For the families of Syria’s disappeared, hope fades but the demand for justice grows

(CNN) — More than a week after Bashar al-Assad fled Syria and his regime collapsed, hundreds of thousands of Syrians still have no answer to two questions that have haunted them for years, even decades.

What happened to family members and friends after they vanished or were detained by Assad’s secret police? And how do we bring their torturers and killers to justice?

Some 150,000 people in Syria are unaccounted for, most of whom were kidnapped or detained by the Assad regime or its affiliates, according to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). CNN cannot independently verify this number.

With every passing day, Syrians’ slim hopes finding a loved one still alive are fading. But they want some form of closure; they scour prison and hospital walls where lists of names and images of bodies are posted. They cling to a sliver of hope, yearn for a miracle.

But they also want retribution.

One of those waiting for news was Hazem Dakel from Idlib, who is now in Sweden. His uncle Najeeb was arrested in 2012 and was later confirmed by the family as having been killed. His brother Amer was detained the following year. Former detainees at the horrific Saydnaya prison near Damascus said Amer had disappeared in mid-April 2015 after being tortured there. But the regime never acknowledged his death.

“Now that people are able to talk, they are naming people, and I got details of exactly what happened in prison, and the torture, who tortured him, who interrogated him,” Dakel told CNN of his brother,

“I want this (new Syrian) country to stand on its feet so we can hold them accountable through the law and courts.”

Amid the celebrations in Idlib after the fall of Assad, he said, there was also mourning. “They are mourning their children. Yes, the regime fell after resistance and struggle, but there was sorrow—like, where are our children?”

“Justice is coming, and our right will not be erased no matter how long it takes,” Dakel posted on Facebook. The family is now “certain” Amer died under torture in Saydnaya, he said.

Human rights groups have begun visiting the many prisons and detention centers across Syria where those perceived as regime critics were confined. An Amnesty International team scoured security branches of the former regime around Damascus this week.

Mazjoub also posted photographs on X of instruments of torture left behind.

“Nothing could have prepared us for what we saw,” said one of the team, Aya Mazjoub. In a series of posts on X she described “underground labyrinths (that) are literally hell on earth. They were overcrowded, crawling with cockroaches and other insects, lacked ventilation. They still smell of blood and death.”

“This is ‘bisat ar-reeh’, a notorious torture device where detainees would be strapped to a wooden slab that would be folded until their back cracked,” she wrote.

“This is the ‘doulab’. Detainees would be stuffed into the tyre and beaten, usually on the soles of their feet.”

Identifying the bodies that are found will require a legion of forensic pathologists. “Many are beyond recognition, mutilated by years of torture and starvation,” said Mazjoub.

Desperate relatives have taken to social media with details of sons, brothers, fathers and sisters who disappeared.

In a video posted on X, Lama Saud said her brother Abdullah was detained in 2012. Regime records had registered his death in 2014, but she said she still had hope he might be alive. “There are many detainees whose families were told they were dead but were later found to be alive,” she said.

Mahmoud Al Shahabi, a Syrian living in exile, told CNN he had been waiting for news of his brothers Hikmat and Amir for 12 years.

“We hope to find them, my situation is like hundreds of thousands of Syrian families who are waiting for news about their loved ones, and we will not give up hope until now.”

So far, he has found no trace.

Al Shahabi also asked on Facebook where the recordings of surveillance cameras at regime security branches had gone, why some documents had been destroyed and why human rights groups had not done more to protect records.

Preserving whatever evidence is left in prisons and around possible burial sites is critical to documenting what happened and tracking down the perpetrators.

But following that trail of evidence is also a race against time. Several human rights groups issued a joint appeal last week, saying: “The real toll will only be known after mass graves and documents from the detention centers are examined and authenticated by trained experts. This documentation must be preserved from destruction.”

Based on the accounts of former prisoners, doctors and regime personnel, it said that an “olive-green Honda with a closed shed that could accommodate around 50 bodies” was used to take the bodies to a site in Najha near Damascus – “which has been called cemetery no.1 (the term used by regime forces is ‘cemetery of the bastards’).”

Bodies at the military hospital stayed for two or three days until there were “enough to transport to Najha graveyard, and sometimes to Al Qutayfah graveyard,” and other sites, according to the report.

The Association of Detainees and the Missing at Saydnaya prison, which describes itself as a coalition of prison survivors, victims, and their families, has meticulously documented what has happened there in recent years, based on witness accounts and other evidence, such as satellite imagery. It reported last year how bodies were taken from the prison and a military hospital to a mass burial site.

In 2020, a man known as “the Gravedigger” told a German court he was recruited by the Assad regime to bury hundreds of bodies in mass graves, including Najha, according to the International Commission on Missing Persons.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said burial sites or mass graves “must be protected and preserved to allow organized exhumation” as soon as possible. “This is also crucial to identify and ascertain the fate of those missing and provide the much-awaited answers to their families.”

After its investigators found documents strewn all over Saydnaya prison, the ICRC appealed for all records to be safeguarded at hospitals and in security centers run by the ousted regime.

The ICRC has also asked relatives of the missing – abroad and in Syria – to register with it, as the mammoth task of identifying the dead begins.

The conflict had killed more than 350,000 since 2011 – an “under-count of the actual number of killings,” a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said in 2021 – and sent nearly six million refugees out of the country. Other groups put the estimated number of dead higher. An Amnesty International investigation published in 2017 said that as many as 13,000 people, most of them civilians believed to be opposed to the government, were hanged in secret at Saydnaya between 2011 and 2015 alone. With reports of civilians killed under torture in the detention centers and prisons for decades, the numbers of those who have lost their lives are still being counted.

In all likelihood, the vast majority of the missing are indeed dead.

In a tearful statement on Syrian television last week, the head of The Syrian Network for Human Rights, Fadel Abulghany, said: “I apologize for the tenth and thousandth time, before this announcement…Most of the forcibly disappeared in Syria are dead – and I am sorry.”

Now the almost overwhelming mission is to find those who died, and to identify them and their killers.

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