DAMASCUS and BARGAH, Syria—Hassan al-Abassi remembers his sister Rania al-Abassi as a woman of quiet brilliance. A dentist in Damascus, she and her husband, Abdul Rahman Yasin, set up a successful clinic in 2008 after returning from a comfortable life in Saudi Arabia.
Rania had a mind for strategy, an ability to predict moves well before they unfolded. These qualities made her a formidable chess player, earning her the title of Syria’s national chess champion from a young age.
Yet, when the regime of former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad came for her and her family in 2013, she did not anticipate it.
On March 7, they arrested her husband. Two days later, they came for Rania and all six of her children—Dima, Entisar, Najah, Alaa, Ahmed, and Layan, aged 2 to 14. Rania was not politically active, according to Hassan.
“Rania understood the system,” he said. “She was a busy mom and a doctor; she didn’t have time and knew very well that she could hurt her family if she was involved in politics.” But Hassan, who now lives in Canada, suspects that the family was arrested because Rania’s husband gave financial help to displaced families that the regime believed had ties to the revolution.
For the better part of the past decade, Hassan has remotely led a search network made up of lawyers and family members inside Syria in an effort to obtain and piece together fragments of information about the disappearance of his sister and her children. He learned that Abdul Rahman was tortured to death in Sednaya, Syria’s most notorious prison, his fate later confirmed by the leaked Caesar files in 2015.
Other than a 2016 document that showed that Rania had been moved to a new prison, Hassan didn’t find much about her. She didn’t resurface after the Assad regime fell in early December, either. He believes that she is likely dead, but he hasn’t given up hope that her children are still alive—even if he hasn’t managed to track them down.
Rania’s children were not alone. They were among what could be thousands of children of detainees—some of whom were born in prison—who had been placed in orphanages as part of a regime-sponsored separation policy that many fear resulted in human trafficking and illegal adoptions.
“Orphanages in Syria have never been just charities—they have always had a political purpose,” said Zeina Ismail-Allouche, an international child protection expert who suspects that many Syrian children could have been put up for international adoption or even trafficked for sex or organ harvesting.
Extended family members such as Hassan, desperate to find missing children, knocked on orphanage doors searching for answers, only to be turned away. Now, Hassan explained in a February interview, with Syria’s caretaker government slow to investigate, crucial evidence may be lost or destroyed—along with any trace of his sister’s children.
“Any place that held the kids was cooperating with the regime and should provide answers to the families,” Hassan said.
A portrait of Salama al-Jbawi in Baragah on Jan. 24.
Sokayna Salama al-Jbawi experienced the regime’s separation policy firsthand.
On a quiet Wednesday morning in the fall of 2018, as she prepared breakfast in her home in the village of Bargah—located in the countryside near the southern city of Daraa—Jbawi’s house was suddenly surrounded by armed men.
She was arrested alongside her husband and her daughter, Heba. The charge was clear yet baseless: terrorism.
Their crime was sharing a surname with Jbawi’s brother-in-law, who was a part of the Free Syrian Army, a coalition of rebel groups that fought the Assad regime. He had died in an airstrike in 2017, yet the Syrian regime was relentless. It was guilt by association, she explained, as they were among 35 people taken that day, spanning four families with the same last name.
Pregnant, Jbawi clutched Heba tightly in the suffocating darkness of a windowless cell that was packed with a dozen women and children. The cries of the little ones filled the room, but the guards silenced them with threats and violence.
“Once you enter the prison, they don’t recognize you as a person,” she said in late January.
In the shadows of the interrogation rooms, she endured beatings and verbal abuse for two weeks. One morning, a guard ordered the detainees to “prepare the children.” Panic spread through the cell, and when one woman resisted, she was dragged away with her child. No one saw them again. Her worst fear became reality when Heba was ripped from her arms and placed in an orphanage.
Rumors about what happened in such orphanages didn’t escape her. Soukayna said she believed that children would be beaten, sold for their organs, or trafficked. Seven months later, Jbawi was released without charges. Soon after, she gave birth to her son, Mohamad.
