2026-01-23
38 分钟This is The Guardian.
This article contains scenes that some people may find distressing.
Take care when listening.
We were forced to burn bodies.
Will survivors of the Tadamun massacres see justice?
By Melvin Ingleby.
Read by Selva Razzlingham.
Abu Muhammad 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 Tadamun, a working-class district in the southeast of Damascus.
The smell was hard to define.
Whenever he noticed it, Abu Muhammad 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.
Abu Muhammad, 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 Taddamun, with his wife and their five children.
The house stood just off a busy road named Daboul Street.
Before the fighting started, Abul Mohammed enjoyed sitting on his balcony after work, sipping his tea as he watched the yellow mini-cabs and honking motorbikes compete for space in the streets below.
But by the time the smell became noticeable, these streets were largely deserted.
The Assad regime had rolled out a network of checkpoints across the neighbourhood in an attempt to quell protests after the 2011 uprising.