Syrians flock to morgues looking for loved ones who perished in Assad's prisons

DAMASCUS -- Mohammad Chaeeb spoke softly into his phone, telling a relative the grim news: He found his brother at the morgue.

“I saw him and said my goodbyes,” he said. His gaze lingered on the blackened body of Sami Chaeeb, whose teeth were bared and whose eye sockets were empty. It looked as if he had died screaming. “He doesn’t look normal. He doesn’t even have eyes.”

The dead man was jailed five months ago, disappearing into a dark prison system under the rule of President Bashar al-Assad. His body is just one of many found in Syrian detention centers and prisons since Assad's government fell last weekend.

Some of the prisoners died just weeks ago. Others perished months earlier. Syrians across the world are now circulating images of the bodies in hope of seeing slain loved ones whose fate had been a mystery.

At the morgue visited by The Associated Press on Wednesday in Damascus, families flocked to a wall where some of the pictures were pinned in a haunting gallery of the dead. Relatives desperately scanned the images for a recognizable face.

Mohammad Chaeeb never knew why his brother had been imprisoned. “We heard stories — cannabis, organ trafficking, drugs, weapon trading. But he had nothing to do with any of that,” he said.

He rushed to the morgue after another brother living in Turkey sent him a photo of a body that looked familiar. He was able to identify his brother by a mole under his ear and a half-amputated finger, an injury from when he was 12.

Standing over the body, he lifted the drape and gently pulled out his brother’s left hand, examining it closely. “Here,” he said, pointing to the stump.

Nearby, forensic workers worked rapidly to identify the bodies and hand them over to relatives.

Yasser Qasser, a forensic assistant at the morgue, said they received 40 bodies that morning from the hospital that were being fingerprinted and having DNA samples taken. The staff had already identified about eight, he said. “But dozens of families are arriving, and the numbers don’t match.”

Some bodies came from the notorious Saydnaya Prison, still dressed in prisoner uniforms, Qasser said.

His colleague, Dr. Abdallah Youssef, said identifying all of them would take time.

“We understand the suffering of the families, but we are working under immense pressure. The bodies were found in salt rooms, exposed to extreme cold,” he said.

Morgue officials who examined the corpses have seen bullet wounds and marks that appeared to be the result of torture, he added.

An estimated 150,000 people have been detained or reported missing in Syria since 2011. Under Assad’s rule, any whiff of dissent could send someone to prison immediately. For years, it was a sentence akin to death, as few ever emerged from the system.

Citing testimony from freed prisoners and prison officials, Amnesty International has reported that thousands of Syrians were killed in frequent mass executions. Prisoners were subjected to constant torture, intense beatings and rape. Inmates frequently died from injuries, disease or starvation. Some fell into psychosis and starved themselves, the human rights group said.

Among the bodies at the morgue Wednesday was Mazen al-Hamada, a Syrian activist who fled to Europe but returned to Syria in 2020 and was imprisoned upon arrival. His mangled corpse was found wrapped in a bloody sheet in Saydnaya.

As they searched the morgue, some families moved among the bodies, weeping quietly and pausing to look for familiar features. The bodies lay covered in white shrouds, each marked with a number and some bearing the label “unknown.”

Hilala Meryeh, a 64-year-old Palestinian mother of four, stood in the dingy identification room, bags of bodies all around her. She had just found one of her sons.

She paused, screwed her eyes closed and turned her face toward the ceiling, murmuring a prayer. Her four boys were arrested by the former Syrian regime in 2013 during a crackdown on the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk. She still needed to find three.

“I don’t know where they are,” she said. “Give me my children, search for my children!”

“Why did he do this to his people?” Meryeh cried out. “Imprison them, we wouldn’t have objected. Try them, but to slaughter them?”

Other Syrians, like Imad Habbal, stood motionless in the morgue, coming to grips with the reality and injustice of their loss.

Habbal gazed at the body of his brother, Diaa Habbal.

“We came yesterday, and we found him dead,” he said. “They killed him. Why? What was his crime? What did he ever do to them? Just because he came back to his country?”

Diaa Habbal, a Syrian who had been living in Saudi Arabia since 2003, returned to Damascus in mid-2024 to visit his family, his brother said. He was arrested by the Syrian military police six months ago on charges of evading military service.

With trembling hands, Imad Habbal lifted the covering, his voice breaking as he wept and spoke to his brother.

“I told you not to come,” he said. “I wish you didn’t come.”

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Associated Press writers Julia Frankel in Jerusalem and Sally Abou AlJoud in Beirut contributed to this report.