Syrians are celebrating their hard-won freedoms throughout the nation, but that joy is

tempered by the absence of so many, imprisoned and never heard from again, disappeared in the

night, and murdered in foreboding torture chambers. In some ways, Syria is a land of ghosts, and the

job of speaking for the dead now falls to their loved ones and to the new Syrian government.

Arlela Malana Allen reports now from the suburbs of Damascus.

A warning, some of the images in this story are disturbing.

Bringing up the bodies, as the full scale of the Assad regime's crimes against its people is discovered, Syrians are beginning to look for their loved ones underground.

This morning, they've opened a suspected secret burial site on a construction lot outside Damascus near one of the regime's most feared prisons.

Inside, bags filled with bones and human skulls. We found seven bags. The seven bags,

there's a written code names of prisoner. A prisoner number blah. So each of the bags was

labeled with the number of a prisoner. According to what we found this. But no names. The brand of the black is it was a flower from Argentina, for example.

They were burying human bodies inside flower bags.

Yeah, exactly.

Syria's civil defense volunteers, the white helmets, famous for pulling survivors out of

the rubble of Assad's bombardment of the rebel-held northwest, are now working across the country to help secure grave sites.

What do you think has happened to these bodies

when you discover them?

What condition are they in?

What has been done to them?

I think they were prisoners.

They died in the prison, and they brought them here.

Some of the bones were broken. And here. Some of the bones were broken.

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