About two kilometers east of the town of Al-Raha, south of the city of Sweida, earthen embankments enclose a plot of roughly 800 square meters, part of a larger eight-dunum site. They mark the boundaries of what residents refer to as the collective burial ground, rather than a mass grave, established for the victims of the sectarian massacres that swept Sweida Governorate in July 2025.

The massacres followed a military assault carried out by tribal fighters alongside members of Syria’s Ministry of Defense and General Security forces, after clashes with armed groups from Sweida. The attack reached its peak over three days, from 13 to 16 July, leaving around 1,700 people dead, according to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, and displacing more than 190,000 people both within and beyond the governorate.

Sweida: Empty Homes and Crowded Graves

One year after the bloody events of July, Sweida remains in a state of open mourning. The tragedy continues to unfold, from the 35 villages that were destroyed and depopulated, to the families still searching for missing relatives, and the cemeteries now filled with the bodies of the governorate’s victims.

The scale of the devastation became apparent as soon as the fighting ended. Following the withdrawal of Ministry of Defense forces and tribal fighters, the bodies of those killed were collected from streets, homes, and targeted villages through a community-led effort supported by a specialized forensic team. They were then transferred to the courtyard of Sweida National Hospital, where they remained exposed to the elements for several days.

The head of the Al-Raha Endowment Committee, identified only by the initials Y.A., told Daraj that Sweida National Hospital proposed burying the victims on land adjacent to the town of Al-Raha. The local community, working alongside the Endowment Committee and the municipal council, agreed to allocate a plot that had previously served as a security compound before the fall of the Assad regime.

The municipality carried out the initial excavation work using a bulldozer, while the Endowment Committee covered the cost of the backhoe and all remaining expenses from its own funds, supplemented by donations from expatriates originally from the town. According to the committee’s head, no financial support was received from government authorities or humanitarian organizations.

He added, “The victims were buried and commemorated on 23 July 2025 under the supervision of the region’s religious leaders and in coordination with the relevant authorities. The burial site was designed to accommodate additional bodies should more victims be brought to the hospital.”

To this day, the graves remain simple mounds of earth, without headstones or concrete markers, bordered only by a few metal stakes and strips marking the site’s perimeter.

Residents of Al-Raha took the initiative to level and pave the entrance to the burial ground and plant trees along its edges. The head of the Endowment Committee said they had submitted proposals to the relevant authorities to help develop the site into a dignified cemetery, including permanent headstones for identified victims and temporary markers for those whose identities remain unknown until they can be identified. However, the proposals received no response, while the costs remain beyond the means of the local community.

On the first day of Eid al-Adha, 27 July last year, families and local officials gathered at the site, laying wreaths and displaying photographs and messages in memory of their loved ones. Today, withered flowers and portraits of the victims still hang from the trees surrounding the burial ground, silent reminders of the tragedy.

The Design of the Burial Ground

According to forensic records at Sweida National Hospital, the Al-Raha collective burial ground contains the remains of 213 victims, including children, who were buried in three successive phases. The graves are arranged across an 800-square-meter area in parallel rows, numbering between 20 and 25, with each row containing seven to ten individual graves. Every victim was buried separately at a depth of approximately two meters beneath the surface.

A medical source at Sweida National Hospital told Daraj that not all of the remains were recovered intact. Some consisted only of body fragments and skeletal remains due to the advanced decomposition of the bodies and the extreme violence with which the victims were killed. The source also revealed that the remains of 12 additional victims, recovered over the past six months, are currently being held and are scheduled to be buried in the same burial ground next week.

Regarding the unidentified victims, the medical source told Daraj that 89 unidentified bodies were initially buried at the Al-Raha burial ground. As families later reviewed forensic records and succeeded in identifying some of the victims, the number of unidentified remains has since been revised to 76.

On the opposite side of the collective burial ground, another section of graves, covering a similar area, was established for displaced residents who had been forced from their villages and were unable to return. These included people who died of natural causes as well as others who succumbed to complications from injuries sustained during the violence.

The head of the Endowment Committee explained: “We allocated burial plots for displaced residents from Western and Northern Al-Maqran next to the collective burial ground.”

In a particularly painful twist, some parents of victims buried in the collective burial ground passed away in the months that followed and were laid to rest beside their children, turning this patch of land into the final resting place of entire families.

