On the street walls around the hospitals in Damascus are picture after picture of both living and dead people. There are searches for some of the around 80,000 people who are said to have disappeared after the fall of Bashar al-Assad and his infamous prisons have been opened.
Some distance away, in the mortuary, are the bodies from the prisons. Many of them are marked by blows and violence. Men and women go around lifting the sheets to see if it could be their son, father or other relative.
A man that TV4 meets finds his cousin who has been missing for 13 years. He gets a body bag and carries it to the trunk of the car.
– Now we will bury him at home, he says to TV4.
But most do not find a family member and scream their anger outside the morgue.
Desperate, they are forced to search further.
Testifies to horrific torture
Some of the released prisoners can testify to the horrors that took place.
TV4 Nyheterna meets two brothers who were imprisoned in the infamous Saydnaya prison and who were released by the rebels just over a week ago. They testify to terrible torture.
Noordin Ara is paralyzed in one leg and little brother Mohammed Ara has a face mask over his mouth because his teeth are knocked out.
– I was going to get food for the others in the cell and then I got punched in the mouth, he says.
Ended up in isolation – without food and water
They say that every fifteenth day guards came and called up a large number of people to come along. They were taken to an interrogation room, subjected to severe torture and then ended up in solitary confinement without food or water.
– Most died or were hanged outside here, says Noordin.
– We knew we were all going to die. One day our names would be called, says Mohammed.
The guards talked about killing prisoners
The two brothers believe that the answer to the whereabouts of the missing can be found underground.
– We could hear the guards talking about taking dead prisoners to Najha.
At the Najha burial site, there are four long cemented passages. Down there, it is suspected that there are mass graves. Several other similar sites are being investigated since the fall of the Syrian regime.
– I want them to open the graves and take the DNA. Otherwise, the relatives will never get an answer about what happened, says Noordin.