The Syria Justice and Accountability Center (SJAC) issued a report on the Mezzeh Military Airport, documenting the deaths of 1,000 detainees due to torture.
The SJAC stated that 1,000 detainees were killed under torture at the Mezzeh Military Airport, estimating that hundreds or thousands may have been executed at the airport.
The center also estimated that more than 28,000 men, women, and children were detained at the airport during the Syrian revolution.
According to the report, a copy of which was obtained by Enab Baladi, at least seven mass graves are connected to the military airport, and the human rights center identified time periods during which three of them are believed to have been used to bury detainees at Mezzeh.
The SJAC was able to access documents and data that had not previously been available at Mezzeh and other facilities run by the air intelligence and entities of the previous regime, which participated in the transfer of detainees and human remains.
This data provides a new opportunity to identify patterns of enforced disappearance and allows the center to present images of several documents attached to the report.
The center stated in a press release that this report is the first comprehensive investigation into Mezzeh Military Airport, noting that it was conducted in cooperation with the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison (ADMSP).
According to Gabriel Young, the SJAC’s special investigator for missing persons, the report relied on a specific investigative methodology that he originally developed to search for individuals who were forcibly disappeared by the Islamic State group in northeastern Syria.
Young added that access to sites and documents related to the previous regime helped establish links between prisons and mass graves, some of which were previously unknown.
The report indicated that the future search for missing persons in Syria requires conducting several contextual investigations and considered this investigation as a model for them.
The center, in cooperation with the association, aims to identify the events leading to the deaths of detainees and their potential burial sites, allowing for precise future DNA testing.
For his part, Basel Piro, a researcher at the rights center, stated in the press release that they followed up on the investigation fieldwork in the early days after the fall of the previous regime.
Pro added that they were able to see the graves with their own eyes, relying on witnesses who had previously worked at the military facility.
The Mezzeh Military Airport is located west of the capital Damascus, less than eight kilometers from the city center.
Tens of thousands missing
The airport is bordered to the north by the Mezzeh neighborhood and its residential areas, as well as a mountain range locally referred to as the “Fourth Division Mountains,” which is home to military units belonging to the division.
To the east lies the Kafr Sousa neighborhood, to the south is the city of Darayya, and to the west are the city of Mu’adamiyat al-Sham and its surrounding mountains.
These cities and neighborhoods have primarily suffered from the influence of air intelligence and repeated arrest campaigns within them or at the surrounding checkpoints.
The Mezzeh Military Airport is one of the largest military airports in the arsenal of the former Syrian regime, designated only for helicopter use.
It was used as a detention and interrogation center for the Air Force Intelligence Branch and is considered one of the prominent strongholds of the Syrian regime after the Tadmor and Sednaya prisons.
After the fall of the previous Syrian regime, it became apparent that tens of thousands of forcibly disappeared individuals had not been found, indicating that they were executed or killed under torture.
According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), the number of detainees and forcibly disappeared persons under the previous regime reached 136,614 individuals by August 2024, among whom 112,414 individuals remain missing.
Evidence indicates that the vast majority of them were likely liquidated in prisons, either through torture or secret executions, without legal procedures, according to the network.