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Tiny Hand
“Every day, we identify more children who belong to Syria’s growing file of the missing.” With these words, Mayasa Ahmad, a member of the Committee for the Search for Missing Children, describes a tragedy that continues to haunt hundreds of Syrian families years after their loved ones disappeared. “For parents, nothing is more precious than their children,” she says. “That is why finding them remains the highest priority, no matter how much time has passed.” As investigations continue, the committee has identified several categories of missing children. Some were arrested alone. Others disappeared alongside their families at checkpoints or during home raids. There are also infants detained with their parents and children born inside detention centers after their mothers were arrested while pregnant. “One of the most overlooked questions is what happened to the children who were born in detention,” Mayasa says. “Where did they go?” According to her, these families have suffered far more than the loss of their children. Many were subjected to extortion while desperately searching for answers. Some paid enormous sums of money to officials and officers in exchange for information or promises regarding the fate of their children. In one case, a family reportedly paid as much as $600,000. While the committee’s current work focuses on children who may have passed through care institutions, Mayasa stresses that the scope of the case is much broader. Hundreds of children remain unaccounted for, with no documentation proving whether they were transferred to care homes or taken elsewhere. The committee continues to investigate all possibilities, including the concealment of evidence and the alteration of identities. So far, the team has verified the status of around 200 children through direct outreach and phone-based investigations. Mayasa rejects efforts to limit the issue to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour alone. She believes the case requires comprehensive investigations and cooperation across multiple state institutions. The most painful cases, she says, involve children who disappeared together with their entire families. Many of these children were detained alongside their parents, yet when prisons were opened and detainees were released, neither the children nor their families reappeared. As a victim of enforced disappearance herself, Mayasa believes accountability is essential. “This was not the result of individual actions or isolated mistakes,” she says. “It was a systematic crime. In my view, it goes beyond a war crime or a crime against humanity. It reaches the level of a crime of extermination.” Today, she says, Syrian families are waiting for one thing above all else: “They are not looking for promises. They are waiting for the truth. They want to know one thing: Where are their children?” …
More than a decade after the start of the Syrian revolution, thousands of children remain missing Behind every name is a family still searching for answers, still waiting, and still hoping for a reunion….
In the winter of 2013, dozens of families fleeing bombardment searched for any safe place in the countryside of Damascus. Inside a factory in the Adra area, entire families from Jobar, Arbeen, and Ain Terma gathered together.Women, children, elderly men, and infants. The place was cold and poor, but it seemed safer than the daily death in Eastern Ghouta. They did not know that the factory would later become the last place they would ever be seen alive. On February 4, 2013, entire families disappeared from inside that factory after it was surrounded by forces of the former Syrian regime and checkpoints controlling the area. Among the missing were the families of Adnan al-Sharif and al-Rabee’, along with several other families. Children only months old disappeared there, including Abada al-Arabini, a baby no older than two or three months, his five-year-old sister Lana, and seven-year-old Ali. Entire families vanished together — grandmothers, fathers, mothers, children, and pregnant women. Some accounts spoke of the men being killed first, while women and children were taken to an unknown location. But until today, no confirmed account exists of what truly happened inside the factory. Esaf Hamoudeh, who lost her grandmother, her uncle, his wife, and their six children, says the families spent years chasing every possible lead. They visited mass graves, orphanages, prisons, and searched through lists and photographs. Esaf Hamoudeh: “We run after every piece of information.” Adnan still returns to the place where his family disappeared. He stands in front of the factory as if the souls are still there. “I can feel their screams here… I feel like their photos on the walls are blaming us because we still couldn’t do anything for them.” After the fall of the former Syrian regime, hope returned for a brief moment. The families believed that opening the prisons would finally reveal the truth. But nothing appeared. No names.No documents.No graves. Only conflicting stories about prisons, checkpoints, and children who may have been transferred to orphanages or taken into the homes of security officers. Esaf says she is no longer searching only for survivors. “Even if they were killed… we want to know what happened to them.” Today, more than 14 years later, the families still carry the same photographs of those children. Children who should be young adults by now. But they remain frozen in their families’ memories… exactly as they were on the day they disappeared inside the factory….
