“This is not him,” one said, examining a photo bearing signs of torture, like the others, making identification harder. “And neither is that.”
“What about that one?” asked the second woman, identified only as Salwa, pointing to the second corpse from the left. She was looking for her 25-year-old nephew who has been missing since 2011, when the “Arab Spring” protests started in Syria.
She moved closer to the board for a better look. “What is his name?” she asked.
There's no name. It's corpse number 22 at the Damascus hospital's morgue.
Similarly, Mohammed Rashad Sheikh makes another daily visit to the morgue. He scans the dead faces. Again, his son isn't among them.
His son's “only crime,” he said, was visiting relatives in Idlib, a rebel-held province. He was a 36-year-old scholar, arrested upon his return four years ago and not seen since.
Naif Hamad Hassan, a morgue worker, said they have received only 36 corpses since the ouster of Bashar al-Assad’s regime—a small fraction compared to the 130,000 Syrians that the UN estimates have forcibly disappeared or gone missing since the conflict began in 2011.
Mohammed leaves the morgue, seeking closure elsewhere. Many who don't find answers in the cold room leave with a blank expression. While they are relieved not to find their loved ones dead, they are also sad that closure remains elusive.
It's this hope—that by some miracle their loved ones might still be alive—that drives hundreds to Martyrs' Square in the heart of the Syrian capital, where they display pictures of their missing relatives alongside phone numbers, hoping for a call from a visitor to this iconic square one day.
A woman showed me a picture of her young son on her smartphone. She explained he was a soldier, arrested 12 years ago for attempted desertion.
“I just want to see him one more time,” she said. “Dead or alive, just one more time. I want to look at him.”
Some family members have been fortunate enough to find their loved ones alive in the notorious Sednaya prison.
But many still search for closure. On Monday, the White Helmets, a volunteer search and rescue organization also known as Syrian Civil Defence, discovered human skeletons near the airport, potentially offering closure to some.
