LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Syria's dictator is gone, but more than a hundred and thirty thousand people are still missing. And some of the groups helping Syrian families find answers are dealing with the Trump administration's foreign aid freeze. NPR's Lauren Frayer has more from Damascus.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS IN RUBBLE)
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: This used to be your...
MOHAMED ALI: Yeah.
FRAYER: ...Neighborhood?
ALI: It's my building.
FRAYER: This pile of...
ALI: Yes.
FRAYER: ...Of rubble.
Mohamed Ali (ph) stands in the ruins of Jobar, a Damascus neighborhood famous for a historic synagogue and for some of the bloodiest battles of the Syrian civil war.
ALI: In every building, there's a grave. Our family, our friends, our people died here, here, here.
FRAYER: He points to mass graves all around him when the civil war ended late last year.
ALI: We (vocalizing) life again.
FRAYER: Ali hoped to give his dead relatives and friends a proper reburial. He's a civil engineer, and he's brought a backhoe to unearth these mass graves, but an argument breaks out between the medical examiner and government officials about what procedures need to be followed. Syria needs help with stuff like this - unearthing mass graves, collecting evidence for war crimes investigations. But many of the groups with expertise in this rely on U.S. funding and have recently lost it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Arabic).
FRAYER: So when Jobar residents called for help from The White Helmets, Syrian first responders who've been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, they got put on a waitlist.
FAROUQ HABIB: We are overstretched. We're dealing with numerous mass graves, and we need resources.
FRAYER: The White Helmets deputy leader, Farouq Habib, says the U.S. Agency for International Development was his group's biggest funder. And when the Trump administration dismantled USAID, calling it rife with waste and fraud, The White Helmets lost a $30 million contract out of its $50 million annual budget.
HABIB: Well, it hinders our survival.
FRAYER: When dictator Bashar al-Assad fled, Syrian prisons sprung open. Government archives littered the streets. One of the people collecting those documents as evidence for possible trials in the future is Fadel Abdulghany.
FADEL ABDULGHANY: We have thousands of thousands of documents, the names of those arrested, and the date of when those being killed or being moved to a grave, and the name of the perpetrators, as well.
FRAYER: Abdulghany runs the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which also lost U.S. funding this year and thus won't be able to open a new office in Damascus or hire a new researcher to go through all these documents. This is happening at the very moment this work needs to ramp up, says Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, who visited Syria in February.
STEPHEN RAPP: Everybody I talked to in Syria at every detention facility or at the courtroom in Homs, where, you know, a hundred people are crammed in the hallways with pictures of their loved ones demanding action. They want that information. Of course, we also need to begin the process of obtaining DNA samples from survivors through swabs of saliva and then beginning this long process of excavating the mass graves.
FRAYER: The mass grave in Jobar, nevertheless, remains untouched. The White Helmets and others are asking the Trump administration not to renew a 90-day pause on U.S. foreign aid that expires this month and help people like Majida Kaddo (ph), who stands in a Damascus traffic circle with a candle receiving condolences. Kaddo has five relatives who were disappeared by the Assad regime. Only one of their bodies has been found.
MAJIDA KADDO: (Speaking Arabic).
FRAYER: "There's nothing worse," she says, "to be so close to justice after 14 years of war and then to have your pain prolonged."
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, Damascus. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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