Syria's disappeared: The long road to justice after Assad

Damascus, Syria - The last time Ziad and Ghina Sabagh saw their son Mohammed alive, he was going out to buy petrol twelve years ago. Then he vanished without a trace.

“His phone disconnected. We waited for half an hour, for an hour, for two hours. But he didn’t come,” Ziad told The New Arab, his words still tense with fatherly concern. “We asked everywhere about him, in all the [security] branches. No one answered.”

As the years passed, the Sabaghs held on to the hope that their 26-year-old son would return - until a few months ago, when they came across a photo of his tortured body laid out in one of Assad’s prison branches. Now they want justice and to see their son’s grave before they die.

The Sabaghs, like so many other families of Syria’s missing detainees, spent years in terrified silence. Now they want their voices to be heard. But almost a year since the regime that took their son away was toppled, they say they feel abandoned by the new government, and that justice is too slow.

“There is awareness. But the government must be faster … The state must find justice for all the detainees. And we will not be silent, for the sake of our children’s blood,” Ghina said.

Mohammed’s photo was one of almost 54,000 images leaked in 2014 by a Syrian whistleblower known as ‘Caesar’, who risked his life to expose to the world the industrial scale of human rights abuses in Assad’s detention facilities - including torture, starvation, and murder.

The New Arab spoke with six families of the victims. In total, the Caesar Files documented the deaths of 6,786 people in detention.

Though the images had been online since 2015, the Sabaghs did not dare investigate for fear of being monitored. It was not until after Assad was toppled in December that they accessed an internet link to the files and found their son.

At a weekly meeting in the Damascus office of the Caesar Families Association, several families gathered to talk, share their pain and vent their frustrations. The organisation is dedicated to the relatives of the victims in the Caesar Files, offering legal and psychological support, as well as advocacy at home and abroad.

After years of self-imposed silence, talking offered a form of catharsis for some families. Under the regime, many would lie and say their loved ones had died rather than admit they had been arrested. It was a way to avoid neighbourly gossip, or worse, suspicion and the dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Some families demanded reparations and financial support, in particular the widows whose husbands were forcibly disappeared. Left to raise their children alone, they can barely eke out a living in a country where 90% of the population lives below the poverty line.

“They [the former regime] gave support to the wives of regime soldiers. They were given jobs, salaries, everything. Now we have nothing, and we have been waiting for a year. I have to pay $100 a month in rent, but I am not rich,” said Huda Sabahieh, a mother of two, whose husband was detained and killed by Assad’s secret police in 2014.

No matter their personal demands, everyone wanted to see the perpetrators in court. “We don’t care about money. We want to know who killed our children, and justice. Money won’t bring my son back,” said Ghina.

In May, Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa established two government commissions to investigate and manage the files of transitional justice and missing persons. But the government is overwhelmed by the scale of the task. More than 300,000 have gone missing since the 1970s, almost all of them under the Assad regime.

This, combined with the government’s limited resources in a country ruined by 14 years of civil war, means most families will have to wait years before they know what happened to their loved ones.

Lina Shamout and her husband, Mohammed Shamout, also lost a son, Thaer. But they also felt the brutality of Assad’s security apparatus first-hand.

“They tortured my husband in front of me. They attacked me and beat me with a stick. They said, ‘If you don’t speak, we will bring your daughter here and torture her in front of you,’” Lina said.

She was arrested in 2013 alongside her husband and four of her children after a neighbour filed a report about them with one of the state’s intelligence branches. The accusation? Attending the funeral of a family member who was a suspected dissident.

Many of the victims’ families shared similar stories about the “report writers”, as they called them. Neighbours or colleagues who lived among them and often fabricated evidence for money, revenge, or both.

The Shamouts were eventually released. All but Thaer, that is. They paid an intelligence officer extortionate bribes to visit him in prison, only to find Thaer was not there. Finally, they were handed a death certificate.

“We were not allowed to talk about anything. We kept our stories hidden until the liberation. I was hoping they were still lying to me, that he was not dead,” Mohammed said. But in 2015, one of his other children found a photo of Thaer online in the Caesar Files leak.

Mohammed reached for his phone and brought up the photo of his son from the Caesar Files. Lina looked away from the screen.

The Caesar Files provided the evidence necessary to finally compel the US to impose heavy sanctions on the Syrian government, with the Caesar Act receiving bipartisan approval in the US Senate in 2019.

Now, Syrians are campaigning for the sanctions to be permanently removed to breathe life into the country’s dire economy. Among them is ‘Caesar’ himself, or First Lieutenant Farid al-Madhhan, who revealed his identity in an interview with Al Jazeera in February. One of the victims’ families called Madhhan a “hero”.

Washington announced new sanctions relief on 10 November, while US President Donald Trump met with Sharaa in person for the second time - the first Syrian leader to visit the White House since the country’s independence in 1946. Sanctions were waived for an additional 180 days, but a permanent repeal would require approval by Congress.

Human rights groups have stressed the importance of justice and accountability, not just for the families, but for Syria’s tentative political transition to succeed.

After being engulfed by deadly sectarian violence twice this year, the country remains deeply divided, and many among Syria’s minority groups distrust the new Islamist government in Damascus. There are concerns that delayed justice could drive people to seek retribution and revenge, which could spark new waves of violence. 

“Transitional justice serves as the optimal approach to achieving comprehensive recovery from the consequences of the conflict and … to ensure lasting stability,” Fadel Abdulghany, founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said in a statement.

For families like the Shamouts, the demand for justice is especially urgent. The official who detained their son still lives nearby.

“I see my son’s killer walking in the street. We know the people who did this to us,” said Mohammed. As far as he is concerned, the regime has not fallen yet.

Alex Martin Astley is a freelance journalist based in Beirut, covering conflict, foreign policy, and social justice issues

Follow him on X: @AlexMAstley