Damascus, Syria – In May 2012, Maysa Awad hugged her family goodbye in Yarmouk, a bustling Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus.
Maysa was leaving her family home – many Syrians live in Yarmouk, too – to go live with her husband Mohamed Jamaa in Damascus.
The 21-year-old was going to give birth to a baby boy in the coming weeks, so her youngest brother Amar and older sister Wafaa came along to support her.
They left behind their mother Nasra, father Ahmed and two younger brothers, 19-year-old Mohamed and 17-year-old Ahmed.
Nasra is the only one they ever saw again.
The siege of Yarmouk
Weeks after Maysa left, Bashar al-Assad’s regime imposed a suffocating blockade on Yarmouk to cut off supplies to opposition fighters hiding in the camp.
The brutal tactic enabled the regime to recapture areas, such as Yarmouk, Ghouta, Homs and even Aleppo, the economic hub and most populated city before the war, while pushing tens of thousands of civilians to the brink of starvation, including Maysa’s family.
For about six months, tens of thousands of people had little access to water, food or medication and were becoming weaker and frailer by the day.
Then, in late December, rumour spread that safe passage was opening for civilians between the neighbourhood of Sbeineh and Hajar al-Aswad, where the Awad family lived.
Nasra, Ahmed and their two children trekked along the road with hundreds of people until they reached a regime checkpoint.
Military officers told the women and girls to return to the camp and for the men and boys to stay put.
“As the women were walking back, they heard heavy gunfire behind them,” said Maysa.
“We know [our father and brothers] are gone, but we want someone to find out exactly what happened that day,” she told Al Jazeera.
Truth and closure
Maysa spoke to Al Jazeera from a hospital in Damascus, where her mother was receiving dialysis. During the siege of Yarmouk, Nasra lost half of her weight, dropping from 90 to 45kg (198 to 99lbs). She has since regained some of her weight.
Her family is one of thousands grieving the loss of loved ones who went missing after they were disappeared or killed during the Syrian war, according to victims, local monitors and legal experts.
Maysa said she wants investigators to look for mass graves at the “Reno checkpoint near the cable company” around Yarmouk.
She wants answers for closure and she wants to pursue justice against the perpetrators.
Under the rule of former President Bashar al-Assad and the war he waged on millions of Syrians to quash any idea of opposition, at least 231,278 people were killed in conflict-related violence, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
SNHR said the regime was responsible for the vast majority of casualties as it barrel-bombed bakeries, markets and hospitals, starved cities into submission, carried out extrajudicial killings and detained and tortured real or perceived opponents to death.
The real scale of the horror is still unknown since not all mass killings have been uncovered.
Hadi al-Khatib, the founder of Syria Archive, a project that has catalogued six million visuals of atrocities since the start of the war, believes his team’s archive can help investigators spot mass graves after reviewing footage of atrocities in different locations.
“This is something the Syrian Archive had as a goal since its establishment at the start of the war, which is to make sure it contributes to transitional justice processes,” he told Al Jazeera.
Reno is the name of a checkpoint between Hajar al-Aswad and Sbenieh.
Maysa believes her father and brothers were among 300 people murdered there.
Protecting evidence
The al-Assad family meticulously documented its brutal repression in thousands of binders stored in government buildings, intelligence branches and in the sprawling labyrinth of torture chambers and prisons.
When Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia with his family, he left behind documents that could uncover the fate of tens of thousands of missing people and implicate regime officials in atrocities, experts told Al Jazeera.
Protecting these documents and securing mass graves is imperative to building cases against perpetrators, Veronica Bellintani, head of international law support at the Syrian Legal Development Programme, said.
Bellintani is concerned that some documents could be deemed ineligible if lawyers can’t trace their provenance, a difficult task after thousands of people entered prisons and searched through bundles of papers looking for their loved ones.
“There will always be arguments [in a court] that documents are fabricated or tampered with … This is why the chain of custody … from a prison to a prosecutor is so important,” Bellintani added.
Foreign journalists and media personalities are also casually handling documents without knowing how important they are, Bellintani continued.
“The pain families have been facing and the need to show the world the horror of the Syrian regime – both understandable sentiments – have taken priority over understanding our collective responsibility to protect these documents,” she said.
Memory and justice
Over the course of the war, citizen journalists and activists documented human rights violations over social media, making Syria one of the first conflicts to be broadcast online.
However, much of the content was eventually taken down for “violating the content regulations” of social media platforms, said al-Khatib from Syria Archive.
The videos and photos that remain online serve as proof of the atrocities committed during the war.
Al Jazeera’s Sanad Verification Agency found and verified a video on YouTube that captures the death of a young man named Ibrahim on June 30, 2012.
He was at the funeral of a protester who was shot dead by regime forces days earlier, according to witnesses.
Ibrahim was one of the pallbearers who was carrying the body in procession when a car bomb went off, killing him and many others.
The video shows bodies burning and strewn on the ground, while bystanders run and scream for help.
Ibrahim’s father, Abu Tarek, couldn’t hold back his tears when he spoke to Al Jazeera about the blast. Days after the al-Assad regime fell, he went to a graveyard in Eastern Ghouta to visit Ibrahim.
“I want what happened to my son to happen to Bashar and his helpers,” Abu Tarek said.
Maysa shares the sentiment, although she is still trying to confirm the death of her father and brothers.
Since the fall of the regime, she has visited several morgues around Damascus in hopes of finding their bodies.
She hopes investigators will search for mass graves in Yarmouk and investigate the regime officials manning checkpoints during the siege.
“Somebody’s responsible for what happened and I want them sentenced and held accountable,” she said.
“Somebody must know who they are. Somebody must know their names.”