In Syria, a country left without ordinary graves to visit, a mother plants one rose in a mass grave, on the first Eid after the regime that forcibly disappeared her sons finally fell.
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On the morning of the first Eid al-Adha after the fall of the Assad regime, a family among the families of the forcibly disappeared sets out to visit the grave of their sons south of Damascus, within the area’s largest civil cemetery, where the Assad regime used to bury its victims in mass graves. The mother plants a rose in the soil of the mass grave, while the son thinks of avenging his brothers, and the little granddaughter tries to understand what is happening.
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Within the ground of the public civil cemetery in the town of Najha, south of Damascus, the story of the mass grave, where thousands of Syrians, disappeared by the hands of the Assad regime, lay, remained buried in silence until the regime fell on 8 December 2024.

Most of the bodies remain unrecovered, for lack of the means needed to identify them and attend to them, in a country emerging from a war that bordered on a systamic genocide.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the network had documented the enforced disappearance of more than 166,000 people in Syria by the Assad regime, equivalent to 1.2 percent of the population.

Syrians remain waiting for justice, and to know the fate of their kin and loved ones.