Damascus, Syria – By the time the red sun slipped beyond the horizon, the playground was empty except for one little girl, nine-year-old Fouziah Alalawi, who stood staring at the bend where her father always appeared to pick her up from school.

It was February 20, 2013, and war had become the background of her childhood: the distant thunder of shelling, the sharp percussion of gunfire, and the sudden quiet that made the adults tense.

That evening, Fouziah was left alone at the school gates. When she walked to her mother’s office, Somayah Alsaaed understood before her daughter spoke. Her husband, Mohammed, 43, had been taken.

The family had already been displaced once from their homes in al-Maliha, the nearby town that had recently fallen under the control of the opposition Free Syrian Army.

But Mohammed, a quiet man with a PhD in rural development, kept the family in Damascus. He believed his work at the Ministry of Agriculture still mattered, staying late tutoring colleagues for free, telling his wife, Somayah, that they would “help Syria’s villages rise”.

Each day, he drove into central Damascus for work, navigating the checkpoints that multiplied as the war crept closer to the family's new home in Qaboun.

He never spoke politics at the ministry; he had seen what happened to those who did.

The father of four – Fouziah, nine; Omar, six, Ahmed, two; and Asenat, just 11 months old – had wanted to name his youngest daughter Hurriyya, meaning “freedom”, but Somayah begged him not to. Even a name could make a man disappear.

That evening, Somayah called her husband’s number, but it rang once and went dead. A colleague told her over the phone that he had taken a call and left the building.

The family got a taxi to the ministry and demanded to see the CCTV. A security guard, Wissam, said he didn’t know anything. His timesheet showed only that Mohammed had signed in that morning.

Somayah folded it into her bag.

The family never went home again. Somayah had heard of entire families disappearing after one arrest.

Relatives stopped answering her calls, and no one wanted to be linked to her. The family spent their first night on the street.

“You can’t even imagine,” she said. “I had four children, and I was alone. I had no money. All I could do was hug them to protect them.”

She took the children to the flat belonging to Mohammed’s brother. For the next year, they lived carefully in a bare apartment in Harasta, a northern suburb of Damascus, with four mattresses on concrete, no furniture, and no heat.

Each morning, Somayah took the children to her office because it had a heater and a kettle. At night, they slept in their clothes in case they had to run.

Years later, a man calling himself Abu Ali phoned, claiming to be from “Branch 215” – a military intelligence branch that would later be known among survivors as “the Holocaust Branch”.

“Where’s your husband?” he asked.

That night, they fled again, to a mouldy basement flat that worsened the children’s asthma, choosing lower rent so Somayah could keep paying school fees.

Fleeing became routine, but Somayah clung to hope that Mohammed was still alive. “He made me promise,” she said, “that the children must grow up to be good.”

At work, colleagues avoided her. Paranoia had gripped a country where neighbours turned on each other. One whispered that Mohammed was a “terrorist”.

The children grew up telling classmates their father had died of a stroke. Only Omar and Fouziah knew the truth - it was safer that way.

A nation still searching

A year after Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, Syrians are still searching for the truth.

The portraits that hung from lampposts have been replaced by the faces of the missing, photocopied pictures taped to shopfronts and walls. Families have searched graveyards and abandoned prisons, hoping a scrap of fabric or a piece of paper might give them answers.

Over 13 years of war, which killed more than half a million people and displaced half the country, the regime and its allies disappeared between 120,000 and 300,000 people, according to the government's National Commission for the Missing.

The system that disappeared them was deliberate – a web of informants, secret police, files and fear. Arrests were made without warrants, over a neighbour’s grudge, a relative’s rumour, or a bribe.

In the days after the regime’s collapse, some Syrians celebrated. Others ran to the prisons. At Sednaya Prison, people grabbed whatever documents they could, as papers were trampled into the ground and crucial evidence disappeared underfoot. Families searched for loved ones, even beneath the floors - what they found were ropes, chains, and electric cables.

Only a few families were reunited after al-Assad’s fall.

For the rest, grief and hope coexist as the whereabouts of the disappeared remain unknown.

The new government, led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, has pledged to uncover the truth. In May 2025, decrees created the National Commission for the Missing and the National Commission for Transitional Justice. Advisory boards have been appointed, and legislation is being drafted.

