In Tadamon, the children know the difference between a human jaw and a dog’s.
So inured are they to decomposing remains, a consequence of living in this desolate Damascus suburb, that the boys casually toss around skulls and fractured femurs.
Once a rebel stronghold, Tadamon was turned into an industrial killing field by militias loyal to Bashar al-Assad during Syria’s 13-year civil war. Broad swaths of the district were reduced to rubble, and it was the site of a notorious massacre by regime loyalists in 2013 before being retaken by government forces five years later.
It has remained a wasteland ever since, reflecting Assad’s policy of ruthlessly punishing those who stood against him: a sea of rubbish and human remains; an ashen purgatory wafting with the souls of unnamed dead.
The Financial Times found human bones scattered throughout mounds of debris and decaying, bloodstained clothes in hollowed-out buildings. In one basement, several frayed rope nooses hung from rafters. In another, the smell of death lingered from a mound of unidentifiable corpses.
These are the consequence of what residents and rights groups have described as years of unfettered atrocities conducted by forces loyal to Assad, including siege, slaughter, torture and brutal sexual violence. Until last Sunday, the neighbourhood had been ruled by the National Defence Forces, a pro-Assad militia who terrorised residents into submission.
“Everywhere we stand, we are probably standing on dead bodies,” one 10-year-old boy told the Financial Times. He recalled how days earlier he had discovered a decomposing hand poking out from a mound of rubble; he and his friends covered it with a mound of dirt.
The neighbourhood is home to an unknown number of hastily dug mass graves, some of the worst examples of Assad’s industrialised violence to be uncovered since his regime was ousted by rebels this month. While rights groups and anti-Assad activists have documented individual atrocities that took place here, the staggering number of human remains has led many to believe that only a fraction of what took place was known.
Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have been killed in Syria since 2011, when Assad’s brutal crackdown on protesters triggered a full-scale civil war. Extrajudicial killings, mass executions and enforced disappearances were consistent features of both Assad’s rule and that of his father Hafez, who ruled from 1970 until his death in 2000.
What happens next in neighbourhoods 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, have vowed to be a unifying force. And yet 13 years of conflict have frayed Syria’s social fabric and left many calling for vengeance.
Tadamon has been a byword for the regime’s bloodlust ever since a video emerged in 2022 showing evidence of a mass killing in 2013. In the video, a man in military fatigues was shown leading unarmed, blindfolded men towards a large ditch in the middle of a narrow street and shooting them at close range as they neared the edge or after they fell in.
He was later identified as NDF member Amjad Youssuf, and the location was confirmed by Human Rights Watch researchers, who matched satellite imagery with the scene in the video. A forensic examination of the site has yet to take place, but the group has already found evidence of war crimes.
Hiba Zayadin, a Human Rights Watch researcher, said the group “did not expect to find human remains scattered across a much larger area of the neighbourhood”. “So much more happened at Tadamon,” she said.
The open-air mass grave still lies in plain sight, though it is unclear whether bodies have been excavated by regime forces to conceal their crimes. Until this week, most residents stayed away, terrified of the narrow alleyway where some of their worst memories were formed.
The horrors in that alleyway and the nearby mounds of rubble continued for years, residents said. They recalled regularly seeing militias loyal to Assad bring men to the area, sometimes blindfolded and bloodied. They would often hear the inimitable slow pop of single gunshots, followed by the thud of bodies falling to the ground.
“Sometimes they were boys from the neighbourhood — revolutionaries who rose up against Assad,” one resident said, describing how his two sons had been killed by NDF soldiers in that way. “But sometimes we didn’t know who they were and they were brought here just to die,” he said, still too scared of retribution to use his name.
He described how night after night, between 2013 and 2018, shots rang out from the neighbourhood. Residents also took the FT to the basement of a mosque where they said militia leaders would bring women they had abducted from the neighbourhood, then rape and kill them.
Tadamon is one example of the pattern of fear and repression that characterised life under the NDF.
“The men that used to rule here, they used to rape women in front of their husbands and then shoot the husband,” one resident said. Another described how no one would “dare ever speak out when they were still around — they would threaten you, beat you, burn your house down or kidnap or kill your children”.
The NDF leaders’ names still inspire fear in the hearts of Tadamon residents, demonstrating how militias were empowered to wreak terror under Assad. Children spoke of how one leader would shoot at them regularly, making their legs dance erratically to avoid his darting bullets.
The neighbourhood was seemingly used as a dumping ground for bodies of unknown origin, killed there or elsewhere. Young men and boys would often be rounded up at gunpoint to come and dig ditches to dump the bodies into. One man spoke of being unable to forgive himself for his complicity in digging the graves of young revolutionaries.
Sometimes, bodies would be removed for reasons residents could not understand.
Salah, 59, a former ambulance driver in the Damascus health directorate, recalled how they would receive dispatch orders to Tadamon in 2018 to pick up bodies, load them on to ambulances and deposit them at the capital’s Mujtahid government hospital morgue.
He said his instructions came shortly after a deal was struck that year between rebels and the Assad government to evacuate rebels and their families from Tadamon to opposition-controlled Idlib in north-western Syria, returning the neighbourhood to regime control.
Some residents suspected the regime was trying to clean up evidence of its crimes. The bodies included those of women and children, Salah said. Most were burnt to a crisp, some zipped up in black body bags.
He and his companions kept their eyes glued to the ground, avoiding the wrath of the soldiers whose guns stayed pointed at them. “One driver was saying the bodies don’t fit in the car, and was told: ‘Fit them, otherwise I will fit [your body in] with them.’”
After the fourth or fifth time, “I vowed never to work in healthcare again,” Salah said.
With the fall of the regime, a handful of the thousands displaced from Tadamon as part of the 2018 deal began trickling back to see what had become of their neighbourhood.
In doing so, some discovered that NDF forces had expropriated their homes, selling or renting them to others. Arguments erupted between families who both claimed ownership over the same house, a sign of looming problems to come.
Many in Tadamon now hope for retribution. Residents spoke of one local NDF leader, Abu Muntajib, who was reportedly caught by rebels trying to flee on the eve of Assad’s fall.
The FT could not confirm if he was now in HTS custody. But for several days after his rumoured “arrest”, Tadamon’s residents ran to a nearby public square, expecting to see Abu Muntajib’s public execution. It never came.