A family's decade-long search for children stolen by Assad's regime

Mint

11 hours ago

DAMASCUS—The resemblance was striking. The boy in the photograph had the family's same thick eyebrows and looked about 17, the same age Ahmed Yaseen would now be—if he was still alive.
Could it be him, his aunt Naila al-Abbasi wondered? More than 12 years had passed since the boy and his five sisters had disappeared, after Syrian military intelligence detained them and their parents in the early years of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
Six months after rebels toppled the Assad regime in a seismic moment for the Middle East, many Syrians are still searching for missing relatives, including an estimated 3,700 children.
An investigation by The Wall Street Journal, based on secret documents from the Assad regime and conversations with former detainees and corroborated by Syria's current government, found that at least 300 children like Ahmed were forcibly separated from their families and placed in orphanages after being detained during the country's civil war.
'He looks very similar," said al-Abbasi, who had scrolled through hundreds of photographs on Syrian orphanages' websites before finding this one. 'The nose, even the mouth."
More than 112,000 Syrians arrested since the start of an uprising against Assad in 2011 remain unaccounted for, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. That figure is comparable to the number of people who have disappeared in Mexico's drug wars, though Syria's population is only a fifth the size.
Children are often used to punish or pressure opponents in war. Russia has taken thousands of children from Ukraine. Decades after Argentina's military dictatorship ended, families are still finding missing relatives seized as newborns and adopted by military couples.
Dealing with this brutal legacy is a crucial challenge for the new Syria, whose government, led by an Islamist group that cut its past ties with al Qaeda, is trying to assert its control over a country riven by sectarian tensions. Syria's presidency said in May that it will set up commissions to probe crimes committed under Assad, compensate victims and trace the missing.
But it is a huge and complex task for a government beset with other pressing issues, including a battered economy.
Failure to address the issue of missing people 'could contribute to cycles of violence," said Kathryne Bomberger, director general of the International Commission on Missing Persons.
At the time of their abduction, the Yaseen children were living in the relatively affluent Dumar neighborhood of Damascus. Their mother, Rania al-Abbasi, was a national chess champion who ran a successful dental clinic.
In photographs Rania posted on social media, the children are pictured smiling alongside SpongeBob and Spider-Man performers during a trip to Syria's coast. Other pictures show Ahmed on a playground swing; wearing a cardboard crown; and with his hair gelled neatly into a crest.
When the uprising against Assad began, relatives urged them to leave Syria. The family had a history with the regime: Rania's father—a prominent religious scholar—had spent 13 years in prison under Assad's father, President Hafez al-Assad, because of his oppositional views. Islamists were often considered a threat by the secular Assad regime.
After Rania's father was released, the family went into exile in Saudi Arabia, where Ahmed was born. But his parents wanted to raise him and his sisters where they had roots and returned to Damascus in 2009.
'She thought she was safe," said Rania's younger sister, Naila, a doctor who remained in Saudi Arabia with much of the family. Between six children and work, Rania had no time to get involved in political activity or protests, even if she supported their demands.
But she did give generously to Syrians displaced by the government's crackdown. And her father, from abroad, had voiced support for the uprising. It was enough to bring the regime's fist down on the family.
On March 9, 2013, Syrian intelligence agents came for Rania's husband, Abdurrahman Yaseen. Two days later, they returned and took Ahmed and the other children, between 1 and 14 years old, along with their mother.
The father's fate eventually came to light in a cache of 50,000 images smuggled out of Syria by a forensic photographer who defected in 2013. The grim catalog contained photographs of some 6,786 Syrians who had died in custody, some with their eyes gouged out. Among the images was one of Abdurrahman.
Still, there was no sign of Ahmed, his siblings or Rania.
The strongest lead came from another mother who had been detained with her children the year after al-Abbasi and her family. Freed in a prisoner exchange in 2017, Rasha al-Sharbaji revealed that security services had seized her five children and placed them in an orphanage run by SOS Children's Villages, an international charity with several locations in Syria. She said she recovered her children from the charity after being released.
