More than 30 photographs were taped to the wall outside Damascus Hospital. They showed the faces of corpses, sometimes alongside identifying marks elsewhere on their bodies. Most had clearly been tortured.
People jostled in front of them on Wednesday, as Syria’s desperate search for about 100,000 missing people continues, days after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Those who thought they recognised someone could go inside the hospital morgue, in central Damascus, to see the bodies themselves. The emanating smell was so strong that passersby covered their noses.
Hamza Haik was a small child when his uncle Mohammad Faisa Haik was taken from a mosque in 2012, “but I remember it”, he said. Haik pulled out his phone, first showing photographs of his uncle, then two others – a family friend who disappeared six years ago, and another man: families are helping each other with their searches.
With his father, Haik looked at the pictures of corpses, then they entered the morgue to see the bodies themselves. It was “horrible”, Haik said with a grimace on their return outside. “We saw bones.” His father, beside him, acted out gouged eyes and cut-off limbs. They were leaving with no answers, and even more questions.
An older woman made it to the hospital door, but her knees buckled at the entrance, staff jumping forward to support her.
At the gate, a group of women pleaded with a security man to let them enter the emergency area. There must be more corpses in there, they suggested, their anguish clear, though he kept repeating that the morgue was the only place they could find them.
Just one family had found a son, a staff member said. It was not clear if she meant among the dead or the living.
There was a man called Maher sitting nearby, waiting for a reunion. He was from Aleppo but had been incarcerated in the notorious Sednaya prison for 18 years, medics said. Maher was thin and hunched, a hood over his head and his eyes half closed. He coughed occasionally, his head nervously bouncing in between. Two of his fingers were in casts. “He was scared inside,” a medic said, gesturing back towards the hospital building.
[ Crowds throng Syria’s ‘human slaughterhouse’ drawn by hopes of a miracle reunionOpens in new window ]
Elsewhere in Damascus, there was still a party atmosphere, as Syrians celebrate the end of more than half a century of the brutal Assad family regime.
At Umayyad Square, young women were doing photoshoots with the three-starred Syrian revolutionary flag wrapped around them; families posed nearby on yet another abandoned tank.
Rebel militants had sealed off the presidential palace, after an initial period where citizens roamed freely, looting the Assads’ belongings. The fighters said they didn’t know why it was out of bounds to the public now, but the order had come from their leadership.
A curfew in Damascus ended on Wednesday, with the rebel coalition leading the country calling for Syrian people to return to work and “contribute to building a new Syria”.
Shops were largely open again. In the old city’s famous Al-Hamidiyeh Souq – where you can buy everything from butt-enhancing underwear to carpets – revolutionary flags were suddenly for sale. A big one was 250,000 Syrian pounds (€18.30); a small one went for 75,000 pounds. The famous ice cream shop Bakdash had queues out the door and revolutionary flags in the window. Foreign money exchanges, largely illegal under the Assad regime, were openly being advertised in public: another transformation.
The nearby Umayyad Mosque was packed with people, including rebel fighters who handed around their guns for women and children to take photographs with.
“You can’t imagine how I’m feeling,” said one, Louy Gabso (26). “We kicked out the Iranians, Russians, Syrian forces.” Next, he said, he wants Syria and other Arab countries not to fight each other any more.
“It’s very happy,” smiled a small woman, who had come to the famous mosque for the first time. “We will have a beautiful future,” her husband said, grinning.
While this couple was hesitant to give their names, elsewhere in Damascus it was clear that people feel comfortable speaking freely.
[ At 5am, my husband shakes me awake. The Syrian regime has fallenOpens in new window ]
Where a week ago certain conversations happened in secret or not at all, people have begun talking openly about what they went through, even to strangers. A taxi driver volunteered that he was imprisoned for a year for avoiding conscription, held in “Air Force Intelligence”. It was even worse than Sednaya, he said. “People were taken underground and no one knew anything about them.”
At the same time, there are growing concerns about extrajudicial retaliation killings. In one Damascus neighbourhood, at least two notifications about public executions have been widely shared – one supposedly for an “informer”, said to have given information leading to many deaths; and one for an accused mass killer associated with the regime. Both were seemingly cancelled at the last minute, after crowds had already gathered. It was not clear whether they were definitely planned in the first place, and there was no suggestion that these were organised by the rebel coalition who have taken over the country’s leadership.
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