misplaced or submerged.
“What are these notes?” a girl raged. “No one helps us. We need somebody to return and examine these paperwork with us. How can I discover him amongst all these jail information?”
The lack of an orderly system signifies that essential proof is misplaced on daily basis at websites throughout Syria: data on the lacking, but additionally probably, any hyperlinks between the Assad regime and overseas governments such because the US or the UK, each of that are accused of benefiting from the American coverage of extraordinary rendition, wherein terrorist suspects had been despatched for interrogation in nations that used torture.
Human rights teams have accused the UK authorities of turning a blind eye to US follow throughout the so-called battle on terror, when America despatched detainees to a number of Middle Eastern nations, together with Syria.
Outside, the air base’s silent hangars are dotted with the charred stays of Russian-made planes and radars, hit by repeated Israeli airstrikes over the previous week.
Assad’s departure has shifted the fragile stability of energy between Syria’s conflicting teams and their varied worldwide backers, together with Türkiye, Iran and the United States.
This was by no means simply Syria’s battle and outdoors powers nonetheless have a stake in what occurs right here.
Syrians firmly imagine that the time has come for them to control themselves with out anybody telling them what they need to do.
As we depart, a younger HTS fighter climbs onto a roof to smash via the portrait of Assad hanging above the interrogation constructing.
He smiles at his companions watching from beneath, whereas pictures and paperwork from the regime’s army archives flutter round their boots.
The fall of Assad has raised unanswered questions on Syria’s future, but it surely has additionally left many questions from the previous unanswered.