Asking around, relatives learned that four sisters with age gaps similar to four of the Yaseen girls were living in one of the centers of SOS Children's Villages. But orphanage staff were too afraid to speak, according to family members, and a lawyer appointed to ask the authorities received no answers.
After the regime crumbled in December, thousands of prisoners stumbled out of fetid prison cells as Syrians celebrated in the streets.
Scattered abroad, members of the extended family mobilized a fresh search, including approaching SOS Children's Villages again.
In a statement, its Syria operation acknowledged it had received 139 children 'without proper documentation" between 2014 and 2018, when it demanded the authorities stop placing such cases in its care.
Most of those children were returned to authorities under the former regime, SOS Children's Villages said, citing an audit into past records. The Journal couldn't determine what happened to them later.
'We regret the untenable situation we found ourselves in when receiving the children and unequivocally disapprove of such practices," it said. The group said it had taken steps to ensure it didn't happen again.
The organization has since filed a claim with Damascus's public prosecutor to open an official investigation into the Yaseen children's disappearance. It said there was no record they had ever been placed in SOS Children's Villages' care.
The family expanded their search to other orphanages.
Baraa al-Ayoubi, director of the al-Rahma orphanage in Damascus, said Syrian security agents had placed 100 children of detainees in her care over the course of the war, but none of them belonged to Rania.
The orphanage was forbidden to disclose details about the children, even to their relatives, when Assad was in power, she said. Eventually, all the children were handed back to their parents, she said.
Records in the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, which has authority over orphanages, confirmed the practice was official. Tucked away in bulging files were secret communiqués from Syria's intelligence services, seen by a Journal reporter, instructing the ministry to transfer detainees' children to orphanages.
An investigation launched by the ministry found a document indicating that SOS Children's Villages had returned the Yaseen children to the former regime. But the family wasn't convinced the document, which wasn't on official letterhead, was real. SOS Children's Villages declined to confirm whether it was authentic.
A search of the ministry's archives identified about 300 children who were transferred to four orphanages in Damascus, said spokesman Saad al-Jaberi.
But many documents have likely been lost, Jaberi said, and the answers that relatives of the 3,700 missing children are seeking may lie elsewhere.
'There are many mass graves," he said.
As the search foundered, the children's aunt, Naila, traveled to Damascus from Saudi Arabia, returning to her home country for the first time since before the uprising.
Opening the door to her sister's apartment, it was as though time had stopped on the day the family was taken 12 years earlier. Dust-covered school books were stacked neatly on the dining-room table. The refrigerator's contents had rotted beyond recognition.
In a notebook belonging to the second-eldest child, there were declarations of love for Syria. 'We'll stay in Syria until you leave, Bashar," wrote Najah Yaseen, who was 11 at the time the family was detained.
A cigarette butt on a tray was the only apparent trace left by the security men.
Another document, collected by civil-society groups from Syria's air force intelligence, indicated that Rania had been transferred to another branch of the security apparatus in 2014. There was no reference to the children, suggesting they might have been separated by then.
The family could only assume she had been killed, but they wouldn't give up on the children.
Family members studied photographs on orphanage websites and official channels of the former Syrian government. A girl in a promotional video for SOS Children's Villages strongly resembled one of the Yaseen girls, Dima, who would now be 25. SOS Children's Villages insisted she was someone else.
Family members weren't sure they would recognize the children today, so a family friend used artificial intelligence to visualize what they might look like now.
After seeing the boy who resembled Ahmed on the website of Lahn al-Hayat, another orphanage, the family tracked him down. His name was Omar Abdurrahman—not Ahmed Yaseen—but other children who grew up in the orphanage said their identities had been changed. Orphanage administrators declined to comment.
He couldn't remember anything about his life before the orphanage. But maybe the trauma of being detained at the age of 5 had erased his memories—and the likeness was undeniable.
While family members waited for a DNA test to settle any doubt, Omar began referring to the missing boy's aunts as his own. When he saw a photograph of Ahmed, he recognized himself.
'That's me when I was young," he said.
Weeks went by before a laboratory finally processed the test. The result came back negative.
The boy remained at the orphanage. For the Abbasi family, the search continues.
Write to Isabel Coles at [e-mail]