Syria's gravediggers tell a story of tortured souls

Cemetery officials recount the thousands of bodies they administered to bearing the scars of Assad’s brutal regime

Lorries carrying bodies arrived daily at the Tell Al Nasser cemetery off the motorway between Homs and Hama. Lizzie Porter / the National

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Every day for four years, lorries arrived – sometimes under the cover of darkness, other times in broad daylight. They carried up to 100 bodies, some in body bags, others still wearing civilian clothing. Many bore clear signs of torture, while others showed marks from ropes around their necks.

Nadhim Abu Dan, 53, and his small team of gravediggers at the Tell Al Nasser cemetery could say nothing about the lorries, until now.

Between 2012 and 2015, the vehicles arrived daily at the site, behind a rubbish tip off the motorway between the cities of Homs and Hama. The gravediggers were forced to bury the remains.

“All of the bodies here came from the [Homs] military hospital and the security branches,” Mr Abu Dan told The National from the graveyard, where he had been sleeping in an outhouse for the past seven years after his home in the nearby Deir Baalba area was bombed.

“This whole area you can see here, to that tree and wall, is filled with martyrs,” he said, pointing across an area filled with gravestones. Before 2012, it was empty, he added.

Over the course of the country’s 13-year conflict, Syria’s military hospitals, as well as being used to treat injured soldiers, became notorious as gathering points for people killed by torture, execution, or those who died of illness in the regime’s security branches.

While on paper these centres were meant to deal with various elements of military and state security, in reality, they became torture cells for anyone perceived to oppose the ruling family.

Mr Abu Dan and the other gravediggers were never able to talk about what they saw or the work they were forced to do, fearing that they too would be arrested for opposing the government and its security apparatus. That changed earlier this month, when rebels opposed to the regime in Damascus swept across the country, prompting former president Bashar Al Assad to flee to Russia and ending over half a century of his family’s iron-fisted rule over Syria.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, there were 157,000 people detained or forcibly disappeared in Syria between March 2011, when the regime cracked down on widespread protests, and August 2024.

Dying under torture

Fadel Abdul Ghany, the network’s director, told The National that about 31,000 of these people were freed from prisons as the regime fell, leaving more than 100,000 people unaccounted for.

“Drawing upon thousands of death certificates in our possession, along with our extensive monitoring of reopened prisons and communication with families, I can state with confidence that the majority of these individuals have tragically perished under torture,” he said.

Stepping carefully over the bumpy ground, the resting place of too many, Mr Abu Dan used his arms to indicate how they dug trenches into the earth to dispose of the corpses – some of those people killed under torture, according to the gravediggers’ testimonies.

“They were brought with names and numbers, we would bury them one by one. We would dig a ditch vertically, and divide them in two lines, each body separately,” said Mr Abu Dan, a man with a fragile frame, weathered skin, and a greying beard. At first, the regime provided blue panels to separate the bodies in the ground, but after a while that stopped. “We started using metal panels,” he added.

Mr Abu Dan described how one of his sons, also a gravedigger, used to bring the bodies into the graveyard in a Suzuki vehicle. “He would bring them layer by layer,” he explained. Then civil defence forces affiliated to the regime in Damascus provided the team with a bigger vehicle, enabling the gravediggers to move the bodies more quickly.

There was little communication between the guards who brought the bodies, and the gravediggers. “We didn’t talk to the guards. They said nothing to us,” affirmed Hassan Abu Dan, another of Mr Abu Dan’s sons, who also works as a gravedigger.

As the sheer scale of the torture and systematic killing in the regime’s feared detention network becomes clear, so are all the ways in which the bodies were disposed of. Some were dumped in mass graves, without markings.

Others, like the Tell Al Nasser site, were extensions of normal cemeteries, expanded to accommodate the thousands of people killed over years of brute torture and executions.

According to Syrians tracking the issue of disappearances and mass killings in detention, it was normal for ordinary graveyards to be expanded into burial sites for those killed in the regime’s prison network.

“In any normal cemetery, there could be a graveyard next to it used to bury detainees,” Marwan Al Esh, a Germany-based activist from the Committee for Syrian Detainees, a group trying to determine the fate of Syria’s missing.

“This is the reality, in all Syrian provinces. They opened a wide, empty section beside the normal graves to bury the detainees, then they would allow the families to erect gravestones on top of them to get rid of the traces of the detainees being buried below.”

The National interviewed four gravediggers at the Tell Al Nasser site, who described direct involvement in burying the bodies, including Mr Abu Dan.

