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We were forced to burn bodies.

Will survivors of the Tadamun Massacres see justice? By Melvin Ingleby,

read by Selva Razzlingham.

Abu Mohammed still remembers the smell. It usually came at dawn, as the mosques sounded the first call to prayer.

By the time he sat down for breakfast, it would fill the air around his home in Tadamun,

a working class district in the southeast of Damascus.

The smell was hard to define.

Whenever he noticed it, Abu Mohammed felt on edge.

He had his suspicions about what it might be, but like so many Syrians who lived under

the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad,

he knew to keep such thoughts to himself.

Abu Muhammad, a retired engineer who asked to be identified only by his nickname,

first noticed the smell in the winter of 2012, nearly

two years after the start of the uprising against Assad. At the time, he was living in a modest

flat in the heart of Tadarmun, with his wife and their five children. The house stood just off a busy road named

Dabool Street. Before the fighting started, Abu Mohammed enjoyed sitting on his balcony after work,

...