Funeral of 3 siblings killed in Russian strike underscores mounting toll on Ukrainian families
Hundreds of residents stood in grim silence. Some wept quietly. Others broke down completely.
The funeral was for 8-year-old Tamara, 12-year-old Stanislav, and 17-year-old Roman Martyniuk — siblings from the same family.
They were killed over the weekend when debris from a Russian cruise missile slammed into their home in Korostyshiv, a city of 24,000 residents about 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Kyiv, during an aerial barrage. It struck at 3 a.m. as they slept in their beds.
'I saw destruction, great destruction. All the houses were razed and shattered,' said Volodymyr Demchenko, the family's 77-year-old neighbor, recalling the night when the missile landed 500 meters (yards) from his home.
The children's deaths underscore the mounting toll on Ukrainian families as Moscow ramps up its strikes amid faltering peace efforts. It was one of several recent tragedies in which children and teenagers have died, revealing a grim pattern as hopes for a ceasefire fade and Russian attacks continue to target civilian areas. 'The three kids were incredibly bright, incredibly polite, the smartest, best students, always ready to help, always ready to support others,' said 22-year-old Yuliia Skok, the eldest sibling's teacher.
Moscow denies targeting civilians, but abundant evidence shows otherwise.
The children's father, still bearing fresh injuries, was released from the hospital to attend the funeral. He and his two surviving children sat beside the coffins — a scene that has become heartbreakingly familiar in a war now grinding through its fourth year. Their mother remained hospitalized.
At least 209 civilians were killed and 1,146 injured across Ukraine in April, making it the deadliest month for civilians since September 2024, according to the U.N. human rights office. The toll was 23% higher than in March and 84% higher than in April 2024.
Among the victims were at least 19 children, while another 78 were injured — more than the combined total of the previous four months. It was the highest verified monthly number of child casualties since June 2022.
The deadliest single strike on children since the start of the invasion occurred April 4 in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's hometown. A ballistic missile exploded over a park, playground and restaurant, scattering thousands of metal fragments that killed 20 civilians — including seven boys and two girls — and injured 63 others, the U.N. said.
Nearly half of April's civilian casualties were caused by missile attacks, many involving powerful explosive weapons targeting densely populated urban areas such as Kryvyi Rih, Sumy, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv and Kharkiv. In several cases, Russian forces used fragmentation warheads that detonated mid-air, spreading shrapnel over wide areas.
One of the deadliest such attacks occurred April 13 in the northern city of Sumy, where two ballistic missiles struck the historic city center minutes apart. The blasts killed at least 31 civilians — including two young boys — and injured 105. Many victims were caught in the open while rushing to help those wounded in the first explosion or while riding a bus near the impact zone.
According to Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office, at least 630 children have been killed since the start of the war, and more than 1,960 injured.
Korostyshiv, a town rarely shaken by tragedy of this scale, stood united in mourning Wednesday.
'They were some talented children who were supposed to keep living, but sadly, the war took their lives. We are very sad, the entire school and the community are mourning,' Skok said.
Mourners passed slowly by the coffins to pay their final respects. Some placed flowers. Others could barely walk.
'This is an irreparable loss that will leave a deep mark in the hearts of each of us,' Zhytomyr regional Gov. Vitalii Bunechko in a statement. 'We bow our heads in memory of the children whose lives were cut short by Russian missiles.'
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When the Syrian regime fell in December, its secrets began to emerge from the rubble. One of its darkest secrets: the forced disappearance of hundreds of children. They were taken from their parents and secretly placed in orphanages, many under false identities. A Times investigation reveals the internal workings of the operation — and how one family fought to reunite. Supported by In Syria, the Assad regime took hundreds of children away from their parents. A Times investigation reveals the workings of the operation — and how one family fought to reunite. By Shane Bauer Photographs by Jim Huylebroek Shane Bauer has covered the Middle East for more than 15 years. To report this story, he obtained several confidential databases created by the Syrian secret police and interviewed more than 50 people, including officials, investigators, children and their families. Eight-year-old Laila Ghbees sat on a couch in an empty interrogation room, her legs dangling above the floor. Standing over her was a tall, bald officer from Syrian Air Force Intelligence, the agency in charge of the Assad government's most confidential tasks. Her 4-year-old sister, Layan, sat next to her, quiet and afraid. The girls were detained at a checkpoint near Damascus the previous day, Aug. 4, 2015, along with their parents, Mosaab and Omama Ghbees. The family was taken to a secret interrogation facility at the Mezzeh military airport on the edge of the capital, where Air Force Intelligence held people accused of opposing the regime. When they arrived, officers led Laila's father away with his shirt pulled over his eyes and his hands zip-tied behind his back. Then they took Laila's picture from the front and the side, just like in the American movies. They told her mother, Omama, that her new name was 446 and placed her and the girls in a musty underground prison cell. The next day, the tall, bald man brought the sisters into the interrogation room. 'Does your uncle Abdulrahman visit you often?' the man asked. Laila's uncle didn't visit the family often. He didn't visit at all, in fact. But she could tell by the way the man was asking her questions that the truth wasn't what he wanted to hear. Laila just wanted him to let her go back to her cell, to her mother. 'Yes,' she said softly. 'Does his beard tickle you when he kisses you?' the interrogator continued. Laila's uncle Abdulrahman didn't have a beard. He was the most clean-cut of all her male relatives — his hair was always gelled, his dress always smart. 