They are finding them in fields, down wells and underneath abandoned houses.
Warning: This story contains graphic details of torture and may distress some readers.
Sometimes one, sometimes many, sometimes buried, sometimes left to rot or be scattered by scavenging animals.
In Syria, they are simply called "The Missing", but in the wake of the country's 13-year civil war, they are now returning as bones, scraps of clothes or on records salvaged from the prisons of Syria's repressive former regime.
More than 200,000 people disappeared between the uprisings that precipitated the civil war in 2011 and the eventual fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
Many were taken by Syria's secret police or intelligence services, or the street thugs employed by the regime, known as Shabiha.
Usually, their families never found out what happened to them.
Others were killed by rebel groups or the Islamic State terrorist organisation, which ruled large parts of Syria during the conflict.
After the regime's collapse, the millions of refugees and internally displaced Syrians returning to their homes are now finding the remains of The Missing across the country.
"After the fall of Assad, it was like an explosion of human remains in Syria," Ammar al-Salmo, the founder and director of the forensic investigation team for the White Helmets rescue organisation in Syria, said.
"We started to receive calls from everywhere about human remains. When people started to return to their homes, to their fields, they started to see human remains at the surface.
"When people started to try to rehabilitate their land, their homes, also they started to see these kinds of mass graves. Human remains everywhere, in every home, in every well, in every life, everywhere."
Mass graves and awful torture
Ammar al Salmo's teams have logged 88 sites — 83 of them mass graves — over the 14 months.
In many, the regime's methods have made it difficult to identify the remains.
"For example, one tactic [that] was used in 2014 and '15, was to kill the people and burn them with [car] tyres," al-Salmo told 7.30.
"We found this in Damascus, we found this in Homs, we found this in Aleppo, where I think there was like an order or like some, like, trend … killing people, collect those people and burn them by tyres.
"[All that is left is] just like small bones.
"In Damascus, in an area called Sbeneh, we have responded to many like that, like a cell or underground apartment where they cover people in this area and they burn them, so we just [find] small bones and crushed bones."
The great number and scale of atrocities in Syria mean many families were affected and most still wait for news of their loved ones.
Mahmoud al-Akesh only knows his family were killed because he saw their photos in a dossier of photos and documentation leaked by a prominent regime defector known as "Caesar".
One photo showed his brother-in-law, dead, without his eyes, after being tortured.
"They poured acid on his back the first time [he was jailed]," Mr al-Akesh said.
"This second time, the day they arrested him ... they gouged out his eyes and killed him.
"They gouge out their [prisoners'] eyes with any torture tool ... they keep torturing them [until] he dies under torture.
"I mean, they don't kill him. They don't relieve his pain directly by killing him, no. He gets tortured 20 or 25 hours [until he dies]."
Mr al-Akesh comes from a part of Damascus called Moadimiya al-Sham, a district that rose up against the regime early in the revolution and was heavily bombarded.
He, his brother Ahmed, another brother Mohammed Nasser and brother-in-law Ahmad Osman al-Sheikh, were all captured and jailed by the regime in the infamous Sednaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus.
While Mr al-Akesh was freed, his relatives were killed.
The Caesar files
In all, Mr al-Akesh found between 60 to 70 of his family and friends in the so-called "Caesar files", photographed with numbers written on their bodies, confirming the Assad regime had killed them.
The so-called files — taken between May 2011 and August 2013 — by the Syrian military police defector known as Caesar, were a detailed trove of evidence of the Syrian regime's system of torture and death.
Their release led the United States and Europe to enact sanctions against the dictatorship and gave proof to families like Mahmoud's, which had lost relatives to the regime.
"That day the regime committed a great crime by giving them numbers, making them merely numbers," he said.
"These people aren't numbers; these people have families.
"My brother, a doctor, he toiled for 30 years in study … and then he refused to leave the country, he wanted to treat the wounded, he wanted to treat the critical cases ... and then the regime arrested and killed him."
Mr al-Akesh only found out how his other brother, Mohammed Nasser, died when he met a doctor who had been in prison with him.
"We sat, he and I, for about two hours. He told me the details of how his [Mohammed's] behaviour was in Sednaya, how his story was, how they took him to execution, how the death sentence was carried out on him," he said.
Bernadette's 'world emptied'
Other families have very little information about what happened to their loved ones and are left with lingering feelings of uncertainty, fear and loss.
