ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Many Kurdish families were among the Syrians who visited the Tadamun area of Damascus after the fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad with the hope of finding the bones of their loved ones brutally killed by the regime.
Fatima Hassan Ahmed, a Kurdish woman, sifted through bones hoping to find anything of her husband who went missing more than a decade ago.
She could not control her tears while speaking about her husband, Haytham Abdu.
"We had a son and daughter. This daughter of mine did not have the chance to see her father. She was in my belly. She did not see her father. They gave me [his] motorcycle but did not tell me anything about his whereabouts. They told me there were dead bodies. I tried so hard to find out where my husband was, but they did not help. He had with himself his ID card, the motorcycle license paper and the [house’s] door key," she told Rudaw's Bilind T. Abdullah in mid-December.
Militiamen told her Abdu was being held by the government.
Tadamun was a site of clashes between opposition forces and the regime in the early years of the civil war.
The Syrian regime’s most notorious enforcers have been accused of massacring hundreds of people, including Kurds, shooting them and putting their bodies in a pit.
In 2022, the Guardian published graphic footage dated from 2013 showing pro-regime forces blindfolding people and leading them to a giant hole where they were shot dead.
People living in the area told Rudaw that the ousted regime had openly killed many people here. A large number of them were Kurds.
Some families visited the area days after the fall of the regime in December.
Mohammed Nasir, from Afrin, visited the area to look for his son, Nidhal, who disappeared more than two decades ago.
"These are the bones of Kurds. All of the thousands of people killed were Kurds. They were burned and buried in this cemetery," he said.
Some of the Kurdish members of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rebel group that spearheaded the offensive that toppled the regime, told Rudaw that Assad killed Kurds and people from other ethnic and religious groups.
“At least 1,700 to 1,800 people were killed here. They included 150 to 160 Kurds,” said HTS member Abu Abdu al-Kurdi.
Local residents said the regime had been killing people at this spot since 2013 and after 2022, they heard more frequent gunshots and could smell the dead bodies.