'Yes,' she said. The man left the room and a few minutes later, he returned with her mother. 'You are telling me you weren't collaborating with your brother Abdulrahman?' he said to Omama. 'Your daughter told me you were.' 'It's not true,' her mother said. Laila feared her lies had created more trouble for her mother. She could remember seeing her uncle before the war began, but that era of her life was growing dim in her memory — kindergarten, her dad's car-repair shop, picnics in apricot orchards and olive groves, trips to Damascus University, where her mother took classes in Arabic literature. They had lived in eastern Ghouta, a group of suburbs just outside Damascus, but when the fighting started, Laila's parents moved their family to a safer town. Her uncle stayed. After the regime put parts of eastern Ghouta under siege, cutting off electricity, water and the food supply, he became the head of the local branch of the Red Crescent, a neutral humanitarian organization. He smuggled in medicine, met with United Nations delegations and secretly gathered evidence of a sarin attack that killed some 1,400 people in the summer of 2013. The Syrian authorities labeled him a terrorist. A guard walked Laila, her mother and sister back to their cell, where mold darkened its crevices and the walls were etched with Quranic verses by prisoners past. Tattered segments of dirty blankets were scattered across the floor, and a toilet reeked in the corner. Thinking of her father alone elsewhere in the prison, Laila had written the Arabic word baba on the cell door with a yellow crayon she had found on the floor of an interrogation room. She also wrote the names of her teenage brothers, Omar and Asem, who weren't in the car with the family when they were detained. 'I wish I was the daughter of Elastigirl from 'The Incredibles,'' she told her mother. That way, she could stretch herself thin and escape through the cracks. Day after day, Omama tried to distract her daughters with a game of tossing olive pits into a plastic bowl; she told them their favorite fairy tale, 'Jabal Ajayib,' about a young woman who marries a king. Down the hall, prisoners whimpered in solitary cells barely large enough to lie down in. Some were packed 20 to 80 thick in group cells with just one toilet or with none at all. After dark, the sounds of men being tortured echoed through the prison, and a sickly-sweet scent of overcrowded bodies and decay lingered in the air. Nearly every night, guards would take Laila's mother away to interrogate her, leaving the door cracked open so the girls didn't get scared and cry. Once, when her mother returned, Laila stirred awake. Omama's face was red and blue. 'What happened, Mama?' she asked. Omama remained silent, and Laila hugged her until she fell back asleep. Then, one night, her mother came back to the cell and sat down next to her. 'There is something I need to tell you,' Omama said softly. 'They are going to take you and Layan. We might not ever see each other again. Layan is your responsibility now. You need to be her little mother.' Laila lay down beside her sister and held her as she slept. The next day, she drew a sun and a little girl on the wall with her yellow crayon. 'Mama, I know the sun doesn't reach you here,' she said, 'so this sun is to keep you warm, and this girl will keep you company.' Omama looked into her eyes intensely. 'You must never forget your name,' her mother said. 'Your name is Laila, Baba's name is Mosaab, and your last name is Ghbees. Remember your grandma's name. Remember your brothers' names. When you get older, search for your family. Don't forget.' Two days later, officers came and took the girls. Ever since rebel fighters captured Damascus in December, sending Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Russia, Syrians have been slowly uncovering the atrocities of his regime. 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. Syrians issued increasingly desperate calls for the new government to investigate the whereabouts of these children and the rest of the disappeared. In February, Wafa Mustafa, a journalist and activist, aired her frustration with the country's president, Ahmed al-Shara, in a widely shared video. 'We've seen the president of the new government meeting with ambassadors, ministers, diplomatic representatives, the European Union and even YouTubers and influencers from Jordan,' she said. 'What kind of message is the government sending by meeting with all these groups but not the families of Syrian detainees?' 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. I walked through the labyrinthine prisons of the secret police, known as the mukhabarat, and found the traces of children among the detritus: tiny sandals and pants, a shirt displaying a cartoon tooth holding a toothbrush, a doll fashioned out of cloth scraps. In one underground prison, among a pile of papers, I found a doctor's note from 2009 recommending fresh air and fruit for six infants who were suffering from bronchitis. The commanding officer approved only the fruit. 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.' One of the earliest references to a child in the databases is to a 4-year-old boy named Shaheed Abdullah Ogalu. He was detained in May 2013 with his father, who was suspected to be a member of a militant Islamist group, the Nusra Front, that fought against the Syrian regime. The boy remained in prison for nearly a year before he was placed in the home of an Air Force Intelligence officer. Records show that, over time, the boy's name changed bit by bit, eventually becoming Abdulrahman al-Shaheed. What ultimately became of him is unclear. Certain cases were treated with a heightened level of secrecy. At least one entry listed the children's names in white text on a white background, meaning that they only became visible when a user searched for them. The case of 2-year-old Lotus Sami Bashwat, who was detained with her parents in July 2014, was designated with the word mahjub — 'hidden.' A note said that 'no inquiries can be made except by the branch head.' Lotus's father was transferred to military field court, known for sentencing thousands to death without due process, and her mother was sent to counterterrorism court, a newly established body for prosecuting Assad's political opponents. Lotus was placed in an orphanage. The regime sent children to at least nine care centers, six of which were part of SOS Children's Villages International, an organization based in Austria that claims to be the world's largest NGO supporting 'children and young people without parental care.' Today, SOS operates in 127 countries and brings in nearly $2 billion in revenue annually. SOS has been accused of playing a role in the forced disappearance of children before. In the 1980s, the U.S.