Along a narrow street flanked by bombed-out residential buildings, a group of children are showing off some gruesome finds.
“There was a shoe sticking out, and one of my friends said ‘that’s a nice shoe’,” 10-year-old Yousef tells me.
“So he pulled out the shoe and all of a sudden a leg bone came out.”
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Yousef is brandishing a shovel with a bucket of human bones in his other hand.
He calls himself the gravedigger.
He’s been digging up bones on this street in Tadamon, a suburb of Damascus for a year now, he says. The bones have been there since before he was born.
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In 2019, gruesome footage of a massacre carried out on this street found its way out of Syria, leaked by opposition activists.
The video, from April 2013, was shot by the perpetrators themselves, henchmen of Bashar al Assad‘s military intelligence directorate.
It shows a succession of men, hands tied, being dragged to the edge of a large pit filled with tyres, then shoved or kicked into it and shot as they fall.
Their executioners seem to revel in the horror of it. They smile to the camera and give thanks to their “beautiful boss”.
The victims are dressed in clean, civilian clothes as though they had been pulled directly off the street.
At least 41 people are believed to have been killed here.
‘They used to burn them’
A woman called Muneera stops to talk to us. She says this is not the only mass grave in the area.
“When they killed people here, they used to burn them,” Muneera says.
“We used to smell the smell of hair burning.
“We used to smell these really bad smells and a few days later, big cars would come pretending to pick up garbage and they would load these dead bodies up along with the garbage, covering them up with tarpaulin.”
She also says she would hear the screams of women being tortured.
“They used to round up women at the checkpoint and take them to the mosque. We would hear them screaming, they beat them, killed them… and I don’t know what else.”
Muhammad Huwari’s 30-year-old son, Hussam, went missing the day of the massacre after he was stopped by regime thugs and asked for his ID.
He reels off the names of those he wants brought to justice, government loyalists affiliated with military intelligence who terrorised the neighbourhood.
“I’m begging the UN and all countries and the Red Cross, please let us see the bodies, just to get some peace of mind. See how they killed him.”
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Now there is a chance for accountability, pursued not just by some foreign jurisdiction but potentially within Syria itself.
The leader of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), Abu Mohammad al Jolani or Ahmad al Sharaa as he now prefers to be known, is making all the right noises about bringing to account all those responsible for torture and killings.
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A transitional government might be better placed to ensure that happens and much will depend on whether the country manages the stability necessary for human rights activists and forensic investigators to do their work.
It is a gigantic undertaking, commensurate with the enormity of the Assad regime’s crimes. It is also the least the Syrian people deserve.
