More than a year has passed since the fall of Bashar al-Assad's government, yet the file of children who were detained along with their parents or born in prison remains fundamentally unresolved.
For more than a decade, Syria's security apparatus operated a deliberate system of child abduction: when dissidents and defectors were imprisoned, their children were seized and disappeared into a network of orphanages, according to Syrian officials.
Over a decade, hundreds of children were systematically removed from families and hidden in institutions to coerce parental cooperation with the regime.
In July 2025, Syria's new government established a commission to investigate the fate of children separated from detained or forcibly disappeared parents.
By December, the commission announced it had located 314 children in state care facilities and reunited 150 with their families.
But these numbers obscure a far larger catastrophe: according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, approximately 3,702 children remain missing, distributed across multiple institutions, police centres, and security agency channels, not just the social ministry.
The commission's own representative, Samer Qorbi, acknowledged the core problem to The New Arab: "Most of the children who returned had been detained relatively recently, so they hadn't forgotten their names and families. But for those who spent many years, this is where the problem lies; they will forget their real names and family information."
When a carpenter's phone became a lifeline
Huda Ajami, a former detainee from Rankous village in rural Damascus, was arrested on 28 March 2024 along with her son's wife and three grandchildren, ages 12, 5, and 4, as they were fleeing to join her son, who was a member of the then anti-regime forces in Idlib.
All family members were transferred to Mezzeh Military Airport (Air Force Intelligence Branch). The 58-year-old grandmother was detained there for five months, while her daughter-in-law remained imprisoned until liberation day in December of the same year.
The children were imprisoned with their mother in the same cell until they left the detention centre on 10 April 2024, after enduring harsh conditions, including fear, food scarcity, and poor ventilation.
"At first, the children were with their mother in the same cell, but then they brought me back together with them to say goodbye before they left," Huda explains.
"We didn't know where they were taking them. So I asked the oldest boy to memorise our home number in Rankous so he could call his grandfather if he managed to, and tell him about our situation and his with his siblings."
The three children were transferred to Dar al-Rahma orphanage. All news of the detained family was completely cut off from the rest of the relatives.
Then fate intervened. One day, a carpenter entered the orphanage to repair doors. Fawaz cautiously approached him and asked to borrow his phone so he could tell his grandfather about his situation and that of his detained grandmother and mother.
After Huda's release, she gained permission to visit the children at the care facility every 15 days, a humiliation that finally ended when the regime fell, the mother was liberated, and the facility was forced to return them.
The family was reunited, but at devastating cost: the children's father had been killed in a security operation one week before Assad's fall.
A case that remains unresolved
But that wasn't the case for the family of dentist Rania al-Abbasi, an international Chess champion, who was arrested along with her husband and six young children from their house in the Dommar suburb of Damascus in 2013. The fates of the whole family remain unknown.
Her sister, Dr Nailah al-Abbasi, who lives in Saudi Arabia with her family and elderly mother, has spent over a year after the Assad regime's fall searching through a labyrinth of bureaucracy with no result.
When she and a relative, Wajad Qaddour, visited the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, they were handed massive files containing thousands of names, but documentation only extended back to 2018.
For earlier years, ministry officials explained, the security apparatus distributed children to care facilities without any records. Before 2018, there were no systematic documents at all.
At the care facilities themselves, staff denied having the children or provided no usable information.
Nailah discovered that the regime had deliberately changed surnames, separated siblings, and created false family records. She believes many of the children listed as "unknown lineage" between 2011 and 2024 are actually children of detainees.
"I received information that facility directors burned documents at the beginning of the liberation," she told The New Arab.
"The directors hold all the secrets. Serious interrogation of them would yield crucial information. But unfortunately, Baraa al-Ayoubi remains in her position; she has stated she does not regret cooperating with security forces. The same applies to Nada al-Ghabra, Lama al-Sawwaf, and Hanadi al-Khaymi. All three were released on bail," she added.
The mechanism of erasure
Lawyer Marwan al-Ash, head of the Syrian Detainees and Detainees Council, witnessed children detained at Mezzeh in 2013.
"I was in cell 34 in Mezzeh prison for 98 days," he recalls. "I heard the voices of women and children in cells 7 and 19. When we went to the bathrooms or to interrogation, I saw infants and children under seven being escorted out daily."
The process of institutional erasure worked like this, he explained, adding, "After parents were detained, children were eventually separated and formally transferred to the Ministry of Social Affairs. The ministry then assigned them to orphanages or care societies. Upon arrival, facilities opened files for each child, some with false names, stripping away identity. Siblings were deliberately separated to "lose the threads of the story."
A particularly systematic violation involved "attachment contracts", according to the committee's report, ostensibly legal adoption arrangements.
Between 2011 and 2024, the commission found that 630 such contracts were formalised, with families receiving children along with signed documents from care facilities and ministry approval.
When investigators attempted to contact the 630 families who received children, only five responded. The rest ignored all outreach, and the commission lacks current addresses or identifying information for most.
The unfinished search
Adnan al-Sharif hails from Arbin in rural Damascus. His family was displaced, but he remained with two brothers, joining the rebels to fight before being relocated to Idlib when regime forces stormed eastern Ghouta and deported fighters from the area.
During the family's displacement journey in early 2013, they reached an area near Adra known for its factories. At this location, Adnan made his final contact with his family before leaving to join the armed resistance in Idlib.
Since then, all the news was cut off, and he lost them: his parents, his ten-year-old brother, his sister and her children — a seven-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl, and a one-month-old infant — along with his maternal uncles and other relatives, 23 people in total.
Adnan tried to obtain any information about these individuals, but without success. After liberation, he visited the place where his family disappeared and learned from locals that the army killed the males from the family while transporting women and children by buses. No one knew where they were taken.
After losing hope of finding the adult family members, Adnan searched for the children and visited orphanages, but obtained no information.
"I felt something suspicious in some orphanages, as if they were hiding something they didn't want to reveal. But at the same time, we cannot accuse anyone unjustly; this matter is too large and requires state efforts, not just individuals."
The work continues, incompletely
Dr Wajd Qadour, who began searching for Nailah's sister's children, has since founded a charitable foundation to assist families and track cases.
She discovered that some facilities deliberately expelled children at age 15 into the streets, creating waves of newly homeless youth with no family, no identity, no records.
The commission acknowledges the enormity of the task. According to the commission's representative, Samir, the work requires "a giant effort." They have organised new teams and established statistics from 2011 to 2024, but the numbers shift constantly, addresses change, and most families never respond to contact attempts.
More than one year after Assad's fall, Syria's new government still cannot answer a fundamental question: where are the children?
The Assad regime's systematic destruction of records, the deliberate separation of siblings, the falsification of identities, and the continuing silence of those who administered these facilities have created a gap that may never fully close.
For families like the Al-Abbasi's and Adnan al-Sharif, the search continues without certainty of resolution, a wound that will not heal because the truth remains deliberately hidden.
Mawada Bahah is an independent Syrian journalist with bylines in local, regional and international outlets
This article is published in collaboration with Egab