A Syrian civil defence official said Wednesday that White Helmets rescuers discovered unidentified bodies and remains in a medicine warehouse in a Damascus suburb, 10 days after Bashar al-Assad's ouster.

An AFP video journalist at the scene said the warehouse strewn with medicine boxes was located just around 50 metres from the Sayyida Zeinab shrine, a revered site for Shiite Muslims.

"We received a report about the presence of bodies, bones and a foul smell at the site," White Helmets official Ammar al-Salmo told AFP.

South Damascus's Sayyida Zeinab suburb was a stronghold of pro-Iran fighters including Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group before Islamist-led rebels took the capital on December 8 in a lightning offensive.

Bone fragments lie on the floor as members of Syria's White Helmets civil defence service evacuate human remains in body bags. Photo: AFP

"In the warehouse, we found a refrigerated room containing decomposing corpses," Salmo said, adding that some appeared to have died more than a year and a half earlier.

He said human bones were also scattered on the ground, estimating there were around 20 "victims".

AFP saw men in white suits removing bodies and remains in black bags and placing them onto a truck.

Some of the decomposing corpses were found in a refrigerated room. Photo: AFP

Salmo said the words Aleppo-Hraytan - Syria's second city in the north, and a nearby location - and numbers were written on bags where the unidentified bodies were found.

"We are going to establish the age of the victims" then take samples for DNA tests "and try to locate their families", Salmo added.

AFP was unable to independently ascertain the reason for the presence of the remains or the identities of the bodies.

The unidentified bodies and remains were found 10 days after Bashar al-Assad's ouster by Islamist-led rebels. Photo: AFP

Since Assad's ouster, a number of mass graves have been uncovered in the country.

The fate of tens of thousands of prisoners and missing people remains one of the most harrowing parts of the Syrian conflict, which has claimed more than 500,000 lives.

In 2022, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor estimated that more than 100,000 people had died in prison, mostly due to torture, since the war began.