Anadolu captures footage of Damascus’ Tadamon neighborhood known for massacre images

By Anadolu staff

Anadolu captured footage of Tadamon, a neighborhood in Damascus that gained international attention for images of a massacre in Syria.

Sites where civilians were executed and dumped into pits by forces of the deposed Bashar Assad regime were also captured on camera.

One of the pits, where the deposed regime dumped the bodies of civilians in 2013, was found to be covered, with human bones scattered on the surface of the pit.

Garbage and rubble had accumulated inside and around an abandoned, partially constructed building where civilians were executed and thrown into a pit.

Human bones were also discovered near abandoned buildings, located 20 meters (65 feet) away from the site.

Abdurrahman Mohammed, a 40-year-old Turkmen resident of Tadamon, said that the regime treated Turkmen residents in the area with extreme cruelty.

Mohammed explained that anyone identified as Turkmen was first detained and then killed.

Turkmen detainees were executed in the streets by Shabiha, the militia loyal to the deposed Assad regime, without ever being brought before a court, he added.

Mohammed recounted how a newly married relative was detained by Shabiha forces.

"They gouged out his eyes, pulled out his teeth, broke his fingers, and then threw his mutilated body in front of his children as a warning to others," he said.

Mohammed described how six people he knew, including children, were arrested by regime forces and then were "chopped up and burned."

Unable to endure the oppression, many Turkmen fled to other countries or relocated to different regions within Syria.

Mohammed explained that the homes of Turkmen residents were bombed by regime forces using aircraft, with some houses destroyed in the attacks.

The remaining homes, he said, were demolished with explosives by regime forces.

"They destroyed the homes of anyone who opposed the regime and demanded money from those who wanted to return to their houses," Mohammed added.

Abdullah Tuma, another Turkmen resident of Tadamon, said that his family migrated to the neighborhood from Quneitra in 1967.

"After the events began in 2011, regime intelligence came to our neighborhood. I fled, but my two brothers stayed behind," Tuma said.

He explained that he was forced to leave his home and, in 2018, managed to reclaim his confiscated property by paying 18 million Syrian pounds.

The massacre occurred on April 16, 2013, when Syrian regime-affiliated soldiers executed 41 people near the Othman Mosque in the Tadamon neighborhood, throwing their bodies into a pre-dug pit in the middle of an empty street.

*Writing by Muhammed Enes Calli in Istanbul