Alex Martin Astley is a freelance journalist based in Beirut. He covers conflict, foreign policy, and social justice issues. He has contributed to New Lines,The New Arab,and other publications.
Khadija Hadla's apartment in the Syrian town of Daraya is riddled with bullet holes and memories. As she leafed through her family's album, she stopped at a badly developed photo showing Daraya as it was before the war. "Look, in this one it's winter. And this is the old house," Khadija said, sitting in her modestly furnished living room. Her daughter, Judy, set down a neat tray of coffee and sweets.
"Look at this land, the farms. Look at Daraya. The olive trees, the wheat. Daraya was famous for its grapes," she explained. "There were twelve varieties planted here. Daraya was heaven on earth."
Daraya — a small town a few miles from Syria's capital, Damascus — is unrecognizable today. Once a hotbed of resistance against the Assad regime, it is now a mass of barren fields and ashen neighborhoods after suffering a massacre that killed at least 700 people in the early months of Syria's civil war. Most of the world has since forgotten about the Daraya massacre, yet the indiscriminate shelling of civilians there was a watershed moment in the conflict.
Most of the photos in Khadija's album are burned beyond recognition — the result of a rocket that hit her previous home. As she turned to the section with photos of her relatives, she smiled as if they were in the room, smiling back.
Khadija lost ten family members during the war. Seven of them — four brothers and three nephews — were abducted by the Assad regime and remain missing. She refuses to rest until she knows where every one of them is buried and until the perpetrators are brought to justice.
About 300,000 Syrians are believed to have gone missing since the Assad family came to power in 1970. The regime forcibly disappeared upwards of 160,000 during the 2011-24 civil war alone. Almost all are assumed dead, likely executed or tortured to death in the regime's notorious, industrial prison network.
For decades, Syria was a country where the truth was silenced. In the end, it was deliberately erased.
- Alex Martin Astley
But the new government in Damascus is overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the task: locating the missing and securing accountability for the families. Local sources claim that more than 100 mass graves have cropped up across the country since the regime collapsed in December 2024. There are scant resources available to begin identifying the remains.
For millions of Syrians like Khadija, knowing what became of their loved ones would bring closure after years of unanswered questions. But the search for truth and justice has a broader significance for post-Assad Syria: It is vital to lasting peace and any meaningful transition from authoritarianism.
Khadija still remembers the last time she saw her nephew, Mohammed Sous. He was playing the Snake game on his phone in his family's new home in Sahnaya, the neighboring town to the south. Most of Khadija's family fled there to escape the bombs and hunger in besieged Daraya. They thought it would be safer.
Mohammed begged Khadija to smuggle him back to Daraya. "Aunt, you are the bravest person in the world," Khadija recalled, smiling at the memory. Sahnaya had become stifling for Mohammed and the rest of the family. There was no fighting there, but they lived in constant paranoia of Assad's secret police.
"His goal wasn't to carry a weapon or kill anyone. His goal was freedom. But they were living in a coffin," Khadija said.
On a cold January morning in 2013, Mohammed's bus was stopped at a checkpoint. Soldiers checked identification papers and ordered everyone from Daraya off the bus. Twenty-two people, including Mohammed, were rounded up on the roadside.
"They were shot and then piled on top of one another. Then they surrounded them with tires and set them on fire," Khadija said, losing her composure. Mohammed was 17 at the time. "I collapsed on the ground, and I was crying and crying until my clothes were covered in dirt. This was the first martyrdom we had in the family."
She still regrets not taking Mohammed back to Daraya. And to this day, she cannot locate his remains. "At least if he was martyred [in the fighting] in Daraya, we could have had a grave," she said.
Khadija has a commanding presence that seems to fill the room — a strength of character that is humbling. This was no doubt the source of her courage when she would smuggle herself out of Daraya at night, risking her life to bring food back to the besieged rebels.
The regime killed three of Khadija's nephews — Basel, Qassim and Ayman — during the intense shelling of Daraya. Ayman's friends would call him "the whale" because he was larger than life and never afraid. He suffocated to death in a chemical attack while on a rescue mission as a paramedic. Khadija recalled how he had once told her that his role in the revolution was to save as many lives as possible.
A few days before Ayman's last job, Khadija smuggled suitcases full of clothes, food and dates (Ayman's favorite treat) into Daraya. She pulled up a photo of Ayman's body on her phone. His eyes were bloodshot from the poison gas — possibly chlorine, she said.
Khadija managed to attend the clandestine funerals of Basel, Qassim and Ayman, and she still finds solace whenever she visits their graves. But it is only partial comfort while Mohammed and six of her brothers and nephews remain missing.
