“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?” …
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….
On July 15, 2024, Maryam Jdei was returning to Homs from northern Syria with her two children, Nour and Hussein, after attending a family wedding in Manbij. Her husband, Mithkal al-Khalawi, was waiting for them in Homs, following their journey minute by minute over the phone, like any father counting the moments until his children return home. Nour was ten years old, a fifth-grade student. Hussein was only six. Before reaching Homs, the family crossed through the Tabqa crossing and approached checkpoints controlled by the former Syrian regime along the Raqqa–Salamiya road. In their final call, Maryam told her husband they were nearing a checkpoint. “We’re at the checkpoint now… I’ll turn off the phone for a bit.” She was afraid security personnel would see her speaking on the phone, Then the line went dead. From that moment on, every phone became unreachable. Maryam disappeared, So did the children, As if the road itself had swallowed them. Mithkal says that at first, he could not understand what had happened. He waited for hours at the Homs bus station, convinced the bus had simply been delayed. But night came. And no one arrived. Later, he returned to the crossing where the family had last been seen. There, he was shown surveillance footage confirming that Maryam had crossed into regime-controlled territory carrying the family documents, with the two children beside her. “They were alive… I saw them with my own eyes on the cameras.” It was the last trace of them ever seen. Since that day, Mithkal’s life has become an endless search. He sold what he owned. Spent large amounts of money chasing rumors and false leads. Moved between prisons, checkpoints, and security branches. Searched through lists, photographs, hospitals, and unidentified bodies. Nothing. He says the loss was not only his family. “I lost my home… my work… my health… everything.” Mithkal once owned a small business in the Homs countryside. He stopped working completely after his wife and children disappeared. Today, he lives alone, surrounded by photographs of two children he no longer knows are alive or dead. Sometimes, he says, the waiting itself feels like another form of torture. “I reached a point where I started wishing they were dead… just so I could know where they are.”…
In 2013, Syrian dentist Rania al-Abbasi disappeared alongside her husband and six children inside the detention system of the former Syrian regime, becoming one of the country’s most well-known cases of enforced disappearance. Rania was not an ordinary figure. She was a respected dentist in Damascus, a former Syrian chess champion, and a mother of six children ranging in age from three to fifteen. The family lived in the Damascus neighborhood of Mashrou Dummar, far from any political activity. But as the Syrian war deepened, even ordinary families found themselves pulled into the machinery of arrest and disappearance. In March 2013, her husband, Dr. Abdulrahman, was arrested after reportedly being accused of assisting a wanted individual. Two days later, security forces raided the family home again and arrested Rania along with all six of her children: Dima, Intisar, Najah, Alaa, Ahmad, and Lian. None of them have been seen since. Over the years, fragments of information emerged from former detainees who claimed Rania had been held inside detention facilities, while reports also circulated about children being heard in nearby cells. Unconfirmed reports later suggested that Abdulrahman may have died under torture after leaked “Caesar” photos from Syrian prisons surfaced publicly. The fate of the six children, however, remains unknown. As the years passed, the case became a global symbol of Syria’s detainee and disappearance crisis, particularly because it involved the disappearance of young children inside the prison system. Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, repeatedly called for answers about the family’s fate. Following the collapse of the former Syrian regime, the case resurfaced widely among activists and journalists demanding access to prison archives and information about thousands of missing Syrians….
Hajar was the only survivor. At the beginning of the Syrian war, her family fled from Daraya to Sahnaya, escaping bombardment and fear. Like thousands of others, they were simply trying to survive, They stayed together until the summer of 2013.Until August 6 the day her entire family vanished. That day, Hajar was speaking to her sister on the phone, Suddenly, her sister’s voice changed. “They caught us at the checkpoint!” she screamed, Then the line went dead. Minutes later, every phone became unreachable, No one from the family has been seen since, Seven relatives disappeared together: Maria Haj Ahmad, three years old. Shaimaa Haj Ahmad, ten. Mohammad Amin Haj Ahmad, fifteen. Fatima al-Zahraa Haj Ahmad, seventeen. Sondos Haj Ahmad, nineteen. Along with their father, Abdul Aziz Naasan al-Haj Ahmad, and their mother, Zubaida Hafez al-Sayyadi, The family had been traveling from Damascus to their hometown of Halfaya in the Hama countryside to spend the Eid holiday. They never arrived. According to testimonies and field information, the family disappeared at the notorious Al-Qabou checkpoint between Hama and Homs, an area reportedly controlled at the time by militias linked to Shujaa al-Ali, affiliated with the former Syrian regime. A checkpoint feared for arrests, disappearances, and people who never returned. But for Hajar, none of the political details change the pain. Years have passed, and she is still searching. Not only for justice , but for an answer. “Even if they are dead,” she says quietly, “I just want to know what happened to them.”…
On April 7, 2013, three families traveling from Beirut were heading toward Idlib. It was supposed to be an ordinary journey, one that would end with a family reunion and a new life in Turkey. Instead, it ended at a checkpoint in Homs. From that moment on, the car disappeared, The driver disappeared, and everyone inside vanished without a trace. Nine children were among them: Ayham Sayed Issa, just eight months old. Triplets Ahmad, Abdullah, and Ibrahim Kanjo, eight years old. Ghina Sayed Issa, two years old. Yathrib Sayed Issa, six. Abdullah Sayed Issa, eight. Abdulhadi Sayed Issa, eleven. Aya Sayed Issa, sixteen. They disappeared alongside their mothers , and have never been seen again. Mohammad Kanjo, the father of the triplets, says it was the first disappearance case he had heard of in that area. He was waiting for his wife and children to arrive in Idlib before continuing together to Turkey — a journey that never happened. His three children had been born after nine years of waiting. Kanjo himself had worked for Syria’s Military Industrialization Authority before defecting. He still remembers the last phone call. “They told me they were at Al-Zahra checkpoint in Homs… then the line went dead. After that, all the phones were unreachable.” Later, while searching for answers through the Idlib governor’s office, he discovered other families looking for the same missing convoy. There, he met Abdulqader Sayed Issa, the father of five missing children, and Haitham Sayed Issa, father of baby Ayham. That was when the scale of the disappearances became clearer. Thirteen cars coming from Idlib had vanished in the same area. All carried Idlib license plates. None returned. Kanjo says he later spoke, through the governor’s office, with Wael al-Halqi, Syria’s former prime minister at the time. According to him, the response was blunt: “Go look for them with the terrorists. The terrorists took them.” More than thirteen years later, the families are still searching. For a document. A photograph. A grave. Mohammad Kanjo ends with words shaped by years of waiting: “We will keep remembering them until we die.”…
