The opening of prisons and detention centers in Syria after the fall of the Syrian regime has brought back the pains of families who still have missing persons from the events of the 1980s in Syria.
Following the fall of the ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8, 2024, and the opening of prisons, images and names of detainees who died under torture in their dungeons spread, extinguishing the hope of the families of the 1980s detainees of seeing their loved ones return after years of waiting and enforced disappearance.
While browsing through the long lists of names, Sena Samara (65 years old) found the name of one of her brothers who was detained in the midst of the 1980s, during the era of Hafez al-Assad, prompting her sad memories and painful scenes to flood her mind.
Samara recounts to Enab Baladi the details of her brothers’ arrests. While her brother Mohammed was preparing for his high school certificate exams, security forces stormed their home at 7 AM, one hour before his exam, and took him “with all violence and cruelty,” promising their shocked mother that he would be returned soon.
But Mohammed’s mother did not know that this was the last time she would see him. When she visited him at the Political Security branch in Idlib, they gave her his blood-stained clothes, and she later learned that he had been transferred to Tadmor prison.
Mohammed was killed in the massacre carried out by the Defense Companies against the detainees, a military force that was under the command of Rifaat al-Assad, Hafez’s brother, who was the main responsible for the Hama massacre in 1982.
With deep sorrow, Samara continued her story to Enab Baladi about the arrest of her other brother, Ziad, from the Faculty of Medicine at Aleppo University in 1980, after the former security service was informed by one of the informants that Ziad was delivering messages from a person affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood to his relatives to reassure them about him.
Ziad’s whereabouts were unknown, despite his family’s repeated attempts to inquire about him and hearing rumors at that time about the regime executing all Islamist detainees, until lists were leaked detailing their names and execution dates in 1984.
Enforced disappearances after 2011
The prisons of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Daraa, and As-Suwayda were emptied of detainees after the Military Operations Administration took control of them and expelled the previous regime’s forces.
Comparing the number of those released from prisons to the number of enforced disappearances documented by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) reveals that there are tens of thousands of forcibly disappeared persons whose fates remain unknown.
According to the latest documentation by the SNHR, issued on December 28, 2024, there are still 112,414 individuals forcibly disappeared at the hands of the previous regime.
The SNHR mentioned that despite the opening of prisons and the lack of information about the return of tens of thousands of Syrian detainees, they are still considered forcibly disappeared because their bodies have not been delivered to their families, and no detailed information has been revealed about their fates.
“Uncovering these facts requires long and intensive efforts to reach the complete truth about what happened to each of these victims, and this must occur within a framework of accountability for those responsible for these crimes, along with providing just compensation for the victims and their families,” according to the SNHR.
The release operations that took place in prisons after the control of the Military Operations Administration showed that the vast majority of the enforcedly disappeared had died under torture, in inhumane detention conditions, or through extrajudicial executions, according to the SNHR.