But progress is slow in a nation stripped of laboratories, specialists, and funds. Officials admit they face a mammoth task: building a national database, recruiting forensic experts, establishing DNA capacity – and finding the dead before time and decay erase them.

On the ground, the work has fallen largely on those who once pulled survivors from rubble, the White Helmets, volunteers for the Syria Civil Defence (SCD).

They photograph and document, noting fragments of identity like clothing, teeth, bones. Each set of remains is boxed and sent to an identification centre. There, the process stops. The boxes of bones stay sealed. According to the White Helmets, no family has been reunited with the remains of the disappeared.

Officials and humanitarian workers say that without DNA laboratories, forensic specialists, or a functioning identification system, the bones can only be stored, even when families are sure they know who they are.

On November 5, the National Commission for the Missing signed a cooperation agreement with the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), the Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria (IIMP), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Officials say these institutions will investigate past crimes, build a national database of the missing, support families, and, eventually, identify and return remains.

The cooperation agreement was billed as the start of a comprehensive national process for truth and justice, committing all parties to share expertise and help build the backbone of an identification system.

The task is vast. There are no reliable official figures; estimates of the disappeared range from 120,000 to 300,000 people, numbers compiled from various sources without a unified database.

Before anyone can be identified, the state must gather what already exists – detention registers, civil documents, military files, and lists held by opposition groups and by survivor associations like the Caesar Families, Families for Freedom and the Sednaya Association.

Then they must collect testimonies from survivors and families, and coax information from former officials and guards who may know where people were taken or buried. All this must be uploaded into a central database that has not yet been built.

“You cannot start immediately searching, looking for answers,” says Zeina Shahla, a member of the government’s National Commission for the Missing. “You need to set up the ground.”

Right now, Syria has only a single identification centre in Damascus, set up with the ICRC, but no dedicated DNA laboratory. Offices in other cities are promised, but not yet open.

“We have huge needs – technical needs, financial needs, human resources,” Shahla says.

“Most of them are not available in Syria, especially the … scientific resources. We don't have DNA labs. We don't have the forensic labs. We don't have the doctors. So we need a lot of resources.

“And of course, this fight is too complicated because it's affecting millions of people. We need to work fast, but at the same time, we cannot work fast.”

The officials point to the scale of the wreckage. Thirteen years of war, hundreds of thousands missing, institutions hollowed out by sanctions.

Many have not even reported their missing, still afraid of what doing so might invite. Around one in five Syrians now lives abroad, scattering the reference samples needed to match the dead to the living.

Some families of the disappeared feel they are at the bottom of the state’s list of priorities. Others, like the Caesar Families Association, understand this process takes time.

Even if every promise is kept, the journey from a signed memorandum in Damascus to a named grave may take decades. Many of the families waiting across Syria may not live to see the day their children are returned to them.

The sisters

The sisters have seen their brother’s body only once, not in a morgue, but on a laptop screen.

In the image, Ayman Taqwa lies dead on a concrete floor, his arm twisted behind him, his neck bent at an impossible angle. Najwa, 60 and Ghada, 55, recognised the shirt – the one he wore the day he was taken, on March 10, 2013.

“They broke his neck … his legs were broken,” Najwa says. They studied every bruise and fracture, proof he was tortured. To the sisters, those wounds meant something else – proof he stayed loyal to the end. “Thank God,” Najwa adds quietly. “He didn’t speak. He didn’t snitch on anyone. He was a martyr.”

The image they stared at came from the al-Assad archives. From 2011 onward, Syria’s web of intelligence branches – 215, 227, 235 – swallowed tens of thousands of men and women.

The photographer who captured those images was a military police officer known by the codename Caesar, later revealed by Global News Insight as Farid al-Madhan. Ordered to document the corpses before disposal, he copied the files in secret – 55,000 photographs smuggled out of Syria on USB sticks.

The Caesar photos gave families their first glimpse of truth. The Taqwas searched through thousands of frames, zooming in on shirts, scars, and teeth – anything that might confirm what they already feared.

Before the war, Ayman lived an ordinary life. Born in 1975, he was a married father of three. “He was gentle and very kind-hearted,” Najwa says. But in al-Assad’s Syria, kindness could be dangerous. “You wouldn’t dare say a word,” she remembers. “You wouldn’t dare breathe.”

