Syrians live among bones after years of Tadamon killings

Year after year, Abdul-Rahman Saud watched blindfolded men be led out of a battered minibus, their hands tied firm.

More often than not they stumbled as they made their way over the uneven ground, disappearing between the skeletons of bombed-out buildings.

Then came the sounds of death: gunshots, screams, pleading.

“I cannot count how many they killed. Everyone here in Tadamon lived in terror,” Saud tells Middle East Eye.

This is the site of the Tadamon massacre, the place seen in leaked footage from April 2013 where Syrian soldiers and militiamen walked 288 people into a pit, mocked them and shot them dead. 

Saud watched it in real time, or at least the prelude. He also saw a lot more. 

“They were killing people here right up until the rebels took Damascus,” he says, one eye on his wandering goats, another on his wandering children.

Saud’s kids roam around this shell-shocked neighbourhood freely. They talk about the bones they find, the bodies they have discovered, the threats they received.

The mass grave from 2013 has been filled in, but macabre mementos can be found all around the alleys.

Tadamon’s residents have grown accustomed to walking past a spine one day, a pelvic bone the next. 

Bodies that weren’t buried were eaten by the packs of stray dogs seen wandering around the ruins, they say. 

The suspicious reddish tinge of some piles of earth suggests the ground in some areas was tilled relatively recently.

“If this neighbourhood could talk it would tell you the most terrible things,” says Mahmoud Flees, who lives nearby. “It could tell you all the crimes it witnessed against women and children.”

Horror scene

Tadamon’s reputation as a scene of horror was sealed by the massacre footage that emerged in 2022. Seven women and 15 children were among those seen murdered.

Yet the scale of killings here, and indeed across Syria, has become more apparent now Bashar al-Assad has been removed by rebels.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, around 100,000 Syrians are missing and presumed dead. 

Their relatives have scoured hospitals, prisons and detention centres for any clues of their whereabouts. Now they are coming to mass graves instead.

Mahsa, who wishes to be identified only by her first name, recognised her brother Ahmed in the video. A still on her phone shows him in the pit wearing a red shirt. He’s slumped lifeless against the earth wall with a man’s bloody head in his lap. 

“I’ve been searching for him for over 10 years. He disappeared with his 10-year-old son,” she says. “I’ve come here to take his body.”

Human Rights Watch on Tuesday urged the interim Syrian government to secure the Tadamon site and other mass graves.

“Without immediate Syrian and international efforts to secure and preserve likely sites of mass crimes for coordinated exhumations and forensic investigations, there is a serious risk that critical evidence for accountability will be lost,” said the rights group’s Hiba Zayadin.

“The loved ones of people so brutally killed here deserve to know what happened to them. The victims deserve accountability.”

Refuge to retribution

“Tadamon” means solidarity in Arabic. The neighbourhood was created to house the Syrians displaced from the Golan Heights after Israel seized the territory in 1967, but as it grew its population diversified.

Druze lived next door to Sunnis. Alawis bought at Turkmen shops and cut their hair at Palestinian barbers.

“It was full of options,” says Saud. “Everyone loved each other but the regime made us hate each other.”

There was a fair amount of support for the revolution in Tadamon, and Assad’s soldiers never forgot it. 

'They walked around like they were kings. If anyone looked them in the eye, they would kill them'

- Abdul-Rahman Saud, Tadamon resident

Saud remembers entire families being killed. His neighbours, the Aloush family, were all wiped out, “including their four young boys”.

“If they saw on your ID that you were originally from a Sunni area like Idlib or Deir Ezzor, that was enough to kill you,” he says.

Tadamon’s kill zone, about a square kilometre in size, was overseen by the Military Intelligence and the paramilitary National Defence Forces (NDF).

Amjad Youssef, a senior military intelligence official, gained notoriety after the Tadamon massacre was exposed. The videos show him gunning down his victims with the ease that comes with routine.

There was also NDF officer Saleh al-Ras. Locals knew him as Abu Muntajeb, though his sadism and moustache also lent him the name “Syria’s Hitler”.

Residents speak of a third man, too: Mario. Court documents from Germany suggest he resembled the computer game plumber.

Clad with blue and white chequered tiles, their headquarters is known locally as the “chess house”. Women snatched from the mosque would be brought here to be raped, neighbours say.

“They walked around like they were kings,” says Saud. “If anyone looked them in the eye they would kill them.”

Saleh al-Ras is said to now be in rebel hands.

Four days after Assad’s government was overthrown, a rumour spread across Damascus that he would be executed in one of the city’s squares.

Hundreds gathered under the pine trees expected to soon become gallows.

But Ras was never brought out to the crowd of rebels, families and the furious. Syria’s new authorities appear intent on putting Assad’s former enforcers on trial instead.

“I want to see Abu Muntajeb hang,” said Fatih Jelawni, 47. “He was responsible for what happened in Tadamon. This would be justice.”