Heba in the yard of her grandparents’ home in Baragah on Jan. 24.
Desperate to find Heba, she turned to her brother, a law student in Damascus at the time, to help her search in Syria’s main orphanages—SOS Children’s Villages, Lahn al-Hayat, and Dar al-Rahma. She said that all of them denied having Heba during the brother’s repeated visits.
Finally, after months of searching, Jbawi heard from another detained mother—who had managed to find her child—that the best way to find her daughter was to file a request with the security branch that imprisoned them.
With this new lead, Jbawi rushed to the security branch. After pleading, an officer finally acknowledged their case. Days later, they received confirmation: Heba was alive, held in an orphanage. The court approved their reunification, and security officers from the prison brought her daughter back.
But Heba, now 3, stood wary and distant in front of her mother after a year apart.
“She had panic attacks and cried whenever I asked about the orphanage,” said Soukayna, who discovered scars on her daughter’s lip, back, and legs.
Inside the pocket of Heba’s clothes, Jbawi found a slip of paper with the words “Dar al-Rahma” on it. That’s how she learned where her daughter had been kept all this time. When she confronted the orphanage about Heba’s scars, she was told they were from an accident: Coffee had been spilled on her.
Jbawi didn’t believe it.
-
Three girls in pastel dresses and head coverings smile as they greet a woman in black headscarf and dress. One girl leans in to kiss the hand of the woman. - The girls who remain at the orphanage in Damascus during the school break are seen as they welcome Baraa al-Ayoubi on Jan. 30.
-
Three single beds stand in a narrow room with a floral rug and a long floral curtain stretched over the far wall. A desk is partly visible in the foreground. - The girls’ bedrooms in the orphanage apartments in Damascus on Jan. 30.
In a January interview Baraa al-Ayoubi, the director of the Dar al-Rahma orphanage in Damascus where Heba was held, denied any wrongdoing. She said Heba was traumatized by her time in prison and that the scars on her back were not from her time in the orphanage.
On a carefully managed visit of the orphanage, where only a few teenage girls were living at the time, Ayoubi showed us rooms with neatly made beds as well as workshops where children could create their own toys and work on crafts in their free time, which could earn them pocket money.
Dar al-Rahma has come under scrutiny before—in 2019, when a neighbor made a post on social media alleging that she had heard children being beaten and abused inside. The next day, the neighbor was briefly arrested, and a subsequential state investigation concluded nothing was happening in the orphanage. Al-Ayoubi denied that violence had ever occurred.
The director acknowledged that her institution housed children of detainees, placed there by the regime’s security forces, but insisted that it was not possible to reunite them or give information about the children to their families without the regime’s approval.
“It was not my responsibility,” she said. “Did we agree? No, we didn’t, but we cared about the child, so we had to follow the orders.”
Ayoubi said that about 100 children of detainees were reunited with their families after the fall of the Assad regime and denied any collaboration with the regime, other than a couple of visits made by former Syrian first lady Asma al-Assad, who carefully cultivated an image of benevolence while she held a tight grip on the country’s orphanages. The London-born wife of Bashar al-Assad was often photographed cradling wide-eyed orphans while visiting the centers.
“It was all a facade,” said Maher Rezek, a former Ministry of Social Affairs employee who worked for the government for two decades before defecting in 2011.
“Inside, it was rotten,” he added.
Maher Rezek, the former director of the social services at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Family, in Damascus on Jan. 30.
The other two main institutions under scrutiny are a local orphanage called Lahn al-Hayat and SOS Children’s Villages, an Austria-based international organization with two orphanages in Syria. All three institutions have denied complicity in enabling Assad’s separation policy.
A Ministry of Social Affairs spokesperson said that the new governing authority has “collected all the available documents it was able to gather, which prove the transfer of detainees’ children to associations.”
Asma al-Assad personally appointed the directors of some of the orphanages, according to Rezek, the former ministry employee.
“They were her shields,” he said. “She controlled everything from the shadows.”
