Corpses, men who don’t know their names: Scenes from a Damascus hospital | Syria’s War

Damascus, Syria – In the furthest room of the Mujtahid Hospital basement in Damascus, a frail young man with jet-black hair crouches on the floor. He holds his face in his trembling hands as people walk in and out.

People come in to look at him, hoping he might be their lost relative. When they manage to convince the man to look up, his face stares not at them, but through them, his eyes calm but distant.

A young doctor, who asked to remain anonymous, at the reception desk says: “They don’t recognise anyone.

“He only remembers his name, and sometimes it’s the wrong name. It may be the name of one of his cellmates.”

The staff here say the man was tortured at the Red Prison at Sednaya, the most brutal and notorious of prisons the regime of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad operated.

He is one of many who have been tortured to the point of forgetting their own identities, according to the doctor.

Hospital staff said sometimes families will come and claim a former detainee as a family member. “Sometimes 10 different people believe the same patient is their relative or their son,” he said. “A person’s features change after he stays in prison for a long time.”

What happens far too often, though, is that the family will later discover that the person they brought home is not their relative and they return them to the hospital so their actual families can find them. It’s hard to say if any of this has an effect on the detainees, however.

The movements of the man in the room were gentle and slow. He was never violent or aggressive.

When spoken to by visitors or hospital staff, he mostly did not respond. Sometimes he would utter a one-word answer.

Sometimes he would simply stare off into space as if he were daydreaming. Mostly, he laid his head in his hands.

‘Perished under torture’

When Bashar al-Assad fled Syria for Moscow in the early hours of December 8, nearly 54 years of cruel dynastic family rule ended.

What followed was an outpouring of joy and relief from millions of Syrians inside the country and in the diaspora. But for many, that joy is tempered by pain. Under the Assad regime, they couldn’t search for their missing loved ones. With al-Assad gone, people could finally start looking for answers about their lost loved ones.

The Assad regime detained or forcibly disappeared at least 136,000 people since March 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

About 31,000 of those people have been released from prisons, meaning 105,000 people are still missing.

As mass graves are being uncovered and investigated around the country, including in Damascus’s outskirts, a ghoulish task rears its head: figuring out who is in there.

“I can state with confidence that the majority of these individuals have tragically perished under torture,” Fadel Abdulghany, executive director of the SNHR, told Al Jazeera on December 14, nearly a week after al-Assad’s prisons had been liberated.

These atrocities have been documented and known about for years, yet several states had been making moves to normalise relations with the Assad regime.

As opposition forces moved through Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and finally Damascus, they threw open the doors to the notorious prisons.

On December 9 at Sednaya prison, less than two days after fighters released the prisoners, thousands of Syrians searched the premises for any sign of missing loved ones.

Flipping through the massive handwritten archives, guided by nothing more than the torches in their phones, people were desperate to catch sight of a name they recognised.

People told Al Jazeera that a search was on for rumoured hidden sections of the prison. Groups of people hammered at walls or floors or used copper dowsing rods to search for gaps in the structure.

The White Helmets, Syria’s Civil Defence, gave up the search for more prisoners the next day. They had not found any additional inmates.

Many in Syria spoke about secret prisons scattered around the country, although none were found.

“Contrary to some claims, we have found no evidence of detainees … in secret prisons,” Abdulghany said.

‘It hurts the heart’

With so many people still missing, the task ahead is massive.

Other countries have dealt with a high number of disappeared in the past, notably Sri Lanka and Colombia.

Still, “Syria has a higher percentage of enforced disappearances relative to its population,” Abdulghany said.

“We need international and UN assistance, but the leadership must be Syrian, especially those with experience, relationships, and trustworthiness in Syrian society.”

In the meantime, Syria’s healthcare system is doing what it can.

Nayef Hassan, who works in the Forensics Department at Mujtahid Hospital, keeps handwritten records of the bodies that come to them and coordinates with other hospitals and centres by phone.

He says Mujtahid received 36 corpses from Harasta Hospital near Damascus and, despite 20 years working forensics, he is still in shock.

The corpses were in horrible condition, “with burns, signs of torture, or bullet wounds” he says.

“It hurts the heart,” he said “What we saw here you can’t describe, between torture and executions … what we saw … it’s something we’ve never seen before.”

Outside, in the hospital’s morgue refrigerator, Al Jazeera got a glimpse of 14 corpses that are still unidentified, lying in their white shrouds with their exposed faces deformed by torture.

Thousands of families come each day, Hassan says. They look at the bodies to see if any are their missing relatives.

In front of the hospital, Adnan Khdair and three of his relatives have arrived to search for five missing people, including a couple of his cousins.

They came from Deir Az Zor, nearly 500km (310 miles) northeast of Damascus, to find the missing five, and Mujtahid Hospital was not their first stop.

“[We went to] Sednaya, Al-Khatib Branch, Palestine Branch, Air Force Branch, Military Security Branch, Mezzeh Branch, Branch 87, Branch 227, all of them, there are 100 branches in the country,” Khdair says.

They will keep searching in Damascus for two or three days more and then will go to Homs, he says.

“We were waiting, hoping that when the prisons were finally opened, records would be released to know who died or not,” one of the men with Khdair says.

Instead, without any news on whether their loved ones are alive or dead, “we’re all suffering”.

Back in the hospital’s basement, the frail young man with memory loss sits quietly in his room, trembling. Two women come in and one starts shouting, looking around for a nurse.

“Show me his chest, please, show me his chest,” she calls out to anyone who would listen. Her missing son had once had surgery, leaving a scar on his chest.

Another young man in a backwards baseball cap comes in and gently helps the torture victim to his feet.

He carefully lifts the man’s shirt to reveal his chest.

The two women mutter a few words to themselves and quietly exit the room.

There was no scar.