The remains of doctors who are determined from the collective graves in Syria

“This is from a mixed mass grave,” says Dr. Anas Al -Hourani.

The head of the newly opened Syrian definition center stands next to two tables, covered with bone currency. There are 32 human thigh bones on each white tablecloth coated. It has been accurately aligned and numbered.

The screening is the first task of this new link in the long series of crime to justice in Syria. The “mixed collective grave” means that the bodies were thrown one over another.

There are possibilities, that these bones belong to some hundreds of thousands that are believed to have been killed by the regimes of President Bashar Al -Assad and his father Havez, who ruled Syria for more than five decades.

If so, if Dr. Al -Hourani was among the most modern victims: they have died more than a year ago.

Dr. Al -Hourani is a world of forensic medicine: teeth can tell you more about a body, at least when it comes to identifying a person.

But with the thigh bone, workers in the bottom floor of the squatting gray offices in Damascus can start the task: they can learn height, sex, and age, which kind of functions they enjoy; They may also be able to know if the victim was tortured.

The golden standard in identification is of course the DNA analysis. But, he says, there is only the DNA testing center in Syria. A lot was destroyed during the country’s civil war. And “due to the sanctions, many of the basic chemistry that we need for tests are currently not available.”

They have also been informed that “parts of the tools can be used and so on for military purposes.” In other words, they can be considered “double use”, and therefore many western countries from export to Syria prohibit it.

Add to that, cost: $ 250 (187 pounds) for one test. “In a mixed mass grave, you have to do about 20 tests to collect all parts of one body,” says Dr. Al -Hourani. The laboratory is fully dependent on funding from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The government of the new Islamic rebels who have turned to what they call “transitional justice” is one of their priorities.

He told many Syrians who lost their relatives, and lost everything beyond them. BBC is that they remain not affected and frustrated: they want to see more effort from the people who finally Bashar al -Assad repelled from power Last December, 13 years of war.

During those long years of conflict, hundreds of thousands were killed, and millions were displaced. And, according to one estimate, more than 130,000 people disappeared by force.

At the current rate, it may take months to determine only one victim of a mixed mass grave. “This will be a job for many years,” says Dr. Al -Hourani.

Eleven of these “mixed collective graves” roam around the top of a beautiful arid hill outside Damascus. BBC is the first international media to see this site. The graves are very clear now. In the years since its dug, their surface was drowned in the dry rocky ground.

Hussein Al -Awi Mansi, or Abu Ali accompanies us, as it is also called. He was a driver in the Syrian army. Abu Ali says: “My shipment was human bodies.”

This integrated man with a salt beard and pepper was tracked thanks to the tireless investigation of Mustafa, the executive director of the Syrians of the Syrian work team in the Syrian emergency situations, a group of advocacy in the United States. He was convinced Abu Ali to join us, and witnessed what he called a parallel “worst crimes of the twenty -first century”.

Abu Ali moved many bodies to multiple sites for more than 10 years. On this site, it came, on average, twice a week for approximately two years at the beginning of the demonstrations and then the war, between 2011 and 2013.

The routine was always the same. He was heading to military or security installation. “I had a 16 -meter trailer (52 feet). It was not always filled with the edge. But I think, on average from 150 to 200 bodies in each load.”

From his shipment, he says he is convinced that they are civilians. Their bodies were “distorted and torture.” The only identification that he can see is the numbers written on the body or hold it on the chest or forehead. I set the numbers where they died.

He said there were many “215” – the famous military intelligence detention center in Damascus known as “Branch 215”. It is a place we will visit in this story.

Abu Ali’s trailer had no hydraulic elevator to vaccinate his load. When he entered a trench, the soldiers pulled the bodies into the opening one by one. Then the front loading tractor “settled them, presses them, and fills the grave.”

Three men arrived with the faces of a cavity from a neighboring village. They confirm the story of the regular visits made by the military trucks to this remote spot.

As for the man behind the wheel: How can he do this for a week after week, year after year? What used to say to himself every time a taxi ascend?

Abu Ali says that he learned to be a dead servant of the state. “You can’t say anything good or bad.”

When the soldiers threw the bodies in the newly drilling pits, “I would go far and look at the stars. Or look towards Damascus.”

Damascus is the place where Malack Oudi recently returned, after years of refugees in Türkiye. Syria may have been free from strangling the dictatorship of the Assad family. Malak still spends a life sentence.

Over the past 13 years, it has been imprisoned in a daily routine of pain and longing. The year 2012, a year after some of the Syrian residents died of a protest against their president, its boys disappeared.

Muhammad was still a teenager when he was recruited in the Assad army, with the spread of demonstrations and the fatal regime campaign was saturated in a full war.

He hated what he saw, as his mother says. Muhammad began to escape, and even went on the same illustrations. But it was followed.

“They broke his arms and hit his back,” says his mother. “He spent three days unconscious in the hospital.”

Muhammad went on again. “I told him missing,” Malack says. “But I was hiding it.”

In May 2012, Muhammad ran out of 19 -year -old. He was arrested with a group of friends. They were shot. Malak says that there was no official notice. But she always assumed that he was killed.

Six months later, the brother of Muhammad al -Asghar Maher from the school was dragged by the officers. The arrest of Maher II was. He went to the 14 -year -old protests. This led to his first arrest. When he was allowed to leave, and after a month, he was in his underwear, covered, his mother says in cigarette burns, wounds and lice. “He felt terror.”

Malack believes that Maher had disappeared from school in 2012 because the authorities found that she was hiding his older brother. Now, for the first time in 13 years, Malak returns to that school, desperate to get any idea of ​​what happened to a dowry.

The new Headtecher teacher produces a couple from the books of the Red Professor. Malak tracks the ranks of the names with her finger, then finds the name of her son. December 2012, the record categorically states: Maher was excluded from school because he failed to attend for two weeks.

There is no explanation that it is the state that disappeared for him. Another thing, though: a folder was found with Maher School Records. Its cover is decorated with a picture of Bashar al -Hakim al -Assad, and it stares far away at the distance. Malac takes a pen from the head of the head of the head and ruins the image. Six months ago, this gesture could be fatal.

For years, it was the only scraps that Malik had to cling to two men saying that they saw Maher in “Branch 215” – the same center of military detention that produced many bodies of Abu Ali to transport.

One of the witnesses told Malak that her son told him something about his parents, as his mother says, he could not just know. It was definitely. “He asked this man to tell me that he was fine.” Malak raises and leaks tears, and is fighting torn tissues in the corners of her eyes.

For Malack, like many Syrians, the fall of Assad was not just a day of joy, but with hope. “I thought there was a 90 % chance that was skilled from prison. I was waiting for it.”

But she was not even able to find the name of her son in prison lists. Thus the palpitations continue to pain through it. “I feel lost and confused,” she says.

Her younger brother, Mahmoud, was killed by a tank shooting on civilians in 2013.

“At least he had a funeral.”