Human remains found in Damascus as Syria uncovers more Assad crimes

Residents of Damascus discovered human remains on Thursday during the renovation of a home in the Qaboun district, the latest in a growing number of grim findings across Syria exposing atrocities committed under the now-defunct regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The remains were transferred to Al-Mujtahid Hospital after being found near the site of a former checkpoint operated by Assad’s forces in 2013, local sources told The New Arab's Arabic edition.

"Internal Security Forces were deployed to the area following the discovery and began investigations to determine the victim’s identity and the circumstances surrounding the burial," one source told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

The discovery comes only days after several other sets of human remains were unearthed in different parts of the country, further proof of atrocities committed by the Assad regime against detainees and suspected dissidents.

On Monday, the Syrian Civil Defence - better known as the White Helmets- and the National Commission for the Missing announced that they had found the remains of eight unidentified civilians in the city of Al-Qaryatayn in the eastern countryside of Homs.

The site included the remains of three children, four women, and one teenage boy were found near a strategic hill that once served as a regime military checkpoint

The organisation said the remains were "exposed and displaced, with no personal belongings or pieces of clothing found at the site".

A day later, the White Helmets announced that roughly 20 more sets of remains had been recovered from a mass grave in the Tel al-Sawan area east of Douma in rural Damascus. Most of the victims are believed to have been women and children.

"No clothes were found on the bodies," the organisation added, suggesting that "the killings occurred while the victims were naked". The mass grave was discovered on farmland near a chemical weapons regiment that had previously been under regime control.

The National Commission for the Missing is leading recovery and documentation operations in coordination with the interior ministry and the Department of Forensic Medicine to discover the whereabouts of over 100,000 civilians who went missing during the Assad regime's reign of terror, with the vast majority believed to have been murdered by security forces.

These revelations follow a Reuters investigation published last Friday, which uncovered a secret operation by the Assad regime between 2019 and 2021 to transfer tens of thousands of bodies from a mass grave in the city of Al-Qutayfah, northeast of Damascus, to a more secluded site near Al-Dumayr in the eastern countryside.

The report said the new site contained 16 trenches stretching 1.2 kilometres (0.7 miles) in total length and holding the remains of an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people.

Most were transported from Tishreen Military Hospital and Saydnaya Prison - handcuffed, blindfolded, and many naked. In October 2018, the site was surrounded by a three-metre-high concrete wall before being completely emptied.

In a separate but related development earlier this week, Syrian security officials discovered another secret underground prison once used by an Assad regime militia to detain and torture civilians, according to state media reports.

The SANA news agency said the underground facility was uncovered in the eastern countryside of Homs, part of a network of torture sites discovered since the regime’s collapse. The prison was reportedly located 10 days earlier during police searches of suspected detention sites.

"Internal Security Forces in the Al-Mukhram area in the eastern Homs countryside found an underground prison north of the village of Buwaydah al-Salamiyah, which was used by the former regime during the revolution to detain civilians," SANA reported.

Omar al-Moussa, deputy director of Homs province’s Al-Mukharram district, told the agency that the prison was an underground hideout sealed with a locked iron door and contained "foam mattresses, wool blankets, and torture tools such as sticks and ropes".

The site was connected to a tunnel five metres deep and 40 metres (131 feet) long.

As investigators continue exhumations and searches across the country, rights groups say the discoveries highlight the immense scale of repression and killing under Assad’s rule - and the long process of uncovering the war crimes that the Assad regime tried to cover up.