Ellen Donovan
A year ago, the Assad regime in Syria fell to Hay’at Tahir al-Sham. Vaunted as one of the most impenetrable regimes of the 21st century, the rapid collapse of the Syrian state reminds us that unpredictability cannot in itself be conflated with impossibility.
Nevertheless, one year later, initial jubilation and optimism for the prospect of a democratic Syria, free of political violence and terror, has diminished in the face of escalating sectarian violence. In March 2025 Assad loyalists attacked government buildings and hospitals near Latakia in western Syria. In the midst of counter-insurgency operations by the Transitional Government, Alawite civilians were targeted by gunmen, the majority reportedly aligned to government forces, in sectarian massacres across Western Syria. Similarly, in July 2025 clashes between Druze and Bedouin groups in the city of Suweida resulted in extra-judicial executions, most significantly in Suweida National Hospital, where staff reported members of government forces shot patients in their hospital beds whilst they slept.
Throughout the work of MaGPIE, post-conflict socio-political instability has surfaced as one of the most prescient challenges to effective protection, engagement and investigation of mass graves. In the absence of financial and forensic resources, political will, and physical access and protection, the risk of sites being forgotten, disturbed and destroyed increases significantly. Syria thus serves as a reminder that violence leaves behind scars, both on the landscape and on the people, but most of all on what Lisa Wedeen, an eminent scholar on political violence in Syria, describes as the “possibilities for political judgement”.
Mass graves are a post-facto phenomenon; that is, they occur only after a crime has been committed. Accordingly, in the context of transitional justice, they can, and do, serve a critical role in supporting accountability processes by both substantiating and corroborating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. It follows that much attention on mass graves in Syria has focused on what could be described as the ‘original’ act of violence; mass detention, enforced disappearances, summary executions and covert burials. Still, mass graves are not static; they are highly dynamic and complex spaces that can draw attention to, or suppress, countless diverse meanings and competing interests.
In my first blog on mass graves in Syria I drew attention to the distinctiveness of both the size and scale of the sites, alongside the Assad regime’s uncommon degree of documenting its own crimes. My PhD research since has sought to link these phenomena to the political and governmental structures of the regime that both generated and sustained them. Doing so has involved consideration of the ‘life-cycle’ of mass graves; the evolution of perspectives around mass graves that occurs through actions taken after the creation and the initial depositing of human remains. Which, in the case of Syria, foregrounds large scale operations by the regime, with the support of Russia, to remove remains from sites such as Quatifah for transfer and reburial in other secondary sites such as Dumayr and Adra. With time, testimony, and not withstanding exhumation, we will gain a clearer picture of the extent of these practices.
Illegal transfer and tampering of mass graves are not unprecedented; MaGPIE’s archive has identified 73 of these sites, with examples in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia, Rwanda, Iraq and Guatemala. In all these cases, exhumation and identification is complicated not just in locating the sites, but also through potential damage to the remains. However, these examples represent only one aspect of the wider phenomenon whereby perpetrators seek to maximise harm against survivors attempting to locate their loved ones. Consider, for example, the callous disposal of bodies in Tadamon in Damascus; victims of summary executions in 2013 by forces of the Military Intelligence Directorate and the regime affiliated militia the National Defence Force (NDF) were left in shallow graves or simply in the place they were killed. Similarly, false death certificates were fabricated for victims killed in detention centres erroneously giving natural causes of death, provided on an ad hoc basis, and accessed more often than not through a long process that ended with bribes. Crucially, attention to the regime’s wider modalities of power reveals the deliberate cultivation of ambiguity and uncertainty around the status of the dead and disappeared. It follows, that through weaponisation of cycles of hopelessness, fear, and powerlessness, mass graves in Syria operated as a fundamental mechanism through which behavioural compliance was generated by the regime.
But why should this matter now the Assad regime has been deposed and the civil war ended? As Venna Das, anthropologist and political theorist, reminds us; “the event does not end with the event”. Returning to Tadamon, since the fall of regime, mass graves have been systematically disturbed by residents and journalists, images of children posing with bones have emerged and there are reports that these same children are now acting as ‘tour guides.’ Most concerningly, there have been rumours of journalists paying children to dig up the bones for photographs, whilst Fabr Saqr, the former leader of the NDF, has been working with the Transitional Government and even visited Tadamon in February 2025. Past violence can be re-lived and re-enacted in the present, and when traces of the regime can be ‘rediscovered’ and ‘reinvigorated,’ as John Borneman rightly asks in ‘Death of the Father,’ “how do we really know when a regime ends?”. For mass graves in Syria then, they can never belong to either the ‘past’ or the ‘present’ when violence is intrinsic to the production of political authority.
