After 50 years of Assad cruelty, Syrians search for dead loved ones - and closure

BBC

Syrians have come to the hospital in Damascus looking to find missing loved ones

On a painted wall outside Damascus's Mustahed Hospital are photographs of the faces of dead men.

A constantly changing crowd of people examine them, squinting against the low winter sun at men who look as if they died in great pain. Noses, mouths and eye sockets are twisted, damaged and squashed. 

Their bodies are in the hospital, brought to the city centre from another on the outskirts of Damascus. The medics say the dead were all prisoners.

A stream of wives, brothers, sisters and fathers come to the hospital looking for information. They're hoping most of all to find a body to bury. 

They get as close as possible to the photos looking hard for anything on the faces that they recognise. Some of them video each picture to take home for a second opinion.

It is a brutal job. A few of the men had been dead for weeks judging by the way faces have decomposed.

From the wall of photos, relatives go on to the mortuary

A woman outside Mustahed Hospital shows us the man she is looking for

Mustahed Hospital received 35 bodies, so many that the mortuary is full and the overflow room packed with trolleys loaded with body bags.

Inside the morgue, bodies were laid out on a bare concrete floor under a line of refrigerated trays. 

Body bags had been opened as families peered inside and opened the refrigerators. 

Some corpses were wrapped loosely in shrouds that had fallen away to expose faces, or tattoos or scars that could identify someone. 

One of the dead men was wearing a diaper. Another had sticky tape across his chest, scrawled with a number. Even as they killed him, his jailors denied him the dignity of his own name.

All the bodies were emaciated. The doctors who examined them said they had signs of beating including severe bruising and multiple fractures.

Dr Raghad Attar, a forensic dentist, was checking dental records left by families to try to identify bodies. She spoke calmly about how she was assembling a bank of evidence that could be used for DNA tests, then broke down when I asked her how she was coping.

"You hear always that prisoners are lost for a long time, but seeing it is very painful. 

"I came here yesterday. It was very difficult for me. We hope the future will be better but this is very hard. I am really sorry for these families. I am very sorry for them."

Tears rolled down her face when I asked her if Syria could recover from 50 years of the Assads.

"I don't know. I hope so. I have the feeling that good days are coming but I want to ask all countries to help us."

"Anything to help us. Anything, anything…"

The families and friends coming in went silently from body to body, hoping to find some end to the pain that started when their loved ones were picked up at one of the regime's checkpoints or in a raid on their homes and thrown into the Assads' gulag.

A woman called Noor, holding a facemask over her mouth and nose, said her brother was taken in 2012, when he was 28. 

All they had heard since was a mention in a Facebook post that he had been in the notorious Sednaya prison, where the regime left prisoners to rot for decades.

"It is painful," said Noor. "At the same time, we have hope. Even if we find him between the bodies. Anything so long as he's not missing. We want to find something of him. We want to know what happened to him. We need an end to this."