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 – where many Syrians also live in Yarmouk – to live with her husband, Muhammad Jumaa, in Damascus.

The 21-year-old was about to give birth to a baby in the coming weeks, so her younger brother Ammar and older sister Wafa came to support her.

They left behind their mother, Nasra, father, Ahmed, and two younger brothers, 19-year-old Mohammed and 17-year-old Ahmed.

Nasra is the only one they see again.

Siege of Yarmouk

Weeks after Maysaa’s departure, Bashar al-Assad’s regime imposed a stifling siege on her Yarmouk cuts off supplies to opposition fighters Hiding in the camp.

This brutal tactic enabled the regime to reclaim areas such as Yarmouk, Ghouta, Homs and even Aleppo, the economic center and most populous city before the war, while pushing tens of thousands of civilians to the brink of starvation, including Mesa’s family.

For almost six months, tens of thousands of people had little access to water, food or medicine and became weaker and weaker by the day.

Then, in late December, rumors spread that safe passage for civilians had been opened between the Al-Sabina neighborhood and Al-Hajar Al-Aswad, where the Awad family lives.

Nasra, Ahmed, and their two children walked along the road with hundreds of people until they reached a regime checkpoint.

Army officers asked women and girls to return to the camp, and men and boys were asked to remain where they were.

Maysa said: “While the women were returning, they heard heavy gunfire behind them.”

“We know [our father and brothers] “They are gone, but we want someone to know exactly what happened that day.”

Truth and closure

Maysa spoke to Al Jazeera from a Damascus hospital where her mother was receiving dialysis. During the Siege of Yarmouk, Nasra lost half her weight, dropping from 90 to 45 kilograms (198 to 99 pounds). She has since regained some of the weight.

Her family is One of the thousands who grieve the loss of loved ones who have been lost After they disappeared or were killed during the Syrian war, according to victims, local observers 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 wants to pursue justice against the perpetrators.

Under former President Bashar al-Assad and the war he waged on millions of Syrians to suppress any idea of ​​opposition, at least 231,278 people were killed in conflict-related violence, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights said the regime was responsible for the vast majority of casualties, bombing bakeries, markets and hospitals with explosive barrels, starving cities into surrender, carrying out extrajudicial killings, and detaining and torturing real or perceived opponents to death.

The true scale of the horror remains unknown because not all mass killings have been uncovered.

Hadi Al-Khatib, founder of the Syrian Archive, a project that has cataloged six million photos of atrocities since the beginning of the war, believes his team’s archive can help investigators discover mass graves after reviewing footage of atrocities at different sites.

He told Al Jazeera: “This is something that has been the goal of the Syrian Archive since its establishment at the beginning of the war, which is to ensure its contribution to transitional justice processes.”

Reno is the name of a checkpoint between Hajar al-Aswad and Sabiniya.

Maysa believes her father and brothers were among 300 people killed there.

Protect evidence

The Assad family meticulously documented its brutal repression in thousands of files stored in government buildings, intelligence branches, and in the sprawling maze of torture chambers and prisons.

When Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia with his family, he left behind documents that could reveal the fate of tens of thousands of missing people and implicate regime officials in committing atrocities, experts told Al Jazeera.

Veronica Bellentani, Head of the International Law Support Department at the Syrian Legal Development Programme, said that protecting these documents and securing mass graves is essential to building cases against the perpetrators.

Bellintani worries that some documents could be deemed ineligible if lawyers cannot trace their provenance, a difficult task after thousands of people enter prisons and rummage through bundles of papers looking for their loved ones.

“There will always be arguments [in a court] Bellentani added that the documents were fabricated or tampered with… That is why the chain of custody… from the prison to the public prosecutor is so important.

Bellintani continued that foreign journalists and media figures also casually deal with documents without knowing how important they are.

“The pain the families were facing, and the need to show the world the horror of the Syrian regime – both understandable feelings – took precedence 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 via social media, making Syria one of the first conflicts to be broadcast online.

However, much of the content was eventually removed due to “violation of content regulations” of the social media platforms, Al-Khatib of the Syrian Archive said.

Videos and photos found online serve as evidence of atrocities committed during the war.

Al Jazeera’s Sanad Verification Agency found and verified a YouTube video depicting the death of a young man named Ibrahim on June 30, 2012.

He was at the funeral of a demonstrator who was shot dead by regime forces a few days ago, according to eyewitnesses.

Ibrahim was one of the pallbearers who were carrying the body in their procession when a car bomb exploded, killing him and several others.

The video shows burned bodies scattered on the ground, while passersby run and scream for help.

Ibrahim’s father, Abu Tariq, could not hold back his tears when he spoke to Al Jazeera about the explosion. Days after the fall of the Assad regime, he went to a cemetery in Eastern Ghouta to visit Ibrahim.

Abu Tariq said: “I want what happened to my son to happen to Bashar and his aides.”

Maysaa shares this feeling, although she is still trying to confirm the death of her father and brothers.

Since the fall of the regime, she has visited many morgues across Damascus in hopes of finding their bodies.

She hopes investigators will search for mass graves in Yarmouk and investigate regime officials who were manning checkpoints during the siege.

“There is someone responsible for what happened, and I want them to be judged and held accountable,” she said.

“Someone has to know who they are. Someone has to know their names.”