When protests broke out in Damascus’s Kafr Sousa in early 2011, Ayman was among the first to join. He was very “diplomatic”, standing between boys throwing stones and soldiers raising rifles. “He used to negotiate,” Najwa says. “He used to try to keep the protest peaceful.”

That ended when Ghada’s 17-year-old son, Khalid, was caught in a government crackdown. “They beat him with metal chains,” she says. “On his mouth. He couldn’t eat for months.” Later, the army entered Kafr Sousa and killed Khalid in an ambush.

Ayman stopped mediating and picked up a rifle after the army entered Kafr Sousa that August and carried out a massacre.

“They killed a lot of my family,” Najwa says. Her cousin, the cousin’s husband, and three of their children were killed – only the youngest survived.

Next door, the cousin’s brother and his two adult sons were also found dead. In a neighbourhood nearby, four more relatives were killed, and a young man and his pregnant wife, carrying twins, were among the dead.

Ayman survived four ambushes, rising to become a leader within the Muqdad bin Omar Battalion in Darayya, a small unit affiliated with the Free Syrian Army.

But the fifth ambush went differently. Carrying forged papers, Ayman went to Damascus to meet a contact. Someone betrayed him. “The man he met talked,” Najwa says.

For years, Ayman's family lived in the limbo of the disappeared. Najwa dreamed of her brother nightly. “Always with his legs hurting,” she says.

Ghada cries quietly, but Najwa speaks like a soldier recounting a commander’s death. “He was wanted number one,” she says, a flicker of pride threading through the grief. “He did not confess.”

Last month, at a memorial in Abu Rummaneh, Najwa and Ghada received a certificate honouring their brother. “We die, we live,” Najwa says. “But we cannot forget them. They are alive in our hearts.”

When Safinaz al-Chaaibi reached Sednaya Prison in 2018, she carried a small visitor card – the first sign in five years that her only son, Mohammed, who she called Hamid, could still be alive.

She and her husband Nabil left from their home in Damascus before dawn, joining a convoy of families moving north through checkpoint after checkpoint. “I had to bend my head,” Safinaz said. “We couldn’t speak to the soldiers.”

At the prison gates, female guards, “children” 15 or 16 years old, she says, made her remove her hijab, and her bra. Fingers were put into her mouth to check that she wasn’t hiding a note.

Mothers had their babies’ diapers stripped off. Guards cut the elastic from underwear because even a stitched hem could carry a message.

“From eight in the morning until noon, it was only searching,” she says. “Three rounds. When one finished, another began.”

Visitors were told they could say only: “How are you?” Visits were to be only three minutes. When they called Safinaz's son Hamid’s name, the guard spoke words that shattered everything. “The prisoner’s not there.”

“My husband squeezed my hand and told me: ‘Do nothing here. We can talk outside,’” she said.

Outside the prison gates, family members were awaiting good news that Hamid was safe and sound. Safinaz broke down; nobody could look her in the eye.

“With the soil from the ground, I started beating myself,” she said. “They had given me a visitor card, but he was dead.”

Hamid had been 18 when he was taken in November 2014 – a schoolboy in Deir ez-Zor who avoided politics. “He was 24-7 watching football matches,” Safinaz says. “He wasn’t even interested in going out in the protests.”

“He didn't have many friends. He was an introvert,” she said, adding that his father was strict. “He wanted to make him a man.”

The day of his disappearance, Hamid left school and went to his part-time job at a mobile-phone shop. By early evening, men from the Republican Guard detained him. When a cousin went to ask what had happened, soldiers arrested him, too. He never returned.

“I saw my phone ringing … they told me, they took Hamid,” Safinaz says. When she went to the security branch to inquire, she was arrested.

Inside, an interrogator fabricated charges in real time, dictating lies to a checkpoint officer over the phone – accusations that Safinaz had been delivering information to “terrorists”. In the next room, she heard her husband Nabil being beaten. In another, Hamid screamed. Each was forced to hear the other.

She was released after a week through an uncle’s connections. Nabil followed days later, thrown onto the street, barely able to stand. The marks, she says, remain on his body.

