Search teams pulled 25 bodies out of a mass grave on Friday in a suburb of Damascus. It is believed that the site contains at least 175 bodies, officials said.
The bodies were found in an agricultural field in the suburb of Otaiba, and according to authorities, they belonged to people who had been killed in an ambush by the forces of then-President Bashar Assad as they were fleeing the besieged enclave of eastern Ghouta, which was then under the control of opposition forces.
It is one of the latest grim remnants to surface from the country's nearly 14-year civil war that ended with the ouster of former President Bashar Assad in a lightning rebel offensive in December.
Family members with missing loved ones came to the site in hopes of finding answers. Among them was Samira Alloush, who was looking for her son, Anas Ahmad Alloush, who had been among those besieged in Ghouta. He was 19 when he went missing in 2014.
His mother had held out hope that he would turn out to be alive and in prison and that he would resurface when the prisons were emptied after Assad's fall. However, among the dirt-encrusted clothes on the ground, she recognised her son's jacket.
"I had hope that he would come out of prison and we would sit together again," she said with tears.
Amer Fahed, commander of operations in the Damascus countryside for the civil defence group known as the White Helmets, said that they will not yet begin to excavate or exhume the mass grave until a specific mechanism is determined by the National Commission for Missing Persons.
The body count could be higher
Ammar Al-Issa, an official with the missing persons' commission who was present at the scene, said the number of bodies could be higher, as 200 to 300 people were believed to have been killed in the February 2014 ambush.
Hundreds of bodies have been found in mass graves scattered around the country since Assad's fall, but many more likely remain to be uncovered.
An estimated 150,000 people were detained or went missing in Syria since 2011, when mass anti-government protests were met by a brutal crackdown and spiralled into civil war. Many of them are likely buried in unmarked mass graves.