-backed military of El Salvador kidnapped hundreds of children while attacking villages suspected of supporting a leftist insurgency. The children were placed in orphanages, including those run by SOS. Some were then transferred elsewhere and put up for international adoption. Hints of SOS's coordination with the Syrian regime began to surface as early as 2017, when a mother recently released from prison told an anti-Assad journalist that she had found her three children at an SOS orphanage. Then, days after the government collapsed, a Syrian man posted a video on Facebook publicly accusing SOS of assisting the regime in disappearing his sister's children. As rumors spread, SOS posted a vague statement on its website: 'We acknowledge the past concerns regarding children referred to care organizations, including SOS Children's Villages Syria, by the former government during the civil war,' it read. The statement made no mention of who these children were or anything about prisons, political detainees or the secret police. 'While in our care,' it continued, 'these children received support consistent with our principles of prioritizing safety and well-being.' SOS's international spokesman, Bertil Videt, told me that the organization 'did not intentionally contribute to the disappearance of any child, and we unequivocally disapprove of such practices.' But documents and interviews indicate that SOS accepted children delivered by the mukhabarat directly from its secret prisons. Then, as the secret police requested, the organization kept the children's presence secret. Among the few families who discovered the truth, some told me that when they came looking, SOS staff wouldn't admit to having their child relatives. I found several cases in which SOS staff refused to hand children over to parents or grandparents who had been released from detention without explicit permission from the mukhabarat. SOS started receiving the children of Syrian detainees in early 2013, but it wasn't until two years later that the Air Force Intelligence databases started to identify the organization by name. In August 2015, a log noted that two girls were to be placed in one of its facilities. Their names were Laila and Layan Ghbees. Laila and Layan were brought to SOS's three-story care center in a village called Qura al-Assad, some 12 miles west of Damascus. They were bathed, checked for lice and brought to their room, which they would be sharing with other children. There were around 100 kids in the orphanage, some who had been abused or abandoned, others whose parents had died or fallen ill. Laila knew she and her sister weren't orphans. They had relatives who could take care of them. She gave one of the caregivers her aunt's phone number and asked her to call it. The caregiver told her no one answered. Laila retreated into herself. For the first month, she hardly spoke. Layan woke up crying in the night and frequently wet the bed. Laila practiced playing chess, because some of the caregivers told her if she got good enough, she might meet the president and maybe he would grant her a wish. She told them she would ask him to let her parents out of prison, and they laughed awkwardly. SOS wanted her to forget about her family, Laila thought. She remembered what her mother told her — never forget your name. She knew her name was Laila Ghbees, not Laila Mosaab, even though that's how the adults wrote it. She knew her sister was Layan, even though they called her Layal. What Laila didn't know was that some of the other children at SOS had parents in secret prisons, too. In another SOS orphanage a few miles away, a boy named Oweis al-Abbar wrote the names of his family members in a notebook for his younger sister, who was just learning to read. A caregiver saw what he was doing, he recalled later, and ripped the page out and scolded him. The children's father was wanted for his opposition work. Perhaps that is why caregivers took pleasure in putting Syrian flags in the hands of Oweis and his younger siblings and filming them while they sang the nationalist anthem, 'God, Syria and Bashar.' Wissam al-Dali, a child psychiatrist who worked for SOS, received Oweis and his four siblings when they came from the Mezzeh airport prison, where they were held with their mother for six months. They 'were in a terrible state,' al-Dali told me. It was winter, and the two youngest, 4-month-old twins who were born in prison, were wearing nothing but cloth diapers. Oweis was scared and withdrawn, al-Dali said, traits she had often seen in the children of detainees. But she didn't try to talk to him about being separated from his family or about his experiences. 'Sometimes, if you open a wound and can't close it, you only increase the child's psychological problems,' she said. She didn't talk to Laila about such things either. More than a year after Laila arrived at SOS, a 9-month-old named Marwan Habeijan was placed in the facility. Laila liked caring for younger children, and she fed and played with Marwan and carried him around as if she were his mother. She had no idea that he was born in the Mezzeh airport prison or that her own mother, Omama, heard his cries down the hall from her cell during the first month of his life. Marwan was placed with SOS when his mother was transferred out of the prison to attend counterterrorism court. The court released her, but when she went to the orphanage, she was informed that only Air Force Intelligence could retrieve her baby, she later told Omama. Reluctantly, she went to a branch of the agency to request that Marwan be released to her. She was immediately thrown back in prison, where she remained for another three years. As Marwan grew older, he would not know his mother's face nor her name. The first person he would cry out for would be Laila. Around the same time as Marwan's arrival, an infant named Sham showed up in a room next to Laila's. She had no last name; nor did Nour, an older child she arrived with. Sham had scabies, which suggested she had come from the Syrian prison system, where the infestation was rampant. Laila grew attached to Sham, but eight months after she arrived, she was transferred to another orphanage called Lahn al-Hayat. SOS told me that Sham and Nour were of unknown parentage, but two orphans who grew up in Lahn al-Hayat recalled that a caregiver told them that Sham's mother was in prison. Then Sham and Nour were adopted, each by a separate family. Children of political prisoners were often moved among orphanages, and aside from the six facilities operated by SOS, there were at least three others around Damascus that the secret police used. I spoke to more than a dozen orphans who grew up at Lahn al-Hayat, and they confirmed that children of detainees began arriving in 2013. Several told me that these children were often kept in their own apartment, separate from the rest. 