Soon after, they learned Hamid had been flown to Damascus – the only way out of the besieged city of Deir ez-Zor. Safinaz decided to follow. A military contact secured her a place on an aircraft.

In Damascus, she built a routine. Each morning, she waited outside the Palace of Justice because detainees occasionally passed through on their way to court. “Whatever the accusation,” she thought, “he will go to court.”

Slowly, she learned what others already knew: whoever was taken, disappeared. Even asking was an offence. The guards told her: “Are you out of your mind, coming here asking about a terrorist?’”

For years, she returned. The guards would repeat: “Not here.”

By late 2024, one city after another fell, and prisons opened. Videos of reunions – men stepping into daylight for the first time in a decade – travelled across Syria like miracles. Hope rose inside Safinaz.

She reached Sednaya Prison, “the very first to arrive at the prison”, she insists.

“I went out under the bullets, during the celebration,” she says. Walking the grounds, she recognised the mesh fencing of the visiting ward. The smell, she says, has never left her.

But there was no sign of Hamid.

Her daughter, Rama, logged into a government database that released details about some of the disappeared. It listed everything: Hamid’s national number, his birthdate, and his family name. All of it matched.

His death was recorded as happening on November 8, 2015, in Damascus, a year after his arrest. The state formally registered that death seven years later, in May 2022.

“Mom, stop looking for Hamid,” Rama told her. “He’s dead.”

In the Al-Muhajireen neighborhood of Damascus, hope had risen for Fouziah, too – that her father might still be alive.

When the regime collapsed, she was in her final year of medical school – fulfilling the promise she had made to her father as a child. Omar, her brother, was studying medicine, too.

The younger children had been told the truth about their father a year earlier, that he was taken by the regime.

They watched the fall of al-Assad on their phones, believing Mohammed might walk out of a prison like others.

Fouziah imagined Mohammed had run – to Germany, perhaps – and stayed away to protect them. When she graduated, she planned to travel there. “If I couldn’t find him,” she says, “I would at least talk about him.”

But as the days after the regime’s fall passed, hope turned into dread. Four days after Damascus fell, Fouziah remembered the Caesar photographs. There was no website – someone mentioned Telegram. She opened a channel and scrolled. Dead faces. One after another. A hundred. Then another fifty.

“I saw a photo, I knew it was him… his face… his eyes… his cheeks. That is him, that's all of him.”

Omar threw his medical coat on the ground. “Baba will never see it,” he said.

“Afterwards, in the house, we separated,” says her mother, Somayah. “Each person was alone.”

Somayah couldn’t steady herself. “I didn’t know how to act,” she says. “The dream I was living, that this family would go back again, and the children see their father again.”

Now she grips the edges of her chair, tears flooding down her face. “I had thought that he would come and help me. And that we will grow old [together].

“And now, unfortunately. I'm trying to give myself hope that I can become stronger again, but I'm failing. It's very hard … he was supposed to help me.”

Across Syria, thousands of families were living the same moment. With their loved ones dead, it only raised more questions: Who tortured them? Where are the bodies? What happened to my father?

“There is no closure,” says Fouziah.

In the southern suburbs of Damascus lies Tadamon, a district that spent the war under siege. It was seized by Free Syrian Army rebels in 2012, partly taken by ISIL (ISIS) three years later, and finally retaken by government forces in 2018 – until the regime fell.

What remains is a city of debris, apartments without outer walls, tiles pocked with bullet holes, and staircases to nowhere. Children play in the rubble and families burn rubbish for warmth and light. A few shops still operate from the shells of buildings.

But for years, the people in Tadamon held onto a secret - Tadamon is also a mass grave where some 41 civilians were killed in April 2013 - becoming widely known only when a video leaked in 2022.

It showed blindfolded men led to the edge of a trench, mocked by their executioner, and shot one by one before their bodies were burned alongside tyres. The perpetrators were members of Syrian Military Intelligence. The White Helmets have begun recovering remains, though no identities are confirmed.

Across Syria, an estimated 66 mass graves have been identified. The remains of the missing keep appearing.

Ammar Selmo, a White Helmets board member, says people lived throughout the war with dead bodies dumped in their basement by the regime. They were warned to never move them. “I went to the police three times,” one man told him.“They came, and they did nothing.”

