Assad’s orphan cover-up: hundreds of detainees’ children kidnapped

The regime of deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad systematically separated thousands of children from their imprisoned parents during Syria’s civil war and placed them in orphanages - often with changed names and erased identities - according to a months-long investigation by The New York Times.

The report, based on classified Syrian intelligence documents, databases, and interviews with more than 50 people, including officials, children, and aid workers, concludes that from at least 2013 until the Assad regime fell in December 2024, Syria’s secret police conspired with ministries and governors to hide detainees’ children in orphanages.

Some of the facilities were run by SOS Children’s Villages International, a prominent Austrian nonprofit.

Children disappeared

Over 13 years of conflict, the Assad regime forcibly disappeared over 100,000 people, the New York Times reports, more than any government since the Nazis. Among them were thousands of children who were initially held in prison cells with their parents before being removed.

Documents obtained by the newspaper show that the notorious Air Force Intelligence, the agency in charge of some of the regime's most confidential operations, ordered children transferred to orphanages, their names kept secret, and decisions about them left only to Assad's intelligence services.

Some children were later adopted away under new identities.

In one case, records showed a 4-year-old boy detained with his father in 2013 was eventually placed in the home of an Air Force Intelligence officer and renamed. In another, a toddler named Lotus Sami Bashwat was designated "hidden", her whereabouts restricted to the branch chief's knowledge.

SOS Children's Villages involvement

Six orphanages run by SOS Children’s Villages were used by the regime to house detainees' children, the investigation found. Families who later searched for missing relatives reported that SOS staff denied children were there or refused to release them without approval from security services.

SOS has acknowledged that between 2013 and 2018, at least 139 "children without proper documentation" were referred by Syrian authorities to its care. Only 34 are known to have been reunited with families, while over 100 were handed back to the regime, with their fate unknown.

Documents reviewed by the New York Times show that SOS at times received direct instructions from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour about how to register children brought by security forces. Some former residents told the newspaper their names had been changed, and that children of detainees were segregated from other orphans, sometimes removed at night in vans with tinted windows.

A family’s ordeal

The New York Times investigation follows the story of the Ghbees family, detained at a Damascus checkpoint in 2015.

Parents Mosaab and Omama were sent to secret prisons, while their daughters, Laila and Layan, were transferred to SOS orphanages.

For nearly three years the family was separated; when they were finally reunited in a prisoner exchange in 2018, the children had become attached to their caregivers and struggled to reconnect with their parents.

After the war, the family fled to Turkey and later resettled in the United States. “We had to get to know each other all over again,” Omama told the Times.

Ongoing investigation

Syria’s new government has formed a committee to investigate the fate of missing children.

It has so far compiled the names of at least 314 detainees’ children placed in orphanages, though officials believe the true number is far higher. Some children may have been abducted by foreign militias fighting on behalf of Assad or adopted abroad.

Former Syrian ministers and orphanage directors have been questioned, but others implicated in official directives have yet to face accountability. SOS says it is cooperating with external reviews into its role.

The Times notes that, without international support to build DNA databases like those used after Argentina’s and El Salvador’s dictatorships, many Syrian families may never be reunited.