'They would wave to us from the windows when we were playing outside,' one orphan told me. 'Sometimes we would go to the windows and talk to them, but if the caregivers saw, they would yell at them and close the windows.' These children tended not to stay more than six months or so, she said. 'Vans with tinted windows would come and take them at night.' The Assad regime exerted control over all orphanages in Syria, but it ran Lahn al-Hayat directly. 'They talked about Bashar al-Assad and the Army, and that's it,' one former resident said. 'There is no phone. It's a prison.' The first lady, Asma al-Assad, treated the orphanage as her pet project. She visited frequently, and pictures of her smiling with Lahn al-Hayat orphans in her arms appeared in the Syrian papers. In the summer of 2013, she invited around a dozen children from the orphanage to help her make a Ramadan meal for people displaced by the war. When they finished cooking, several orphans told me, she announced that she had a surprise: The president himself entered the room, awkward and lanky. The children ran to him and screamed with delight. 'Did you just come out of prison?' a 6-year-old boy asked. He was new to the orphanage and the other children barely knew him. The president laughed. 'Who told you I was in prison?' One of the older children later asked the boy why he said that. 'I was in prison with Baba,' she recalled him saying. 'And Baba said when we get out, we're going to imprison Bashar.' Some of the children brought to Lahn al-Hayat were newborns. 'It seemed like every two or three days there was a new baby,' a caregiver who worked there from 2016 to 2019 told me. One infant was so new he still had the vernix on his skin. Officially, Lahn al-Hayat only accepted children of unknown parentage. The caregiver wondered: How could it be that they didn't know who any of these babies' mothers were? She suspected that some were born in prison. One day, she said, a 1-year-old boy was brought in. Her supervisor informed her that the boy had lost his family. 'I said I'd take his picture and try to find them,' she said. 'He told me, 'Don't you dare.'' The supervisor told her to give the boy a name so they could register him at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor. She chose Karam. 'I looked after him for two years, then they took him away,' she said. She pleaded with her bosses to leave him with her. 'I told them I would raise him. They gave him to a family in Hama and changed his name to Badr. I left the orphanage after that.' Most of the former Lahn al-Hayat residents I interviewed had no memories of their parents, so they were unsure whether they were orphans or the children of detainees, but some were haunted by faint recollections. Abbas Yassir, now 23, remembered coming back to the orphanage from school, ice cream in hand, when he was in third grade. A woman was waiting in front of the building. 'I'm your mother,' she said, and showed him a picture of himself when he was younger. 'Tomorrow we are going to come get you,' she promised, 'as soon as your father gets out of detention.' He waited for her the next day, but he never saw her again. For days after his family disappeared, Laila's uncle Abdulrahman was beside himself with grief. In addition to Laila, her sister and their parents, the secret police had also abducted Abdulrahman's wife, his mother, his mother-in-law and his infant son, Mohammed, who was just 4 days old. Abdulrahman hadn't been able to attend the birth. He knew he was wanted by the regime, and he didn't dare leave his home in eastern Ghouta. His wife, Iman, had given birth at a hospital in Damascus and planned to recover from her C-section at his parents' apartment in the city. She would return to eastern Ghouta through secret tunnels with the baby. A few days after the birth, Abdulrahman's father-in-law called him. He had stopped by the apartment, and no one was there. The whole place had been overturned. Abdulrahman panicked. Last he had heard, the baby was still in the hospital being monitored for neonatal hypoglycemia, so he asked a Red Crescent colleague in Damascus to check on him. As soon as the colleague arrived, Abdulrahman recalled, an officer advised him to leave before he was arrested. A few days later, Abdulrahman received a direct message on Facebook from an account set up by a member of the secret police. If he wanted to see his family again, it said, the rebels in eastern Ghouta would need to surrender 25 captives — regime officers and loyalists. 'Your wife's health is not good,' it read. Abdulrahman asked the local rebel leader, Zahran Alloush, to make the exchange, but Alloush offered nothing but empty condolences. Abdulrahman had an idea: Maybe if the regime thought he was dead, they would let his family go. He responded to the Facebook message: 'The owner of this account is dead and buried. Contact someone who can help you.' Then he sent a picture of himself to his friends, his face pale, vacant and streaked with blood, and they posted it on Facebook pages with captions extolling his martyrdom. The police didn't fall for it. An officer messaged him again. 'We know your whole story,' he wrote. 'Your relatives told us everything.' Weeks passed with no news. Then an officer who worked in the hospital started posting pictures of himself with a baby, whom Abdulrahman recognized as Mohammed from photos his wife had sent him. The officer said he had named the baby Ali. Abdulrahman was devastated by guilt. He wandered the war-ravaged streets of eastern Ghouta and cried alone in empty buildings. Once, he tried to walk to the front line to turn himself in to the regime, but his friends stopped him. They had seen him remain stoic through bombardment and chemical attacks, but now Abdulrahman seemed unable to bear the weight of daily existence. They found an enclosed garden for him to hide out in and supplied him with sedatives; he sat there day after day, month after month, without a word about his family. By this point in the war, Abdulrahman was not the only Syrian searching for disappeared children. In 2015, according to an Air Force Intelligence database, a Red Crescent employee discovered that his sister's children were at SOS. He showed up at the orphanage with their grandmother, but the mukhabarat ordered that the children 'should not be handed over under any circumstances.' Then they arrested the man for the 'heinous crime' of searching for his nieces and nephews and threw him in the Mezzeh airport prison. I also tracked down the uncle of a girl who, documents show, was placed in SOS by Air Force Intelligence in 2018. He told me that he and his wife searched for her in orphanages around Damascus, but when he went to SOS, he said, he couldn't get past the front door. 