Dia Hadid
speaker
762 appearances
58 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 12 Sep
Dia Hadid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 51 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
And she says 20 days after she arrived, prison guards banged on their cell doors and told the women, get your children ready. It was chaos.
And even now, years later, Shbawi cries as she remembers this. One woman who'd been detained for a while told them, say goodbye to your children now because they're going to take them away. Don't make a fuss or they'll put you in solitary.
but some women wouldn't let go, so the guards came in and took their children by force. Shabawi drew Heba into her lap. She put her arms around her and hugged her. She said, You're going to a better place, and when this ends, you'll be with me and I'll hug you. Shabawi hoped that was true. She prayed. Oh God, protect her with your watchful eye that never sleeps.
As the months went on, Shabawi watched more mothers come into the cell and she watched them have their children snatched away, including newborn babies. She says pregnant women detained alongside her were taken to hospital when they went into labour. After birth, the women were returned to their lock-up with their babies.
They were allowed to nurse them for a few weeks and then the guards took the babies away. It was a fate spare we feared as well because when she was arrested with Heber, her two-year-old, she was also a few weeks pregnant. But after almost eight months of detainment and weeks before she was due to give birth, she was finally sentenced and she was shifted to a notorious prison called Adra.
She still doesn't know what her crime was, but in prison she was told she'd be released soon and she was given one phone call. So she called her sister and asked if somebody could pick her up and she told her sister, Heva isn't with me. I don't know where she is.
Shbawi returned to her village heavily pregnant. Her husband by that point had abandoned her and married another woman. This happened a lot to women who'd been detained. When they were freed, they weren't greeted as heroes. They often faced immense stigma over the possibility that they'd been sexually assaulted while confined.
Shbawi jokes that it would have been better if her husband had died in a Syrian prison so she could tell their kids that he was a martyr. It was Shbawi's brother who began the search for Heba. He heard that she might be in an orphanage, and so he went banging on their doors across Damascus.
And after three months of running around, the intelligence agency that had detained Shbawi finally returned Heba to him. Shbawi was in their village waiting. She'd just given birth and was recovering. And then they arrived. She says when she saw her daughter, their reunion was bittersweet. Shbaoui says she came to her girl and asked her, do you remember me? And Heba replied, mama.
She says, I hugged her in my arms and I saw her. But as the days wore on, Heba grew distant. She screamed when Shbawi tried to bathe her, feed her, dress her. It was like she blamed her mother for their separation. But Sukaina Shbawi, at least, was one of the lucky ones. Her daughter came back.
I'm not sure we'll ever be able to get an accurate count, but a respected monitoring group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, they estimate some 3,700 children remain missing after they were detained during the war by Assad regime forces.
And based on our own investigation, we were able to confirm that at least 300 children were taken away from their mothers while they were being held by the directorate, including one baby girl who died while she was in the care of an orphanage. That was just in Damascus. We weren't able to reach orphanages in other parts of Syria at the time when we did our reporting.
And in Damascus, children were handed over to four orphanages and care centres. Intelligence agents ordered them to keep the children's existence a secret. The practice became so common that orphanage workers even had a name for these kids, security placement children.
Yeah, and just like they were handed over by intelligence agents, days, weeks, months, even years later, intelligence agents took the children back. Orphanage directors presumed the children were given back to their mothers once they were released from detention. And that did happen, like Heba Zbawi, who was returned to her mother, Skaina Zbawi.
First, Aisha, it's important to understand that an orphan in Muslim-majority countries like Syria is not a child who's lost their parents.
It's a child who's lost their father and often children are handed over to orphanages because the mother can no longer support them financially or because if she'd like to remarry, her new husband may not want to raise what conservative society sees as somebody else's kid.
Yeah.
Yeah, the fates of these children of detained mothers first bubbled to the surface through the activism of one man, Hassan al-Abbasi. Al-Abbasi is a Canadian Syrian engineer who lives in Canada, and he's been searching for his sister, Rania al-Abbasi.
She was taken by Assad forces on March 11, 2013, alongside her husband and their six children, from Dima, the eldest at 14, to Leyan, who was two years old at the time. Aranya's relatives believe that her decision to give food to families displaced by fighting at the time made her a target. Aranya very quickly became one of the most prominent women held by the Assad regime and
That's partly because of al-Abbasi's activism and partly because Rania was a national chess champion in Syria. The US State Department still advocates for her release. And Hassan al-Abbasi keeps trying to find clues to his sister's fate and of her family. Sometimes he uploads old home videos of Rania's daughters to Sad Music just to remind people that they're maybe still out there.
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