Syrian committee identifies 314 children taken by Assad regime from detained parents

The Syrian Committee for Investigation into the Fate of the Children of Detainees has said that it had it has so far identified 314 children who were forcibly taken from their detained parents by the former Assad regime.

Raghda Zeidan, the head of the committee, said at a press conference that 150 children had so far been reunited with their families, while efforts were underway to return 50 more to their relatives.

The children were placed in care homes and orphanages by Assad regime forces during the Syrian conflict, with no information about their identities or their families. There are believed to be thousands more children in orphanages whose true identities and parents have not been discovered.

Zeidan said that the committee was working on several tracks to reunite more children with their families, including gathering documents and information from families and reviewing records of care homes between 2011, when the Syrian conflict began, and 2024, when the Assad regime was overthrown.

She also said that the committee was continuing to look into the cases of children who have already been returned to their families and had set up two hotlines for communication with families and gathering information.

In response to a question from The New Arab’s sister site Al-Araby Al-Jadeed about the use of forensic medicine in the committee’s work to determine the parentage of children, Zeidan said the committee had a plan to expand its cooperation with forensic medicine, with joint committees involving several specialised bodies set up for that purpose.

She added that the current mechanism for matching children with their families relies on available documentation and investigative work, a task made difficult by the former regime, which had registered children under false names or recorded them as being “of unknown parentage.”

Mother clings to hope of finding her four children

Attending the press conference, which was held at the Syrian Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, was Amina Marwa. She told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed that she was there because every number announced could be a thread leading to the fate of her four children, who have been missing for more than ten years.

On January 5 2014, her husband and children left the besieged Yarmouk Camp south of Damascus, only to be detained by Assad regime forces.

That day, her son Mohammed was nine years old, her daughter Fatima al-Zahra was seven, Maryam was barely two, and Sham was only six months old.

She has not received any information about them since that fateful day. Her last contact with her husband was a phone call saying he had left the besieged refugee camp and would be joining her with their children soon, but he disappeared after this with no further word.

Marwa said that time had stopped for her for 12 years, but she still believed that her children were alive and was waiting to see them again.

The Assad regime detained and forcibly disappeared hundreds of thousands of Syrians over the 14 years of the country’s brutal conflict. Most of them are believed to have died in the Syrian regime’s prisons amid abuse, starvation, neglect, and summary executions of prisoners.

However, many Syrian families still desperately cling to hope that their loved ones will be found.