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
Then last year, after the Assad regime fell, al-Abbasi made a remarkable claim that aired on a popular Syrian opposition television station that he was told by an anonymous friend that Rania's children were being hidden in an orphanage. Al-Abbasi says he sent friends to ask around the orphanages immediately, and he began to cast doubt on the Damascus branch of the SOS children's villages.
Al-Abbasi's claim was picked up by other Syrians on social media who began accusing the orphanages of human trafficking. As this unfolded, SOS Children's Villages issued a statement. They acknowledged that their Damascus branch had taken in security placement children over a period of four years until the charity's headquarters found out and ordered their Damascus branch to stop.
The regional director, Tom Malvert, who's a Swedish national, told me they're trying to rectify the situation now as much as they can.
SOS Children's Villages has trawled its records to find 139 children who'd been placed there. But they can only confirm that 21 Syrian children were reunited with their families as of this April. Malvett says he believes the staff were operating under extreme conditions. They were trying to do their best by the children who were appearing at their doorstep.
And after Malvett's statement, multiple orphanage directors spoke up to defend the work they continued to do in Syria. These orphanages, however imperfect, have played a vital role in Syria particularly through the civil war. They remain one of the only places that vulnerable kids can receive care. From our interviews with orphanage directors, patterns emerged as to how these placements happened.
Agents delivered the children in white vans to the orphanage. They came with a paper listing the child's first name and a demand to keep the child's existence totally secret. And one institution appears to have obeyed that order to the letter.
The Life Melody Complex, or Tajammar Lahna Al Hayat, is a gated complex. It's perched on a hill overlooking Damascus. Syrians appear angriest at this orphanage more than any other. That's because it was once sponsored by Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syria's former ruler. She used to visit the institution, cameras at the ready to show her with orphans.
She was photographed alongside a long-time board member, Nada al-Khabara. We met Al-Khabara on a winter's day. She walked us through the orphanage. She wanted to show us how well they care for the children. There's about 400 boys and girls here, from babies to women in their early 20s who have nowhere else to go. We met toddlers who were warmly dressed, watching cartoons.
In other rooms, babies nap two or three to a cot. There just wasn't enough room for all the babies that had been abandoned here. As we walked, Al-Khabra proudly told us she is familiar with all the children in the orphanage. She laughed and said she even arranges the circumcisions of all the baby boys. Muslim boys are expected to be circumcised. She paid for the weddings of the older kids.
She was really proud of that. She pulled up one video on her phone of one of those weddings. But Alhabra says she only found out that intelligence agents were delivering children to the orphanage after the Assad regime was toppled. She says that's because she didn't spend any time in the administrative building where children were handed over.
She was with the children in the main building, the orphanage, and she says she didn't notice some of the children suddenly arriving or leaving. But Life Melody Complex actually did keep records of the security placement children who were transferred into their care. Copies of those records were handed over to the new interim government.
An official showed NPR a list of 45 children who were placed there by intelligence agents. That official told us there was a stack of pages, an inch thick, filled with other names of other security placement children who were cycled there over the years. But the official didn't show us that stack of papers.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from members of the former Assad regime. They said, my life is worth the price of a bullet. During this investigation, I visited every single orphanage I could find in Damascus to figure out if there were patterns to these children being hidden away. One of them was Almobarra Nisaia, which is on a busy Damascus road.
Here, the director kept detailed records of the 50 children who were deposited by intelligence agents. Inside, director Rana Al-Baba is chatting to some colleagues when I met her in December. Compared to what we heard at the Life Melody orphanage, Al-Baba was sharply aware of the transfer of security placement kids into her orphanage's care.
Over bracing Turkish coffee, she tells us the first time an agent came knocking with a baby boy to hand over, she didn't believe it. She tells me, I even asked for the man's ID. I said, how do I know you haven't kidnapped these children? Al-Baba tells me, this man looks at her and says, you're asking me for my ID? Do you understand who I am? And Al-Baba says, it began to sink in.
Saying no to the Air Force Intelligence Directorate would be a death sentence. She says, they would have put us through their human mincer. They would have made us hamburgers or kebabs. Albaba says when the children arrived, they were sick, thin, dirty, infested with head lice, like they'd just come out of prison.
Al-Baba says in her orphanage for the first week, they isolated the kids with a caregiver. They called them housemothers, and the housemother would offer the kid new clothes, a pink pyjama or a blue one. Do you want a toy? What do you want to eat today? Fries? She says they wanted the kids to see they were cared for.
But Al-Baba says she was not at peace with the arrangement and there were limits to what she could do. She says she had to turn away relatives who came to her orphanage looking for their missing children. She had to obey. We end our interview with Al-Baba. She tells me she hopes she was worthy of the burden that God made her carry.
It's at this moment I look out the window and see a man lingering outside. He's clutching his mobile phone and looks nervous. I ask Al-Baba, does he work here? Al-Baba peers out the window. No. And she invites him into the office. He walks in and tells Al-Baba that his children went missing in 2013 with his wife.
She'd been detained by forces loyal to Syria's former ruler Bashar al-Assad as she was trying to get to hospital because she was nine months pregnant. He says for a long time he believed his wife and kids had been killed to punish him because he'd refused to provide information about rebels operating in his area. He pulls out his phone to show her pictures of his kids. There's Mohamed, 7.
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