A fifth gravedigger, who started working at the site five years ago, said that the number had largely tailed off by the time he started working there, but they would still receive tortured bodies to bury.

“The number was less, maybe one would come to us who had been killed under torture every two days,” the gravedigger said. “We would bury him, but it stopped in general in around 2015.”

Two more cemetery officials, who asked to remain anonymous, confirmed details of the burials, although they did not take part in the process. Asked how many bodies they received overall between 2012 and 2016, one of the them said, “thousands”.

The two cemetery officials said that the bodies were brought in body bags. The gravediggers who saw the bodies at closer hand said some were in body bags, but others came in civilian clothes, sometimes with their hands tied behind their backs.

“Some were in ordinary clothes, some in military clothes – no burial shrouds,” said Mr Abu Dan. “Some of them had marks of torture on their bodies, others would have gunshot wounds.”

“Some of them had the marks of the rope around their neck, which was used to hang them. There were some that came to us with their heads cut off, or their hands or feet cut off.”

Mr Abu Dan said that some of the bodies appeared to belong to Syrian soldiers, but the vast majority were civilians. “There were some [soldiers], but not many. Most of them were civilians, some with execution rope marks on their necks. In their clothes, everything.”

The victims appeared to have died a few days before being buried.

“They had been dead for several days. They smelt,” said Mr Abu Dan. “They had not been in freezers, they seemed to have been thrown under a tree or something.”

Execution system

The people they buried appeared to have been killed in a systematic way, according to the gravediggers.

“In the military security branch, they seemed to have an organised programme, that they killed 60 people a day,” said another gravedigger, who gave his name as Nazir. “I was also detained, for no reason. The other prisoners told me that at least 60 people were killed at the military security branch every day.”

While in other places, burial sites containing detainees have been left bare, the gravediggers described how some families were permitted through the nearby Air Force intelligence checkpoint to erect graves over their loved ones’ burial places. They families were able to identify the burial place, the gravediggers described, by receiving the burial number assigned to the person at the military hospital.

Syrians are still coming to the graveyard to search for their loved ones. Bilal Dagestani, 34, lost contact with his father-in-law in October 2013, after he travelled through a checkpoint belonging to the regime political security branch in Homs city.

Mr Dagestani, who works for a photography printing business, described how he paid about $8,000 to regime security officials to determine that he was dead, and that he was supposedly buried at Tell Al Nasser. Using the number assigned to the father-in-law’s body, the cemetery workers were able to tell him roughly where within the graveyard they believed the body to be buried.

“We paid so much money to people to find out if he was still alive or dead, and it turned out he was dead,” Mr Dagestani said as he examined the colours of gravestones that he might be able to place over the presumed burial site. “I’ve been told that there's a roughly 80 per cent chance that this is where he is buried.”

Others have not been identified, meaning that the number of bodies far outweighs the scores of gravestones at the site.

“There are more bodies underneath my feet here,” said Mr Abu Dan, his black muddy wellies sinking slightly into the soft ground.

Graves of victims which mentioned the word, “martyr” were removed or destroyed by pro-regime security forces, two of the cemetery workers said.

“Some of the families came and put the words martyr on the grave, when they [regime officials] saw that, they would break the gravestone,” explained Hassan Abu Dan.

Indeed, some of the gravestones lay broken and cracked on the ground, including one that read, “the deceased martyr,” of a man born in 1988 and who died in 2012. Most of the death dates mentioned on the graves dated back to 2012, sometimes 2013, most of them young men; Mohammad, Lotfi, Zakariya, Hassan and many other familiar names.

The uncertainty about where exactly each body is buried complicates efforts for closure for families. The process of collecting DNA samples from surviving relatives and exhuming graves, such as Tell Al Nasser, to properly determine the fate of the missing, even those documented in regime paperwork, will take years.

“People think that the issue of accountability and DNA and identification takes a matter of days and hours,” Bassam Al Ahmad, executive director at Syrians for Truth & Justice, a non-governmental organisation documenting human rights violations, told The National. “You need a lot of investigation, DNA samples for matches. We are not asking people to wait 10 years, but it has been only a matter of days since the regime collapsed.”

In 2015 and 2016, the numbers of bodies arriving for burial started to tail off, the gravediggers said. But the memories of what Mr Abu Dan and the other gravediggers saw has stayed with them.

“What can I say? When I saw those young men, it was like seeing my sons in front of me.”