Bernadette Hallak's husband, Bassam, a civil engineer, was seized by regime security agents from an Easter lunch with his family.
He was taken along with his sister, Siham, who had been reported for throwing flowers out of her office window at demonstrators on the street below.
Siham was released after 24 days in jail, but Bassam disappeared, meaning the only time his wife would hear his voice again was in her head.
"After [he was taken], Bassam and I were always in a dialogue," Ms Hallak said.
"I feel him talking to me before I sleep, telling me: 'Go up to the attic'. I would ask myself, 'Why did I dream of the attic?' [but] I went up and found the oil can leaking.
"I mean, he talked to me at Easter, like 'make me this dish' and [I felt] Bassam was present."
But one day she became sure her husband was dead.
"Then I felt ... the world emptied. I got up in the morning and told them [my family] Bassam is no longer in the world, no longer present," she said.
When Mrs Hallak tried to find out what happened to her husband, officials from the former government gave her a death certificate with incorrect details that appeared to have been arbitrarily filled out.
"They opened the drawer and gave it to me," she said.
"[It said] that he is Muslim … [and] the hair they got wrong … I said to him 'he is Christian.'
"The drawer was filled with certificates. I saw them. Witnesses who signed without seeing. And here also I told them, 'Maybe he didn't die.'
"I told them ... 'Prove he is dead. I want his body'. They didn't give it to me."
Ms Hallak still desperately wants to find her husband's remains.
Her children fear he could have been one of the prisoners liberated from the regime's jails who wandered lost and unsupported, in the chaotic days after the dictatorship collapsed.
"When the liberation happened, hospital morgues were opened, Sednaya prison was opened, and we saw many tragedies," she said.
"I wish [someone] would knock on the door now who wants to take DNA from my children when a grave is opened.
"They tell me it is difficult and expensive. I don't know exactly what it costs, but isn't it necessary to properly catalogue such matters?"
A never-ending task
Finding funding and capacity to undertake this work is a challenge when so much of Syria was destroyed or damaged in the war and the transitional government is still trying to restore basic services.
The government has created a new National Commission for the Missing responsible for investigating these cases, coordinating with the various groups working on transitional justice, liaising with the families of The Missing, as well as securing and opening mass graves.
A member of the commission's advisory board, Mahmoud Aswad, told the ABC the body was still working to establish offices, hire staff and prepare a central database, but with limited financial resources.
He said it would take time before the commission would be able to determine exactly how many people had been killed and to deliver findings to families.
"It depends on gathering the information, building the structure, to bring the human resources and to have enough information from the family and also to give the samples of the DNA from the family," Mr Aswad said.
"Then it will be to open the mass graves, taking the sample from the remains and doing the match."
The commission is relying on incomplete records salvaged from the former regime's corrupt and repressive administration.
Lawyer Ammar Abara, who was detained in Sednaya prison for four months, recovered many records from the jail in a bid to help the new government trace The Missing.
"On the day after the liberation, I went up to Sednaya, like many other people. They wanted to know the fate of their children and loved ones, or a husband," he said.
"So I found registers on the floors, papers on the floors. I found documents present on the floors and I started taking them."
In all, Mr Abara compiled and sent more than 4,000 names of prisoners to the transitional government's prosecution service, including many who were recorded as being executed.
"We have identities of people who were here, there are even the names of friends I found here, friends of mine, their families didn't know their fate, so I found them," he said.
"It encouraged me, I know people were present here and were liberated, so I said it means the registers and the papers are all important. I took them to protect them."
After being swarmed by desperate families in the days after the Assad regime fell, the prison has since been locked up and left under guard to prevent looting.
The transitional government is reportedly debating whether to demolish it or turn it into a memorial.
"My opinion regarding the prison is that the government should preserve it," Mr Abara said.
"The prison must be preserved ... so it can be witnessed by the generations that will come later on ... that this is what happened in Syria or happened in Sednaya prison."
Exposing the crimes and remembering the victims is likely to be one of the most protracted and difficult parts of Syria's recovery.
The White Helmets have begun training workers and volunteers in site investigation, body recovery, and forensic and anthropological analysis, aided by volunteers from countries with a history of atrocities.
"It's like the first step for recovery," al-Salmo told 7.30.
"Without answering all these questions, we cannot build peace. Peace only builds on justice.
"I think Syria cannot go ahead without knowing what happened in the past."
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