SOS Children’s Villages said that the former first lady visited one of its centers on a single occasion to attend an iftar meal with caregivers and children during Ramadan. “The team had no option to decline the visit,” a spokesperson wrote in an email, adding, “She has had no involvement in the management, operations, or governance of the association.”
Read More
The Long Shadow of Syria’s Chemical Weapons
USAID funding cuts cast doubt on eliminating the country’s stockpile.
The New Syria Is Run Like the Old
A constitution by decree gives the president unchecked powers, risking what has been an impressive transition.
What Are Uyghurs Doing in Syria?
They helped overthrow Assad, but potential terrorist ties complicate the community's future in the country.
Rania’s brother Hassan said an investigator with the new government showed him a document that proved that four of Rania’s children were living in SOS Children’s Villages. His public campaign to find them started when he came across a social media post from the organization featuring a photo of a girl who bore a striking resemblance to one of Rania’s children. When he reached out to the organization, it denied any knowledge of their whereabouts and stated that it had no evidence that they were in its care.
SOS Children’s Villages declined an interview, but noted the organization is working with the new Syrian government on an investigation to trace children who have been separated from their families, and pointed to a press release. The organization found in a preliminary investigation that it had taken in 139 children without documentation between 2013 and 2018 and that some of the placements of children “were imposed upon us by the authorities at the time.” The statement, last updated in May, said that ultimately, all 139 children were accounted for.
During a power outage at the orphanage in Damascus on Jan. 30, a woman working there uses her phone’s light to illuminate the room, revealing handmade crafts and jewelry created by the children.
“While in our care, the children received support consistent with our principles of safety and well-being,” the statement continued. “We took decisive action in 2018 to halt placements without proper documentation. Since 2020, under the leadership of a new National Director, SOS Children’s Villages Syria improved operations through stronger alignment with international child protection and safeguarding standards and significantly strengthened transparency for its activities in Syria.”_
The organization also found itself at the center of controversy in 2023, after facing allegations that 13 Ukrainian children abducted by the Russian military were placed under its care in facilities in Russia, where they were reportedly subjected to forced assimilation.
SOS Children’s Villages denied involvement in the affair at the time and said that “there is no indication that SOS Children’s Villages Russia was involved in the alleged forcible removal of children from Ukraine.” It nonetheless cut ties with its Russian member office, saying that local staff acted independently, and said it categorically condemned the forcible removal or illegal adoption of Ukrainian children.
In Syria, documents and testimonies published by local media, as well as by Hassan on his social media accounts, suggest that security branches altered the names of children of detainees or even put them up for adoption by families close to the regime.
“The orphanages need to make their archives and reunification methodologies available,” said Allouche, the international protection expert, who has researched the use of orphanages as a tool of state repression.
The Abassi family with five of their children: Abdul Rahman Yasin holds Ahmed and Alaa next to his wife, Rania. In front of them from left are Entisar, Najah, and Dima. al Abassi family photo
In Syria’s prisons, it wasn’t uncommon for women detainees to be raped and even give birth to children while in detention, according to Rezek. Children born in prisons would also be put in orphanages or often even disappear.
Ayoubi, the director of Dar al-Rahma, labeled the allegations of name changes, violence, forced adoptions, and trafficking as “rumors” and said that an official investigation is needed in order to establish the facts.
But Hassan fears that much of the evidence has been destroyed or misplaced since the fall of the Assad regime. While authorities are now working to recover lost data and expedite investigations, he believes that there isn’t enough being done by the new government to get to the bottom of the issue.
The Ministry of Social Affairs spokesperson said that the agency is working with families to find the missing children and has urged other families to provide names and information that could help locate and properly document their cases. But Rezek said that the government is facing more pressing issues at the moment, and that the new administration has been slow to provide answers.
Hassan, however, will not give up.
“This requires a real investigation, an actual, thorough investigation,” he said. “The information we could find would reveal the extent of the crimes committed by the regime in Syria, but I don’t believe we have even started yet.”