'My niece is in God's hands now,' he told his wife. 'When she gets older, she'll search for her family.' As they walked away, he recalled, an SOS employee stopped him and said, 'Listen, if she were here, she'd be better off than if she was with you.' It went on like this, with each family making their own isolated attempts, caught between the desire to find their young ones and the fear of asking too many questions. One man, an appliance importer and philanthropist named Khalid Marashli, pushed things further. In 2013, a volunteer with Marashli's charity came to him with some startling news: Her sister-in-law, a national chess champion named Rania al-Abbasi, had been taken from her home by the mukhabarat, along with her husband and six children. None of their loved ones knew where they were or what they had been charged with. The sister-in-law asked Marashli, who had connections to regime officials, to help figure out what had happened to them. Marashli agreed to look into it. He convinced some low-level intelligence officers to bring prisoners to his charity when they were being released, so he could help them get back on their feet. 'I'd give a donation basket to the prisoner,' Marashli told me. 'It was charity! But at the same time, I'd get information from him.' Through these sources and other government contacts, Marashli heard that children of detainees were being placed in orphanages run by SOS Children's Villages. Marashli knew that if he wanted to get inside, he would need a cover story. In late 2016, Marashli told me, he got permission from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor for his charity to throw a party for children at an SOS orphanage in Saboura, a few miles from the one where Laila and Layan were being held. During the party, caregivers gave Marashli's assistant a tour of the orphanage, and she noticed that some children were in their rooms, away from the celebration. Staff told them that photography was prohibited, but they discreetly took pictures with their phones and posted them on Facebook pages devoted to missing children. A family got in touch with Marashli to say they recognized one of the children, a boy of around 10 with thick eyebrows and buck teeth. They showed up at SOS to collect the boy, and Marashli posted pictures of their reunion on Facebook. 'Great joy for this family and the child, whose family thought the war took him to some unknown fate,' he wrote. Shortly afterward, Marashli was brought in for questioning by Military Intelligence. He recalled that an officer put him in solitary confinement and told him he was going to be executed. Several hours later, the officer sat him in a room, gave him coffee and a cigarette, and inquired after his son, who was then 16. 'How is Qusay?' Marashli recalled him asking. 'Listen, Khaled. You are a good man, but you need to stop this research. You are not only involving yourself. You are involving your children. Go back to your charity, go back to helping people, but stay away from the orphanages. That's our work. If you get near them again, who knows what will happen.' In prison, Omama thought about her daughters every day. Guards told her they had been taken to her relatives, but she didn't believe them. She was in a cell with 20 other women, including her brother Abdulrahman's wife, Iman, who didn't know where her baby, Mohammed, was, either. Iman pined for a child she didn't have the chance to know. Omama and Iman feared for their children, but they were grateful the children were not with them in prison. They could have ended up like the 10-year-old boy in solitary confinement down the hall, whose parents had been executed and who was now beaten when he spent too much time in the bathroom. Two other boys had been locked up with their mother and grandmother ever since their father defected from the Air Force in 2012. Omama could sometimes hear conversations between the youngest boy and the guards, and it was clear how little he understood about the outside world. Once, a guard showed him money through his cell window and he didn't know what it was. Even fruit was foreign to him. Omama and her cellmates lived on small portions of bread, potatoes and bundles of boiled chard, their leaves caked in mud and worms. Each prisoner got one boiled egg per week; if there were any pregnant women in their cell, which there often were, many of the other women would split theirs with her. Some, especially the younger detainees, would flirt with the guards and entice them to bring treats like gum or cookies or soap to wash their clothes. One woman was particularly good at this game; she won a guard's affection and asked him where her children were. He told her they were probably at SOS Children's Villages. As the months passed, more and more women learned that their children were in orphanages, hidden from the world as they were. Many of the women, including Omama, were being held as hostages, either to pressure their husbands or brothers to turn themselves in or to be exchanged for regime officers held by the rebels. That meant they had some leverage — the regime wanted them to stay alive. Through a prison orderly, the women passed messages from cell to cell and decided to go on a hunger strike. When the day came, the prisoners screamed and shouted, pounded the doors and walls and refused to let any food into the cells. After several days, the head of the prison came to talk to them. He told them to be patient: Wasn't the Prophet Joseph imprisoned, and didn't God get him out? The women told him they wanted their families to know where they were, and they wanted to see their children. Some days later, guards called out the numbers of several prisoners, including Omama's. An officer took her to a room, where she sat and waited. Suddenly, the door opened and, like a dream, her girls were standing there. 'Mama!' Laila screamed. She leaped onto Omama's lap and touched her face. 'Mama, I want to look at your face as much as I can until they come and take me back,' Laila said. She glanced down at her mother's sleeve. It looked different than it had when she left the prison. Then, it fit snugly around her mother's wrist. Now it hung wide and loose. Layan stood there, stiff. It had been a year and a half since she had seen her mother; she was now 5. Omama pulled her onto her lap alongside Laila and kissed her hands and feet. Layan looked away. 