The White Helmets comprise more than 3,000 volunteers who now retrieve the dead. “We’re the only team right now … responding to mass graves and recording potential mass graves sites, collecting human remains… and preserving these human remains,” Selmo said.

Every skeleton receives a file, a police report, a brief medical assessment – then the bones are boxed and stored in a warehouse.

In a move widely viewed as appeasing civil society, Raed al-Saleh, the head of the White Helmets, was made minister of disasters and emergencies in March.

The annual budget for the White Helmets is about $25m, and cuts from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have removed around $4m to $5m – roughly a fifth of funding. The White Helmets' general assembly has decided to dissolve the organisation, which is to be “integrated into the ministry”, said Selmo.

“The White Helmets will die. They’ll die soon,” he said.

Some families insist they recognise their dead. One man identified his brother, sister-in-law, and their children by their clothing. For years, he begged for their bones.

“I tried to convince him many times to keep these bones with us … every day, he called me,” Selmo said.

“So at the moment, no families have been reunited with their remains because there is just no DNA test.”

In a dim basement room in Damascus, plastic chairs scrape against the tiles as members of the Caesar Families Association take their seats.

The association began quietly in Berlin in February 2018, a network of Syrians who recognised their relatives in the Caesar photographs. The meeting in Damascus was one of their first on Syrian soil. For the families, the question was no longer whether their loved ones were dead. It was what would come next.

Global News Insight spoke to four families in the room. They wanted the truth about what happened, accountability for those responsible, dignified burials, reparations, guarantees that disappearances would never happen again. Each family agreed on the list; they differed only on what should come first.

For Najwa and Ghada, the sisters of Ayman from Kafr Sousa, the demand is simpler: a grave. The state told them Ayman was buried in a mass grave in Najha, in the southern Damascus countryside, sharing a trench with others who were killed around the same date.

“It’s not an individual grave,” Najwa says. “We’re still waiting … so they can take the remains, test the DNA and see who’s who.”

What they want, she says, is to bring their brother home - "to receive his body, to bury him, to have a tomb in Kafr Sousa".

“Just for the people to feel,” she says, “that their spirits were not sacrificed for nothing, that their blood did not go in vain".

But others, like Safinaz, whose son Hamid died under torture in 2014, are no longer willing to wait. She is not a member of the Caesar Families Association, and she has no patience left for committees and meetings.

In the first months after the fall of al-Assad, she watched ministries announce conferences on detainees, reconciliation, and transitional justice. “Each time there’s an organisation,” she says, “they reserve fancy restaurants and they take us there for meals. And it’s all nonsense. They’ve done nothing.”

Her list of demands begins with something small enough to hold in one hand.

“I want one thing,” she says. “A death certificate for my son.”

Under the regime, soldiers killed in battle were called martyrs, their families given benefits, and honour cards. She wants the same status for those who died under torture.

“The [al-Assad regime’s] martyrs were holding the weapons and the tanks. Meanwhile, our children were tied and they were under torture.”

What she wants is “a card of honour - a card I can hold high wherever I walk".

She, too, wants accountability. “Why doesn’t anyone go out and tell us what happened?” she asks. “Just take one of them to court. Maybe this brings serenity to some hearts.”

Somayah - Mohammed’s widow - says she does not want revenge, but “the truth”.

“Each person is responsible in a security branch. Each one who wrote a report. Each collaborator. From the smallest official to the highest one. Even the guard at the door. The ones in the car carrying them to the mass graves. All of them are smaller versions of al-Assad.”

Beside her, Fouziah – now 23 – sits quietly among the Caesar families.

She recounts what might have happened if her father had collected her from school that day. He would have taken her straight to the ministry, as he always did, for the two hours before he signed off his shift.

Mohammed even made her a small sign-in sheet so she could clock in and out the way the adults did, her name written beneath his.

She would stay with her father, wandering through the corridors at times. If she saw someone smoking in the office, she would march back to her father to report them. She had watched him enforce the rules once, and understood it as her duty, too. “My father was my childhood”, she says, smiling through tears.

Across the room, Somayah listens, tears running down her face.

Mohammed’s disappearance was “harder than death”, Somayah says. “Death has a kind of peace. You bury them. You pray. You visit.”

“But disappearance …” She lowers her eyes. “It still kills my heart, little by little.”