>Over 13 years of civil war, which killed more than 500,000 and displaced half the country, the Assad government and its proxies forcibly disappeared around 100,000 people, more than any regime since the Nazis. Though the gates of the prisons have been flung open, the fate of the disappeared remains mostly unknown. Among the missing are thousands of children.
>Many of them, at least at first, were held in prison with one or both of their parents, but then they were removed from their cells. Where were they taken? What had happened to them? Families were desperate for answers. In the days after the regime fell, people dug through mass graves in search of anything that could give them closure. Missing-persons posters were plastered around the capital. Silent vigils were held in city squares.
>[…]
>Finally, in May, al-Shara’s government formed a Committee for Monitoring the Fate of Children of Detainees and the Disappeared, but thus far it has provided scant details to the public.
>Over the course of a six-month investigation, I obtained copies of dozens of Assad-era classified documents and several Air Force Intelligence databases, which led to interviews with more than 50 people, including Syrian officials, investigators, children and their families. Together, they provide the most comprehensive picture to date of the Assad government’s disappearance of children. From at least 2013 through the end of the war, Syria’s secret police conspired with ministers and governors to place the children of political prisoners in orphanages — including several run by an international nonprofit organization — where they were hidden from their families and encouraged to forget their pasts and, in some cases, had their names changed and were adopted away.
>In December, as I interviewed Syrians just after Assad’s fall, there were rumors of missing children being discovered in orphanages, but nothing was certain, and the regime’s agents seemed to have done their best to destroy any evidence on their way out: In the headquarters of the Syrian intelligence services, empty gas cans sat in rooms turned to ash, and hard drives were ripped out of computers and strewed across floors.
>[…]
>The databases I obtained make clear that the decision to remove a child from his or her parents in prison was made by top officials at Air Force Intelligence. In documents marked “top secret” or “deliver by hand,” the secret police would then often task the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, or the governor of Rural Damascus, with placing the children in orphanages and ensuring that they remained hidden. The orders instruct them to keep the children’s names secret, prevent any information from being “leaked” and make no decisions about them “without the mukhabarat’s approval.”
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Archived version: [https://archive.fo/saNpT](https://archive.fo/saNpT).
>Over 13 years of civil war, which killed more than 500,000 and displaced half the country, the Assad government and its proxies forcibly disappeared around 100,000 people, more than any regime since the Nazis. Though the gates of the prisons have been flung open, the fate of the disappeared remains mostly unknown. Among the missing are thousands of children.
>Many of them, at least at first, were held in prison with one or both of their parents, but then they were removed from their cells. Where were they taken? What had happened to them? Families were desperate for answers. In the days after the regime fell, people dug through mass graves in search of anything that could give them closure. Missing-persons posters were plastered around the capital. Silent vigils were held in city squares.
>[…]
>Finally, in May, al-Shara’s government formed a Committee for Monitoring the Fate of Children of Detainees and the Disappeared, but thus far it has provided scant details to the public.
>Over the course of a six-month investigation, I obtained copies of dozens of Assad-era classified documents and several Air Force Intelligence databases, which led to interviews with more than 50 people, including Syrian officials, investigators, children and their families. Together, they provide the most comprehensive picture to date of the Assad government’s disappearance of children. From at least 2013 through the end of the war, Syria’s secret police conspired with ministers and governors to place the children of political prisoners in orphanages — including several run by an international nonprofit organization — where they were hidden from their families and encouraged to forget their pasts and, in some cases, had their names changed and were adopted away.
>In December, as I interviewed Syrians just after Assad’s fall, there were rumors of missing children being discovered in orphanages, but nothing was certain, and the regime’s agents seemed to have done their best to destroy any evidence on their way out: In the headquarters of the Syrian intelligence services, empty gas cans sat in rooms turned to ash, and hard drives were ripped out of computers and strewed across floors.
>[…]
>The databases I obtained make clear that the decision to remove a child from his or her parents in prison was made by top officials at Air Force Intelligence. In documents marked “top secret” or “deliver by hand,” the secret police would then often task the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, or the governor of Rural Damascus, with placing the children in orphanages and ensuring that they remained hidden. The orders instruct them to keep the children’s names secret, prevent any information from being “leaked” and make no decisions about them “without the mukhabarat’s approval.”
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