'Don't you remember me?' Omama said. 'I'm your mother. Look at me! Talk to me!' A female guard standing in the room started to cry. Then, not five minutes after their meeting began, she told Omama the visit was over and led the girls away. Back in their group cell, some women were encouraged by the visits. Others were disturbed. Iman didn't recognize the face of her newborn in the toddler they brought to her. She thought she was being tricked, so she rejected him. Not long after the protest, one woman from their cell was released in a prisoner exchange. She recovered her child from SOS, then contacted Iman's sister. Iman's son was there, the woman said, and she shared the number of a caregiver who worked in the orphanage. Abdulrahman, who had come to believe his family was dead, was overwhelmed with relief. The caregiver said it would be impossible for his family to come get his son, but in exchange for $300, she sent him two photos of the boy — pudgy-faced and curly-haired. Another year went by, and Laila's image of her mother slowly faded in her mind. SOS moved her, Layan and other children of detainees to a different orphanage in Saboura, the one Khaled Marashli had visited. This orphanage was more restrictive; they didn't allow trips to parks or outside activities. The girls' cousin Mohammed, who had been brought to visit the prison at the same time, was eventually placed there with them, and he stuck by Laila. He slept in her bed, but she often lay awake at night. She felt herself transforming into an angry, bitter 10-year-old. She started to withdraw from friends and lash out at random. In prison, meanwhile, the days grew colder and shorter, then hotter and longer. Women came and went, and those who remained rarely knew whether the others had been freed, sent to some other secret lockup or killed. Omama tried to resist the pull of despair. She diligently picked lice out of their clothes and blankets, and she spent days sewing a letter to her children into a scrap of cloth. But the facade of optimism always broke. She knew the idea that a letter would get to her family was a hopeless fantasy, so she tore it up before she finished. It was hard for Omama to know what was breaking down faster, her soul or her body. In the midst of a deep depression, she got hepatitis, and was forced to isolate for a month in solitary confinement. She recovered, but the thought of enduring another day became increasingly burdensome. Red, black and blue spots appeared all over her as she grew anemic from malnutrition. She was taken to a military hospital, where she received a blood transfusion while shackled on the floor. In late 2017, Omama and her relatives were transferred to Military Intelligence Branch 215, where the chess champion Rania al-Abbasi is believed to have been sent and where thousands of others had been tortured to death. Their cell had no ventilation, and their health worsened. Omama lost all hope and fear. She shouted at guards and covered the air-conditioning unit the officers used to freeze the prisoners; she persuaded her cellmates to refuse to take their medications until they were given lice shampoo. Every day, she made trouble. Then she cut herself and wrote the names of her children on her arms in blood. An interrogator came to ask her what was going on, and she told him to kill her. Just wait a few days, he said. Her family was on the negotiators' list for a prisoner exchange. In March 2018, nearly three years after their arrests, Omama and the rest of her family were brought to a checkpoint in rebel territory and released in exchange for captured regime soldiers. An officer drove Omama and Iman to SOS, where Laila ran to her mother and hugged her tightly. Layan and Mohammed stood at a distance. Layan, who was then 7, started to cry. 'I don't want to go!' she screamed, clinging to her caregiver, Rasha. 'I want Mama Rasha!' Rasha picked her up, set her in the car and closed the door. As they drove away, Omama tried to soothe Layan, and Iman tried to calm Mohammed, but the only person they would respond to was Laila. In its public statements since the regime collapsed, SOS has avoided explicitly acknowledging that its staff knew the organization was accepting children who had been taken from political prisoners. 'The fact of the matter is that it wasn't clear why the children were separated' from their families, Angela Rosales, who was then the interim chief executive of SOS, told me in February. But the documents are clear: One memo from the ministry to SOS in 2014 stated that five children were being referred under orders from Air Force Intelligence's interrogation division, 'in accordance with the national interest.' In another document marked 'top secret,' Air Force Intelligence notified the ministry that it had gone to SOS and picked up one of the children it had deposited there. 'The context was a very complicated one,' Rosales conceded. 'The regime was very controlling. Lots of people were very, very scared. The staff were members of local communities, and they were putting their lives at risk.' Rather than distancing itself, though, SOS sought closer ties to the regime. In 2016, it appointed a close friend of the Assad family, Samar Daboul, as head of its Syria operations. Samar was the daughter of Deeb Daboul, a key figure in the Assads' rise to power and the head of the presidential office for five decades. Samar's brother, Salim Daboul, was a mogul with business ties to the Syrian state. SOS's international office declined my request to interview Samar. In May, she resigned. A spokesman for SOS acknowledged to me that local staff members started to raise concerns to its international offices in 2017, but it wasn't until the following year that the organization stopped accepting the children of political prisoners. In a statement on its website, SOS claims it took 'decisive action in 2018 to halt the forced placements of children into our care without proper documentation.' But this decision coincided with a general downsizing of its Syria operations because of changes in funding, and the organization neither conducted an internal investigation nor publicized what the regime was doing. For the next six years, through the end of the war, the mukhabarat continued to funnel children into other orphanages, and SOS kept its secret. Earlier this year, amid growing criticism, SOS conducted an internal review, which concluded that between 2013 and 2018, at least 139 'children without proper documentation' were placed in its custody by Syrian security services. It is only aware of 34 being reunited with their families. All but one of the remaining 105 were handed back over to the authorities, and SOS says it doesn't know where they were taken. 