"In March, they took my brother, Khaled." Khadija described him as a simple family man, but that offered no protection from Assad's secret police. Like the rest of the family, he was from Daraya, offering sufficient evidence to be taken.
As relatives of the missing are forced to wait for answers and accountability, there are fears that frustration could turn into anger — or something more sinister.
- Alex Martin Astley
Another man who had met Khaled in jail at one of Damascus's interrogation centers tracked the family down to deliver the news. "He told us that Khaled was martyred," Khadija said. "He was tortured, and that made him lose his mind. He no longer knew his own name."
Later, in 2015, a photo of Khaled's body surfaced in the Caesar files, a trove of thousands of leaked images that exposed the scale of human rights abuses in Assad's prisons. Once more, Khadija reached for her phone, pulling up the photo. It was time-stamped, taken just 14 days after his arrest.
Khaled's arrest, detention and enforced disappearance, like that of so many other Syrians, was arbitrary. What he may or may not have done was of little relevance. The ones who survived were simply lucky enough to avoid arrest.
Talal was arrested not long after Khaled, mostly because of his curiosity. "They were not supposed to get Talal," Khadija said, as her story came to her 22-year-old nephew, also abducted in 2013. Talal had been married for a week when uniformed men stormed his house in Sahnaya. They had come for his cousin's husband, a member of the rebel Free Syrian Army. But as the soldiers were forcing him into a car, they noticed Talal watching from the upstairs window. They took him too.
A few months later, Talal died of cholera in a dank cell. Qutaiba, another of Khadija's brothers, also succumbed to illness from filthy prison conditions. Khadija was given a small piece of paper with a scribbled confirmation of death. She keeps a collection of them in a small box — like supermarket receipts — pitiable testaments to the lives that each meant the world to her.
The only consolation the family can draw from the cases of Mohammed, Khaled, Talal and Qutaiba is in knowing what became of them. But other members of Khadija's family vanished without a trace. As she searched for answers in vain, the years of gnawing anxiety proved worse than the final confirmation of death.
Faisal was the smart brother, an artist who made furniture for a living. One day in May 2013, security officials abducted him from his shop in Sahnaya. There has been no news since. Khadija's other brother, Hussein, was a farmer. He would often visit his fields on the outskirts of Daraya to harvest vegetables to sell at the market. On one of those trips, in November of the same year, he vanished along with his car.
Then there was Hisham, Khadija's youngest brother. "We used to call him Mishmush," she said, a term of endearment meaning "apricot" in Arabic. His wife was pregnant when he went missing in March 2015.
Khadija discovered he had been taken to intelligence Branch 227 in the Kafr Sousa suburb of Damascus, where she was handed another death certificate. But when she pleaded to take his body home, her persistence became dangerous. "I was almost killed for demanding the remains," she said. Hisham died in prison before his daughter was born.
When Assad fell, Khadija saw a glimmer of hope. Maybe Faisal or Hussein would be among the thousands streaming out of Syria's prisons on that December morning. "Once Assad had fallen, I went to all the detention centers and branches, including Al Khatib Branch, the Air Force Intelligence Branch, 215, 227; I visited all of them," she said.
But Khadija's hopes soon curdled when she realized that no one was coming home. Her search efforts in the free Syria felt just as futile as before.
For decades, Syria was a country where the truth was silenced. In the end, it was deliberately erased. In the regime's final hours, fleeing officials torched intelligence, judicial and prison archives. In Damascus's infamous Palestine Branch, the intelligence office's archive room was filled with shattered hard drives and piles of ash — all that remained of the documents that might have held clues to finding Khadija's missing relatives.
Today, she believes the case of Syria's missing detainees is not prioritized by the new government. Her frustration grows every day, but her demands are unwavering: "I am asking for the rights of the detained. I am saying we want their bodies, we want their tombs, we want the truth."
"I don't want to see vengeance," she added. "I want official state courts and official prisons, and I want everyone to be held accountable." Finally, she wants reparations from the fortunes hoarded by the Assads. It is the least the government can do, in a country "built on the blood of the martyrs and the detainees," she said.
"Can you believe that the mothers of the martyrs have to beg for money just to buy bread?"
Most families of the missing detainees echo these demands. But with Syria in ruins and most of the former regime's senior officials hiding abroad, it could take years before they are realized.
A sense of dignity and the need to give her family members a decent burial drive Khadija's search for their bodies. Human remains turn up everywhere: in basements, wells and fields. "The other day they found bones in the sewage," she said, appalled at the thought they could belong to one of her brothers.