Private Burial Grounds

Across Sweida Governorate, forensic records show that the documented death toll from the massacres has reached 1,439, a figure that remains provisional and continues to rise. Of these, 785 bodies were brought to Sweida National Hospital. Families living in relatively safe areas were able to recover their relatives’ remains and bury them in family plots or within the courtyards of their homes. As a result, most of those buried in the Al-Raha collective burial ground were residents of villages that had been depopulated, people who no longer had homes, land, or private cemeteries to return to.

Displacement and the overcrowding of existing cemeteries forced some displaced families to seek permission to bury their loved ones in privately owned burial grounds. This was the case in the village of Al-Hayt, where a woman from the Amer family, displaced from her hometown of Al-Matouna, could not be buried in her native village. Instead, she was laid to rest the same day in a shared grave alongside a resident of Al-Hayt.

Sweida’s Victims Are Being Killed Twice

Families of the victims continue to face administrative obstacles imposed by institutions affiliated with the government in Damascus, headed locally by Sweida’s appointed governor, Mustafa al-Bakkour. His administration operates from the village of Al-Soura al-Kabira, whose residents were displaced after General Security forces took control of the area and turned it into the headquarters of most provincial government institutions.

According to families, these bureaucratic hurdles include attempts to alter or misrepresent the actual causes of death on official documents as a condition for completing administrative procedures and obtaining essential paperwork.

Ahlam Abu Ajram, a photographer from the city of Shahba who documented the Sweida protests, recounted the killing of her brother:
“My brother, Iyad Abu Ajram, 51, was executed in front of his eldest son, who was not yet 18. He was stopped at Al-Omran Roundabout and killed while wearing civilian clothes after his religious affiliation was verified, despite the fact that he was unarmed. His car and personal belongings were stolen, and his son was left alone beside his father’s body.”

After Iyad’s body was returned to his hometown of Al-Junayniya for burial, the family decided to take the children out of the country for their safety. To obtain passports, they needed an official death certificate from the Central Civil Registry in Damascus and appointed a lawyer to handle the necessary procedures.

Despite submitting the forensic report issued in Sweida, the Civil Registry Office in Damascus reportedly made the issuance of the death certificate conditional on changing the cause of death to “natural causes,” while prohibiting any reference to the summary execution. The family categorically refused, arguing that doing so would amount to falsifying the facts and denying the victim justice.

Their experience mirrors those of several other families in Sweida who attempted to obtain official documents from government offices in Damascus or Al-Soura al-Kabira. One such case is that of Umm Haidar (a pseudonym), a woman in her fifties whose husband and son were killed in the city during the assault.

“When I applied to receive my husband’s end-of-service compensation after he retired in 2025,” she told Daraj, “the authorities in Al-Soura al-Kabira required me to change the cause of his death to either death from a stray bullet or natural causes before they would release his pension. They also demanded that the date of death be changed to avoid linking it to the period of the massacres.”

She added, “More than 30 years of service have gone to waste. I still can’t access his pension, and I’m now displaced from my home with no one to support me.”

Umm Haidar said she has no intention of returning to government offices, insisting that these are fundamental rights that should not be subject to negotiation or conditions requiring families to disregard the forensic reports issued by Sweida National Hospital.

“I will never forgive what was done to my husband and my son,” she said.

Sweida’s Residents Caught in a Political Stalemate

Many of the victims’ families now refuse to complete the official death registration procedures, viewing them as a public denial of the massacres they witnessed firsthand. They say the process has only deepened the crisis of trust between the people of Sweida and the government in Damascus.

For many, these measures amount to a form of psychological siege, compounding the physical displacement that has forced families to live in shelters lacking even the most basic humanitarian conditions, while food and medical assistance have been almost entirely absent for months.

Displaced residents of Sweida find themselves trapped between two forces: on one side, the government in Damascus, which they accuse of obscuring the truth and covering up its crimes; on the other, local authorities within Sweida, whom they say monopolize decision-making while failing to seriously address the displaced community’s needs and demands.

This political deadlock has further reinforced residents’ conviction that trust in the government cannot be restored without meaningful action on the ground. In their view, rebuilding confidence must begin with the return of displaced communities to their villages, fair compensation for the loss of homes, property, and livelihoods, the reconstruction of destroyed houses, the public prosecution of all those responsible for the massacres, and an official acknowledgment of the sectarian abuses committed by government forces against the people of the governorate.

Note: The overall death toll from the Sweida massacres varies depending on the documenting body, and no comprehensive final count has yet been established. Some local media documentation groups in Sweida estimate that the number of victims has exceeded 1,600, while documentation efforts remain ongoing.