'We recognize that, despite our best intentions, not all decisions made during this time met the high standards to which we hold ourselves,' its most recent statement reads. The SOS spokesman told me there are currently two external investigations underway, which the organization hopes will 'provide more insight into the situation at the time.' In July, the new Syrian government detained the former directors of several orphanages and the former ministers of social affairs and labor Kinda al-Shammat and Reema al-Qadari for questioning over their suspected role in the forcible disappearance of children. 'Their signatures are on official documents related to the disappearance of children that came from security branches and even the transfer of them to people's homes for adoption,' said Raghda Zedan, the head of the new government's investigative committee. (No charges have yet been filed.) Among the documents I obtained were signed directives from three other former ministers of social affairs and labor — Salwa Abdullah, Mohammed Seif al-Din and Louai Emad al-Din al-Munajjid — ordering orphanages to take children of political prisoners and conceal their identities. None of them have yet been questioned by the Syrian authorities. Nor have three former governors of Rural Damascus, Alaa Munir Ibrahim, Moataz Abu al-Nasser Jamran and Safwan Suleiman Abu Saada, whose signatures appear on similar communications. Samer Qurabi, a spokesman for the committee, told me that SOS's Daboul is considered a suspect, but like others connected to the regime, she was no longer in Syria; she had fled to the United Arab Emirates. The committee has compiled the names of at least 314 children of detainees who were placed in orphanages. Zedan told me that witness testimony they have recently taken suggests that there may be more cases: The records they have are incomplete, and some orphanages tampered with their own files in an effort to hide their complicity. She suspects that many of the children who went missing may have never passed through orphanages. The committee has received reports that children were also abducted at checkpoints run by foreign militias fighting on behalf of the Assad regime. 'Maybe they were sent outside the country,' Zedan said. 'Maybe they were adopted within these militias.' It's not yet clear how many children are missing in total, but based on the scores of parents who have come to them, it could be much higher than the number of cases they have identified so far. The government's investigation has confirmed that some children of detainees had their identities changed, Zedan said, but how many is unclear. The committee has not yet issued a finding about whether SOS engaged in the practice. One of the databases I acquired references a memo from the head of the Air Force Intelligence interrogation branch from December 2014, nearly two years after SOS began accepting children of detainees. He recommended that four children held at the Mezzeh airport prison be placed in SOS 'under their real names' because he suspected that giving them 'fictitious names' could draw unwanted attention. The recommendation raised a question: Why would Air Force Intelligence specify that these children keep their names unless there were others placed in SOS who did not? SOS's international spokesman, Bertil Videt, told me that because security forces did not provide legal identification for the children, it is 'impossible to confirm whether all names were accurate.' Videt insisted, however, that SOS 'was never instructed to change or create names for children in our care.' Yet the official records leave room for doubt. A letter from SOS to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor in 2013, asked how the organization should register the children placed in its care by the security services. The ministry responded that it should 'follow the same procedures in registering children of unknown parentage' used by the government-run orphanage that later became Lahn al-Hayat. Nine of the 14 people I interviewed who grew up there told me their identities were changed. One of them, a young man named Ala Rajub, had documents showing that in 2013, when he was 12, the Interior Ministry invented new names for his parents and 'corrected' his surname to Naseef. 'I asked why they did that, but no one would answer me,' Rajub told me. After the regime fell, he found his some of his family members. Twenty-five-year-old Obada Hassan told me that years after he was placed in the orphanage with his brother and sister, he was told they weren't his siblings after all, and each was issued a different surname. Earlier this year, Hassan and his brother took a DNA test that proved what they had known all along — the regime had attempted to sever them from each other and from their pasts. Many children at Lahn al-Hayat had their surnames changed when they reached the age of eligibility for conscription into the military. Syrian law exempted children of unknown parentage from service, but a number of those I interviewed said they were told that the law didn't apply to them. 'As your country served you, you must serve your country,' the co-director of Lahn al-Hayat, Neda al-Ghabra, told them. Al-Ghabra 'had a strong relationship to Asma al-Assad,' Qurabi said. He believed that the orphanage forced orphans into the army 'in order to ingratiate themselves to the regime.' Twenty-three-year-old Abdullah Badra told me he tried to escape service, but he was caught and brought to Sednaya prison, where he was accused of being a rebel fighter and tortured. He told his interrogator he was an orphan from Lahn al-Hayat. 'You are a terrorist like your father,' the officer responded. Badra didn't know who his father was. Did the mukhabarat? The government's investigative committee has only recently begun the enormous effort of trying to locate missing children. The fact that so many of the children were infants when they were separated from their families makes tracing particularly challenging. 'There are children we've met who were raised by foster parents but don't know who their original families are,' Zedan told me. 