On a sun-bleached field a few miles east of Damascus, the crimes of the Assad regime were laid bare. Another mass grave had just been discovered. Next to a former military base near the town of Adra, hundreds of bones lay scattered across the ground.
A forensic team from the White Helmets — the famous civil war search-and-rescue group — began collecting the remains in brown paper bags. One of them pointed to a skull near a drainage ditch. Another knelt and picked up a femur, then a rib. Then, they found something that made everyone fall silent: a tiny vertebra, likely belonging to a child no older than three. To complicate matters, the field and the skeletons beneath it had been churned up by farming machinery, making it much harder to count, and later identify, the victims.
"They destroyed everything," said Ammar al-Selmo, the forensics program manager with the White Helmets. "We could've found complete skeletons before that." Ammar suspected that the landowner was trying to hide the evidence by cultivating the land over the bodies. The police soon arrived, followed by officials from the Ministry of Interior.
A Bedouin family observed the commotion from a clutch of tarpaulin tents. They had been paying rent to plant tomatoes there. But now the field would be cordoned off, denying access to their crops. The family was forced to look for work elsewhere.
Surprisingly, locating mass graves is not the main challenge facing Ammar and his team. The problem is that too many bodies are turning up for them to handle. The forensic ground team has only 30 members to cover the entire country, with daily reports of new discoveries.
At his office in Damascus, Ammar recalled some of his recent jobs. On one occasion, he recovered several bodies from a basement. A family lived on the floor above, but for eight years — despite the smell — they had been too afraid to say anything.
On another occasion near Hama, he went to collect three bodies buried near a private residence. A man with a gun, claiming they were his missing sons, threatened Ammar when he tried to take the bodies for identification.
Some of the mass graves are on an industrial scale. The Dhumair site near Damascus has a series of trenches spanning two kilometers. The government lacks the resources to begin the immense task of exhuming bodies from these graves, so Ammar and his team only gather unburied surface remains.
Over the past year, they have collected and stored hundreds of skeletons, though these are yet to be officially identified and returned to their families. That would require genetic testing, and Syria does not have a functioning DNA laboratory. In many cases, such identification will be impossible. Ammar often finds bodies completely burned — a common regime tactic early in the war, he said.
The White Helmets are gathering evidence that could one day bring those responsible for mass murder to justice, a process widely regarded as vital for Syria's transition, healing and long-term stability. However, locating the missing and securing justice are proving to be increasingly politically volatile. The government faces significant pressure to prosecute senior Assad regime officials, and swiftly.
To address both issues, President Ahmed al-Shara'a, who toppled Assad, established in May the National Commission for Missing Persons (NCMP) and the National Commission for Transitional Justice (NCTJ). With staffing and funding shortages from the onset, both face a massive undertaking.
"You cannot start immediately looking for answers," said Zeina Shahla, a media advisor at the NCMP. "You need to collect all the pieces of the puzzle." In this regard, the Commission's primary task is to build a national database of the missing. But it has inherited a broken paper trail from a regime bent on destroying any evidence of its crimes.
"It is not realistic to start giving answers now to the families if we don't have the data and if we don't have the DNA," Zeina noted.
As relatives of the missing are forced to wait for answers and accountability, there are fears that frustration could turn into anger — or something more sinister. Waves of intercommunal violence have swept through Syria over the past year as old grievances threaten the country's efforts to rebuild.
Ongoing revenge attacks and sectarian killings have left many among Syria's minorities living in fear, as the deferral of justice leads some to take matters into their own hands. Nearly 100 people have been abducted or forcibly disappeared in the 11 months since the regime's collapse, according to the U.N. human rights office. It has urged the Syrian authorities to do more to prevent violations and hold those responsible — from all sides — to account.
While the formation of the two Commissions has been hailed as a step in the right direction, it is nonetheless telling that the NCTJ attributes serious violations solely to the previous regime, rather than to every party involved in the civil war and its aftermath. Forces constituting the new government have been responsible for carrying out atrocities before and after Assad's collapse, calling into question the state's ability to ensure impartial accountability.
If Syria is to move forward, it will have to reckon with the crimes of the present, as well as those of the past. All mothers must know where their sons are buried, just as all families have a right to lay their loved ones to rest. If not, the collective trauma will pass to the next generation, and the ghosts of the missing will haunt the nation's future.
Back in Daraya, Khadija closes the family photo album. Her daughter stows it somewhere deep inside the apartment, alongside their other memories. For now, it is all they have left of their missing loved ones as they pick up the pieces of their lives in the new Syria.
The views and positions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DAWN.
