The Syrian neighbourhood at the heart of Assad’s killing machine

In Tadamon, children know the difference between a human jaw and a dog’s jaw.

They are so obsessed with the decomposing remains of living in this desolate suburb of Damascus that the boys accidentally throw around skulls and broken hips.

Once a rebel stronghold, Tadamon was turned into an industrial killing field by militants loyal to Bashar al-Assad during Syria’s 13-year civil war. Wide swaths of the neighborhood have been reduced to rubble, and it was the site of an infamous massacre by regime loyalists in 2013, before being overrun by government forces five years later. taking back.

Since then, it has remained a wasteland, reflecting Assad’s policy of ruthlessly punishing those who oppose him; an ashen purgatory teeming with the souls of the nameless dead.

The Financial Times found human bones scattered among the debris and torn, bloody clothing in dug-out buildings.In one basement, several frayed knots of rope hung from the slopes. In the other, there was a smell of death from a pile of unrecognizable corpses.

These are the aftermath of what residents and rights groups have described as years of unfettered atrocities by forces loyal to Assad, including siege, slaughter, torture and brutal sexual violence was the inhabitants to obey.

“Everywhere we stand, we’re probably standing on dead bodies,” a 10-year-old boy told the Financial Times, recalling how he found a decomposing hand sticking out of a mound of rubble days ago. he and his friends covered it with a mound of earth.

The neighborhood is home to an unknown number of hastily dug mass graves, some of the worst examples of Assad’s industrial violence uncovered since the rebels toppled his regime this month. Although human rights groups and anti-Assad activists have documented the individual atrocities, the staggering number of human remains remains. the number has led many to believe that only a fraction of what happened is known.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died in Syria since 2011, when Assad’s brutal crackdown on protesters sparked a full-scale civil war consistent features of governance as well as that of his father, Hafez, who ruled from 1970 until his death in 2000.

What happens next in districts like Tadamon will be a test case for Syria’s new rulers. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the most powerful rebel faction backing the country’s interim government, has promised to be a unifying force. Yet 13 years of conflict have eroded Syria’s social fabric and many called for revenge.

Tadamon has been a symbol of bloodshed since a video surfaced in 2022 showing evidence of a mass killing in 2013. The video showed a man in military fatigues leading unarmed, blindfolded people into a narrow street and shooting them at them from a distance as they approached the edge or after falling in.

He was later identified as NDF member Amjad Yusuf, and his location was confirmed by Human Rights Watch researchers, who matched satellite images to the video scene.A forensic examination has yet to take place, but the group has already found evidence of war crimes.

Hiba Zayadin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the group “doesn’t expect to find human remains scattered over a much larger area of ​​the district.” “A lot more happened in Tadamon,” she said.

The open-air mass grave is still visible, although it is unclear whether the bodies were dug up by regime forces to cover up their crimes.Until this week, most residents stayed away, terrified of the narrow alley where their worst memories were formed.

Residents say that the horrors in that alley and nearby ruins continued for years. They recalled regularly seeing pro-Assad fighters bring people into the area, sometimes blindfolded and bloodied.They often heard the inimitable slow thud of single gunshots, followed by the thud of bodies falling to the ground.

“Sometimes they were neighborhood boys. revolutionaries who stood up against Assad,” said one resident, describing how his two sons were killed by NDF soldiers that way. “But sometimes we didn’t know who they were, and they were brought here only to die for,” he said, still too afraid of retribution to use his name.

He described how gunshots rang out from the neighborhood night after night between 2013 and 2018. Residents also took the FT to the basement of the mosque, where they said militia leaders would bring the women they kidnapped from the neighborhood and then rape and kill them.

Tadamon is one example of the fear and repression that characterized life under the NDF.

“The ruling men here used to rape women in front of their husbands, then shoot them,” said one resident. Another described how “no one would ever dare to speak up when they were still around. they would threaten you, beat you, burn your house down or kidnap or kill your children.”

The names of the NDF leaders still strike fear into the hearts of Tadamon residents, showing how the militants were able to carry out terror under Assad. of bullets.

The neighborhood appears to have been used as a dumping ground for bodies of unknown origin, where young men and boys were often rounded up at gunpoint to dig ditches to dump the bodies in. One man spoke of his inability to forgive himself for his complicity in digging the graves of young revolutionaries.

Sometimes the bodies were removed for reasons unknown to the residents.

Salah, 59, a former ambulance driver for the Damascus Health Department, recalled how in 2018 they would receive orders from Tadamo to pick up the bodies, load them into ambulances and take them to the morgue of the capital’s Mujtahid Government Hospital.

He said his orders came just after a deal was struck between rebels and the Assad government that year to evacuate rebels and their families from Tadamon to opposition-held Idlib in northwestern Syria, returning the region to regime control.

Some residents suspected the regime was trying to clean up evidence of its crimes. The bodies, Salah said, were burned to a crisp, some sealed in black body bags.

He and his companions kept their eyes on the ground, avoiding the wrath of the soldiers, whose guns remained pointed at them. [your body in] with them.”

After the fourth or fifth time, “I vowed never to work in health care again,” Salah said.

As the regime fell, some of the thousands displaced from Tadamon as part of the 2018 deal began to return to see what had become of their neighborhood.

In doing so, some discovered that NDF forces had expropriated their houses, selling or renting them to others, and disputes arose between families who both claimed ownership of the same house, a sign of trouble to come.

Many in Tadamon are now hoping for retribution.Residents were talking about one of the local NDF leaders, Abu Muntajib, who was reportedly captured by rebels trying to escape on the eve of Assad’s ouster.

The FT cannot confirm whether he is now in HTS custody. But for days after his rumored “arrest,” residents of Tadamon raced to a nearby square in anticipation of Abu Muntajib’s public execution. It never came.