'With some families, it's clear how they got their foster children, but there are others who need to be investigated.' After hundreds of children were abducted and given up for adoption by military regimes in Argentina and El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s, DNA databases were set up with the help of international teams of forensic anthropologists and scientists. Families with missing relatives could submit DNA samples, and swab kits were sent around the world to adults who wondered if they might have been abducted as children. DNA testing would be helpful in Syria, Zedan said, but without international support, the country doesn't currently have the capability. While families in Syria search for their loved ones, SOS and other orphanages that coordinated with the Assad regime continue to operate there. When the Ghbees family was reunited, Omama was determined to take her children somewhere the Assad regime could not reach them. She and Mosaab found their teenage sons, Omar and Asem, and the whole family walked over mountains, through forests and across the border into Turkey. They enrolled Laila and Layan in school and had another child — a boy named Ahmed — but Omama still didn't feel secure. Last year, anti-Syrian pogroms swept the country, and the windows of the shop where Mosaab worked were smashed. Omar was working as a translator in a hospital, and one day, a Turkish man accused him of staring at his wife and beat him up. Then, miraculously, an application they filed in 2021 came through: They had been granted refugee status in the United States. They flew from Istanbul to Boston last August. For two months, a Catholic charity put them up in a hotel next to a freeway on-ramp in rural Massachusetts. The nearest place to buy groceries was a Walmart four miles away, and the only public transportation was a bus that came in the morning and returned in the evening. Mosaab walked there and back, despite his aching legs. They had hurt ever since he was tortured in prison, when they swelled to twice their size. Mosaab was the type to carry his burden quietly, but there were images that would never leave him, like the man officers left to die in his cell after an interrogation, naked and bleeding from his head. Or the time a man threw up blood until he died, and officers made two prisoners write a sworn statement that he had choked on his food. Now, he and Omama were focused on the mundane struggles of life as refugees in America: surviving on SNAP benefits, trying to learn English from YouTube and figuring out how to secure housing without a credit score. As they searched for a place to settle down, an administration came to power that started to disappear people, especially immigrants like them, using masked police. Still, they were committed to giving America a try. Syria's future was unpredictable; the children needed to be in school, and they had to pay off a debt for their plane tickets. Sometimes, they called to check in on Iman and Abdulrahman. The couple barely discussed her experience in prison, or his outside. For a few months after Iman got out, she would ask her son, Mohammed, then 2 years old, about his time in the orphanage, but before long, she stopped bringing it up. Eventually, he forgot about it entirely. Mosaab and Omama eventually found an apartment in Worcester, and in February I went to visit them. We sat on the floor of their unfurnished living room; Mosaab offered me Nescafé, and Omama, wearing a gray manto and a hijab, began narrating her story. Over our many hours of conversation, her voice cracked only once — when she recounted telling Laila, in prison, that she and her sister were going to be taken away. 'I didn't know whether to cry or steel myself in front of my daughter so that she stayed strong,' she said. We spoke about the women and children she met in prison, many of whom I knew only through the cold, bureaucratic language of intelligence files. I explained to Omama and Mosaab that it was through such files that I first learned about their family. When I showed them what I had found, Omama said it was the only evidence they had seen that they were ever in prison. During our conversation, Laila and Layan came home from school, backpacks hanging from their shoulders and dusty-rose and brown hijabs wrapped tightly around their heads. Laila, 18 years old and a senior in high school, sat next to her mother and jumped in occasionally to offer details about her experience at the orphanage. Layan, 14, sat quietly across the room and often stared off blankly as her mother or sister spoke. 'When Layan was younger, her personality was stronger,' Omama said. 'Now she's more reserved. Laila is the opposite. Her experience made her bolder.' For a long time, Omama said, there was a distance among members of the family. 'There was less affection. My daughters had been in a different environment than the one they knew with me. My sons had become strangers to me. They'd lived though extremely difficult circumstances in eastern Ghouta. In the absence of their family, they'd come to rely on friends. Then those friends were killed in front of them. We had to heal our wounds together. We had to get to know each other all over again.' Laila told me she didn't know how to feel when she left SOS. 'I couldn't tell the difference between sadness and happiness,' she said. Now that she was older, she could see how malleable she was. Her identity was only just beginning to develop while she was at the orphanage. She remembered a time, not long before they got out, that the staff gathered everyone in the common room to watch the news about the rebels capitulating in eastern Ghouta, where she was from. 'It was like a victory celebration,' she told me. 'The caregivers were happy, and so was I. I was just like them.' She wondered what would have happened if she hadn't gotten out while she was still a child. She had seen posts on social media about orphans having their names changed and being sent to the army. 'I could have killed innocent people,' she said. 'I was brainwashed.' I read Laila the names of several dozen children I had found in the records who were placed in SOS while she was there, but whom I hadn't been able to trace. Some she recognized. Most she didn't. She went through SOS's Syrian Facebook page and showed me pictures of kids she knew. None of their names matched the records I had. Laila scrolled past posts in which SOS claimed to help children 'grow up safely with a feeling of security and belonging.' She recalled that, when they took group photos, the caregivers told her to take Layan and step out of the frame. The only image she had seen of herself at SOS was a shot in a promotional video posted on YouTube in which she appeared in the background. She wanted to show it to me, but it seemed to have been deleted. There was no trace of her anywhere. Additional reporting by Mohammed al-Shebli. Read by Malcolm Hillgartner Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck and Krish Seenivasan Engineered by Quinton Kamara
