‘We were forced to burn bodies’: will survivors of the Tadamon massacres see justice?

<p>The Damascus suburb became Assad’s killing field. But some of the perpetrators are still around – and even working with the new government</p><p>Abu Mohammed still remembers the smell. It usually came at dawn, as the mosques sounded the first call to prayer. By the time he sat down for breakfast, it would fill the air around his home in Tadamon, a working-class district in the south-east of Damascus. The smell was hard to define. Whenever he noticed it, Abu Mohammed felt on edge. He had his suspicions about what it might be, but like so many Syrians who lived under the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, he knew to keep such thoughts to himself.</p><p>Abu Mohammed, a retired engineer who asked to be identified only by his nickname, first noticed the smell in the winter of 2012, nearly two years after the start of the uprising against Assad. At the time, he was living in a modest flat in the heart of Tadamon with his wife and their five children. The house stood just off a busy road named Daboul Street. Before the fighting started, Abu Mohammed enjoyed sitting on his balcony after work, sipping his tea as he watched the yellow minicabs and honking motorbikes compete for space in the streets below.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/nov/13/survivors-tadamon-massacres-justice-syria">Continue reading...</a>