Bissan Fakih is a Middle East Campaigner with Amnesty International based in Beirut. In this piece, she shares reflections from an Amnesty International trip to Damascus – the organization’s first official access to the country since the uprising began in 2011.
In the middle of a crowded square in central Damascus, dozens of women stood clutching framed photos of their loved ones to their chest. They had gathered in Marjeh Square to demand justice for family members who had been forcibly disappeared under the brutal rule of former President Bashar al-Assad. I stood at the edge of the crowd close to the street where cars were whizzing past, interviewing a young woman – our conversation punctuated by the sounds of car horns. A taxi slowed down near us and the driver, an older man with a sun-weathered face, leaned out the window waving urgently. “Ayham Makki!” he yelled frantically, the cars behind him honking at him to move. “Ayham Makki!” He pointed to my notebook, indicating I should write it down. “Is he disappeared?” I asked. “Yes, disappeared. My brother-in-law,” he said. I wrote down the name, lifting my notebook for him to see. He nodded his solemn approval and drove off.
I turned back to the young woman I was interviewing. Her name is Sondos Mohammad Hassan. Her father had been forcibly disappeared 10 years ago. She described how he had been seized by Syrian government forces during Ramadan: “We were all home, having Suhoor together. They came and took him from the house.”
“I came for justice today,” she told me. “There will be no civil peace without justice, without accountability. The ones who abducted people, they must be held accountable.” She paused. “Some people are still searching for their family members,” she added quietly. “I’m not searching anymore… but some people are.”
In the space of a week while we were in Syria, there were three sit-ins and vigils for the families of the disappeared in Damascus and its suburbs alone. The many tens of thousands of disappeared, for so long absent, are today being made visible, remembered and fought for by their loved ones.
Much of the ousted Assad government’s power was built on arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance – a fate so terrifying that anyone would need to think twice before opposing its rule. Syria was ruled with fear, and the price of dissent was often vanishing without a trace.
More than 100,000 people are estimated to have been disappeared in Syria since 2011, when the Syrian uprising began – the vast majority by the Assad government. Young men mostly, but also some women and some children, were plucked off the streets or taken from their homes and disappeared off the face of the earth. Some for their vocal opposition to the Assad government, some for speaking to journalists or distributing humanitarian aid, some because informants had reported them as opposing the government, be this true or not, and others seized randomly at checkpoints.
When Assad’s government fell on 8 December 2024, families waited with bated breath, hoping their loved ones would emerge from the labyrinth of notorious underground detention centers where so many had been tortured and hidden. The vast majority didn’t.
Our team travelled to Daraya, which became famous for being a bastion of nonviolent protest in 2011 – its youth, nonviolent leaders, held up flowers in the face of security forces who were opening live fire at protests in the country. Daraya faced the wrath of the Assad government, both for its symbolism and for its proximity to the capital, the center of power. Many of its youth were forcibly disappeared. Later, some had their bodies returned, bearing marks indicating they had been tortured to death. For some whose bodies were never recovered, their families have accepted they had likely died in detention, but without answers to where their bodies could be.
In Daraya, Abu Ammar, a member of the town’s local council, told us: “The night of the liberation [8 December 2024] we returned to Daraya. In Damascus, everyone was celebrating. But there was no celebration in Daraya because people were expecting us to return from displacement [and bring] the missing. Around 2,700 people are missing or disappeared, detention cases. These are the ones we documented but there are more.”
In Yarmouk and in Deir Assafir, in Eastern Ghouta, families of the disappeared gathered in Truth Tents – a grassroots initiative across Syria where families are gathering in tents demanding the truth for what happened to their loved ones. Looking at the sheer numbers in the Truth Tent in Deir Assafir was breathtaking. Hundreds and hundreds of people were seated, carrying framed photos of their loved ones.
One man holding a paper to his chest, asked us to film him. In neat handwriting in blue ink, he had listed the names of 10 men from his family that had been forcibly disappeared. Three of them were his sons, said Omar Ahmad Jalloud. Ahmad, Mohammad and Ali all disappeared on the same day on 30 August 2012.
In Yarmouk, a young man named Ziad Amayre told me how 10 of his relatives had been disappeared from the area of Tadamon. I assumed he was counting distant relatives in his extended family. But my heart sank when he listed them: “My mother. My four sisters. My brother-in-law, the husband of one of my sisters. Their two children. Two aunts.” They had all been disappeared together.
Back in Marjeh Square, people kept coming up to the families holding up photos – and asking – “who do you represent?” “Who are you doing this sit-in for?” “Is it the Kurdish disappeared?” “The disappeared by the regime?” The family associations were adamant in insisting on inclusivity and unity, despite what seemed like the ever-present news that Syria was fragmenting or falling apart. “For all of the disappeared, all of them from all sides”, the families would respond.
So much needs to be done to achieve justice, and families of the disappeared are making the to-do list clear:
Mass graves need to be excavated forensically, witnesses need to be interviewed, evidence needs to be preserved and sifted through. Survivors of horrific detention and disappearance need to be supported and provided reparation. And those who caused this unspeakable horror and caused families to mourn loved ones gone missing during Syria’s war must be held accountable. The new Syrian authorities need to guarantee that the past is the past and these violations will never occur again.
Despite working on the issue of enforced disappearances in Syria for more than a decade, and knowing the estimated numbers, I still left Syria shocked and weighed down by the sheer scale of people affected. I was flipping through my notebook back in Beirut, and I saw that I had scrawled down a note: “I don’t think I’ve been in a room in Syria where there weren’t survivors of detention and families of the disappeared”. Even far away from our work, it was prevalent, this heartbreak, everywhere, seemingly carried by all people. The Amnesty International movement documented Saydnaya’s slaughterhouse and the pain caused by the disappearances of Assad’s government and Syria’s many armed groups, and campaigned for the release of people detained. We stood in solidarity with the families of the disappeared. And now, as the families fight for truth, justice and reparations, we must listen and support them again.
One activist working on organizing the Truth Tents, whose own brother was forcibly disappeared, said: “There should never be a government ever again that can disappear you behind the sun.”
Read Amnesty International’s new briefing on families of Syria’s disappeared – their fight for justice and their urgent demands.
