A week after Bashar al-Assad’s government was overthrown, one of Syria’s top human rights workers has a sobering message: 100,000 missing people are almost certainly dead.
Fadel Abdulghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), has been working for years with a team of 21 people within Syria to record everyone who was detained or simply vanished without a trace.
As rebel forces bore down on Damascus, seizing city after city, the SNHR visited every prison and detention centre as they fell, documenting as many detainees freed from their cells as they could.
“Our records show that approximately 136,000 people were either being detained or had been forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime,” Abdulghany tells Middle East Eye.
The figure includes more than 5,000 children.
“But we have only recorded a maximum estimate of 31,000 people released over the past few days.”
The only conclusion, Abdulghany believes, is that most were killed under torture.
'Most of the bodies were tortured, it’s obvious'
- Shahd Bou Hassoun, Syrian doctor
“There is no secret detention centre to be discovered. There are no secret floors under prisons, or heavy doors that haven’t been opened,” he says.
“When people share false information, it plays with the families of the victims.”
Sednaya, Syria’s most infamous prison, had a capacity of 10,000 people, Abdulghany says.
“But approximately 1,600 prisoners were released,” he adds, far fewer than has been reported on social media, where many Syrians get their news.
Tortured corpses
Nonetheless, Syrians scour prisons and hospitals for information on their missing relatives.
At Damascus’s al-Mujtahid hospital, people step out of the morgue with scarves clenched to their mouths. Bloodshot eyes look into the middle distance, their faces greying by the second.
Around 35 bodies were discovered in a hospital in the countryside outside the capital and brought here, where there is electricity and better facilities.
“They seemed to have all been in Sednaya because their clothes were the same as the prisoners held there,” says Shahd Bou Hassoun, a volunteer doctor at al-Mujtahid hospital.
Syrians search the morgue at Damascus’s al-Mujtahid hospital looking for missing relatives, 13 December 2024 (MEE/Daniel Hilton)
Men and women shuffle in and out of the cramped facility, tiptoeing between cadavers on the floor.
They brush bodybags and pieces of material to one side to get a better look at the deformed faces, a chance to see if their relatives’ features can be recognised in the gaunt grimaces.
Many of the people held in this morgue have been dead for a month or so, medics say, and their condition is rapidly declining.
“Most of the bodies were tortured, it’s obvious. You can see many died of either torture or starvation,” says Bou Hassoun.
“Some were found to have been suffering from chronic illnesses or conditions, like tuberculosis or liver cirrhosis.”
Unanswered questions
Families from Damascus and its environs have spent the past week searching the capital’s various detention facilities and hospitals.
Now it’s the turn of people arriving from Syria’s periphery, some crossing former frontlines after years of being estranged from the capital and other areas previously held by Assad.
At the morgue, women and men approach MEE with images of lost sons and brothers.
Talal Jahar’s brother was a student in Latakia when he went missing in 2013. “Someone told the government he was a terrorist,” the 49-year-old from Raqqa says.
'We don’t know if we will find anything, but we still have hope'
- Najm Abdullah Jweir, relative of missing Syrian
Razan Mellah was 34 when she got into a taxi in southern Daraa province. Her father, Abdul Kader, has never seen her since.
Mohammed Amani forgot to take his ID card when he travelled through a Daraa checkpoint. That was enough for him to be taken away. “We have heard nothing about what happened to him,” his mother, Saida, says.
All of them have one thing in common: someone convinced them to spend thousands of dollars for information about their missing relatives.
People working in or with prisons and detention facilities have persuaded desperate Syrians to part with tens of thousands of dollars each, promising to obtain news of their relatives or even their release.
Most often, it turns out to be a con. “At first, we paid but never found out anything. It was a scam,” says Saida.
Ahmed Husein Salha, 33, sold his family’s land for information about his brother, Mohammed, who was arrested near Hama in 2016 as he tried to reach opposition-held Idlib province with his wife and children.
“After paying, I was told he was in Sednaya, but nothing else,” he says.
Scattered records
Syria’s slaughterhouse, as Sednaya prison is known, has a commanding view of the hills just north of Damascus. If it wasn’t hell, it would be picturesque.
At its entrance, dozens of people crouch over documents that have been laid out on the ground for people to sift through.
Others walk from cell to cell along Sednaya’s three long wings. They’re not looking for anything in particular. Rather, they want to visualise the conditions prisoners endured.
Syrians sift through scattered documents looking for clues about missing relatives at Sednaya prison near Damascus, 13 December 2024 (MEE/Daniel Hilton)
Abdulghany believes Syrians should start checking the civil registry instead.
In 2018, the government began to register forcibly disappeared people as dead.
With help from an employee in the civil registry’s office, the SNHR managed to match around 3,000 officially deceased people with people known to be missing.
In most cases, the authorities never told the families they had died.
MEE has reviewed several documents from the registry that list the deaths of missing Syrians. The cause of death is all the same: cancer.
“We don’t know if we will find anything, but we still have hope,” says Najem Abdullah Jweir, who has travelled 600km from northeastern Hassakeh to Sednaya.
