In Syria during the 14-year civil war, many children were detained with their mothers. Then, security forces separated them. Thousands of these children have never been found.Since the fall of the Assad regime, parents of disappeared children have continued to search for answers. In this episode of The Sunday Story, NPR correspondent Diaa Hadid investigates: what happened to the disappeared children of Syria?This episode includes mentions of rape and torture.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What happened to the disappeared children of Syria?
I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story. Over the winter, NPR's Dia Hadid was reporting in Syria. Rebel fighters had just overthrown the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. In her weeks of reporting, Dia discovered something shocking. It wasn't just men and women who were imprisoned by the Assad regime.
Children were also taken, and many remain unaccounted for. Today on The Sunday Story, what happened to the disappeared children of Syria? Dia Hadid brings us the story from her reporting in Damascus after the break. Stay with us.
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Chapter 2: How did Dia Hadid investigate the missing children?
I'm Aisha Roscoe. This is a Sunday story from Up First. NPR's Dia Hadid joins me now to talk about her reporting from Damascus. Dia, I know you were sent to Syria in the chaotic weeks following the Assad regime's fall. How did you come across this story about missing children?
Aisha, as I was seeing what was happening in Damascus, I couldn't stop thinking about the children. I'd covered conflicts like this for so long and I knew there'd likely be a large number of kids in orphanages whose parents had been detained or even disappeared during the civil war. And I kept thinking, what was happening to them now? And let me tell you, this was hard for me.
I have two young kids, so stories about vulnerable children really hit home. And I try not to take too many long trips away from them. So for this assignment, I felt like I needed their permission. So I told them, I'm going to Syria so I can meet little ones who don't have a mama who So is that okay to give your mama to some other kids for a little while? And my girls agreed.
That's very sweet of your girls.
So I began calling groups that care for vulnerable children, like UNICEF, the Red Cross, other big organizations that run programs in Syria. And one group I reached was SOS Children's Villages. That's an international aid group headquartered in Austria. It has branches all around the world, including in war zones.
And a spokesperson for them told me they were coming to terms with a revelation that was shaking the organization. Their Damascus branch had secretly taken in children whose mothers had been detained by intelligence agents. And this revelation was triggering a lot of anger in Syrian society.
Well, I mean, and rightfully so. How did you investigate these allegations?
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Dia face while reporting in Syria?
Well, after getting this tip, me and producer Mirna Rashid, we went to other orphanages across Damascus and we asked, did intelligence agents force you to secretly take in children? And what happened to those children?
And what did you find out?
While it was really hard to get answers at first, orphanages did not want to speak to us. The situation felt so uncertain. The Assad regime had just fallen at the time and people online were accusing them of collaborating with the former regime. But as we investigated, we finally met an official at the Ministry of Social Affairs who also wanted to know the answers.
You see, the ministry had been overtaken by rebels who formed an interim government, and Syrian families were asking them for help to find their children. So this official helped us by calling up orphanage directors and telling them that they had to talk to us. He requested anonymity through this process because he wasn't meant to be speaking to the media, let alone helping us.
Did you manage to speak to any parents whose children were taken away?
Yeah, we spoke to one orphanage director who wanted us to hear from the detained women themselves. So she connected us to a couple of mothers. One of those women was Sukaina Shbawi. We reached her at her home in a village in the southern Syrian province of Daraa. That's where the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad first erupted. She was keen to chat.
So Ayesha, this is what Shabawi told me. She says that in the fall of 2018, Syrian security forces turned up one day and they dragged her and her daughter Hiba from their home. Hiba was just two. Shabawi believes they were taken hostage to pressure her husband's brothers to surrender to government forces.
That was a pretty common tactic at the time because the brothers had joined the uprising against the regime. Jibawi and Heba were driven to holding cells run by the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. That was one of the most feared and violent arms of the Syrian regime. Guards pushed her and Heba into a cold, dark cell with about six other women and their children.
Nearly all the women's cells also held children, but the conditions there were not conducive to staying alive. Jibawi says they were only allowed to use the bathroom three times a day, not enough for little kids. So the mothers procured a bucket for the children to use as a toilet and they emptied it out whenever they could. There was never enough food.
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Chapter 4: What did Sukaina Shbawi experience while detained?
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.
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.
So Dia, I just want to interrupt you here. Do you have a sense of the scale of this? How many children were being taken away from their mothers like Hiba?
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.
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Chapter 5: How many children are missing due to the Syrian conflict?
We're back with NPR's Dia Hadid and her story about the missing children of Syria.
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.
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Chapter 6: What is the role of orphanages in Syria during the conflict?
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.
and they were distraught.
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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Chapter 7: Who is Hassan al-Abbasi and what is his story?
Islam, she's 5. Yousef, 3. His name is Hani Al-Fara.
And in December, 11 years after they disappeared, he saw the social media buzz about children hidden in orphanages. And he began hoping just maybe his children were alive. Maybe they'd been hidden in an orphanage. Maybe this orphanage. Al-Baba says she's sure his children weren't placed here, but just in case, she asks for his wife's name.
The children typically came listed under their mother's names. Al-Baba shakes her head sadly. Not here, sir. I wish they were. I would have given them to you. But she tells him, you mustn't give up hope, sir.
God willing.
God willing. God willing. God willing.
We took Hani al-Faraz details and we met him a few days later in his tiny apartment in a working class suburb of Damascus. It's up a few flights of narrow stairs. And al-Faraz holding his youngest son from his second marriage.
Hello, Habibi.
We sit in a room that feels like a cubbyhole. During the years that he tried to find his wife and children, he angered the Assad regime soldiers who manned the checkpoint in his area. They detained him and ultimately shifted him to a lock-up where he was tortured for hours, every day, for three months. He says he was strung up from a ceiling, beaten and starved.
After that, he began to hope that his wife and children were dead, rather than experience the depravities of detention under the Assad regime. And that includes well-documented cases of rape of women, men and children. Al-Fara says his friends urged him to move on, marry a good woman, make a new family. One of his friends set him up with his sister, and they fell in love.
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