Since Assad’s Fall, Many Families of the Forcibly Disappeared Still Lack Answers

Maryam Hassan sits on a couch in her home in Jdeidet Artouz, a suburb of Syria’s capital Damascus, her voice soft but steady as she speaks. She raises her eyes to look upon a photograph of Younes and Mohammed al-Muqbil, her husband and teenage son, whom she last saw on September 26, 2013.

Mohammed was 14 years old when he was detained at a regime checkpoint outside Yarmouk camp, where the family had moved to from their home in the area of Al Hajar Al Aswad.

The family was told that Younes would have to be present to pick his son up. The unassuming father, a school teacher who Hassan says hadn’t even participated in anti-government protests, walked straight into a trap, disappearing into the unknown with his child.

For the next 12 years, Hassan and her children lived their lives in fear. When Bashar al-Assad’s regime was toppled in December 2024 by rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, she hoped it would lead to the long-awaited moment of reunion for the family. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), more than 100,000 people remain forcibly disappeared to date, with thousands of their loved ones, including Hassan, still waiting to learn of their fate.

In the first years after the disappearance, Hassan inquired about her family in police stations and courts, and even reached out to NGOs like the Red Crescent.

“Sometimes, you wouldn’t really be able to say to anyone that your son and husband were detained,” at the risk of oneself being disappeared, she says. “I was really scared.”

The detention of Mohammed and Younes divided Hassan’s life into a “before” and “after.” She’d move from home to home to avoid interacting too much with her neighbors. She’d often say her husband had passed away and that she was a widow. Yet, sometimes, the truth caught up with her. She explains how one of her daughter’s professors tried to blackmail her daughter into accepting his romantic advances in exchange for finding her father and brother.

“I told her to un-enroll from her studies, as I was scared he’d write up an [intelligence] report on her and…” Hassan says, struggling to complete the sentence.

When the regime fell, Hassan couldn’t bring herself to believe that Assad was gone. As she lay ill in bed, a friend of hers offered to search for her husband in the notorious Sednaya prison, where tens of thousands of people were tortured and killed by the Assad regime and its security branches.

“Before the regime fell, I couldn’t raise my voice,” she says. “After the fall, my daughters and I went to Umayyad square, and held up banners about the detained.”

“The idea I had was that the moment they opened up Sednaya prison, they’d emerge. Nothing happened, and then we started to go to the public squares and ask about them.”

It was Wafa Mustafa, a Syrian activist who shared in Hassan’s pain, who told her about a vigil for the missing in Damascus’s Hijaz station in late December 2024. Mustafa has been a fierce campaigner for Syrian detainees since the 2013 kidnapping of her father, Ali Mustafa, an outspoken critic of the Assad regime. As the regime fell, Mustafa pored over hundreds of videos and photos making the rounds on the internet from Germany, where she lives in exile. She was hoping for the slightest clue that could lead her to her father.

“I believe ultimately the government is responsible for the safety of everyone.”

In March 2025, President Ahmed Al-Sharaa announced a new transitional government expected to lead the country in the postwar period. A year into the fall of the regime, Mustafa says she’s yet to see a “commitment to transitional justice” on the part of the transitional government. She believes that the violence in March 2025 on the country’s Mediterranean coast and July 2025 in the city of Suwayda in southern Syria have been alarming indicators of a country still in chaos.

The former was sparked by an insurgency of Assad loyalists, which spurred retaliation from the government and affiliated forces killing more than 1,400 people — many of whom were members of the Alawite sect to which Assad belonged, in massacres that a UN inquiry called widespread and systematic. In Suwayda, government and affiliated forces entered the region after longstanding tensions between the Druze and Bedouin communities in the region escalated. Israel took advantage of the situation by launching airstrikes and arming Druze militias to advance its own political interests, including maintaining control of territory it has illegally seized from Syria. More than 1,000 individuals were killed in the fierce fighting. To date, the security situation in Suwayda is delicate, and movement is heavily restricted.

In terms of the amount of freedom available to Syrians now, Mustafa says, “There’s a margin that came by default after the fall of the regime, but we hear of arrests, killings, enforced disappearances, and revenge [killings] almost every week, if not more. … But I have to say that my experience is that this margin has been shrinking in the past few months.”

“Some argue about whether the government is directly responsible, enabling or just ignoring,” Mustafa said, in reference to the daily instances of violence in various parts of the country, “but I believe ultimately the government is responsible for the safety of everyone.”

In May 2025, after months of pressure from families demanding to know the whereabouts of their loved ones who disappeared under the Assad regime, the Syrian Transitional Government established the National Commission for Missing Persons (NCMP). Zeina Shahla, media advisor and spokesperson of the NCMP, tells to Truthout that their work is still in its initial stages: preparing internal systems, and establishing collaborations with international organizations to help pool funds and resources.

Mustafa Haid, an independent consultant specializing in human rights, accountability, and transitional justice in Syria, highlights the lack of transparency and structure within the NCMP.

“There’s a significant amount of documentation that has either been lost or destroyed, and no clear safeguarding mechanism in place,” he says, referring to evidence found in various Assad-era security branches. “There’s no chain of custody for these documents.”

In November 2025, the NCMP signed an agreement of collaboration with the International Commission on Missing Persons, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the UN Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria. The declaration reflects a “shared commitment” by all the parties in ascertaining the fate of “all missing persons in Syria, regardless of the circumstances of their disappearance or affiliations.”

Haid says the agreement is “positive, but a vague and general statement of cooperation that needs more elaboration.”

“Time is working against us rather than in our favor,” he adds.

Hassan shares Haid’s sentiment about the urgency of the matter.

“It’s so slow — there’s no good communication with families of the missing,” she says. “There’s no transparency, we have no clue what they’re working on.”

“We’d pay money and wait, just to hear their voice, or an update that they were well.”

Shahla says the commission understands the families are waiting, and emphasizes their right to answers, but also argues the task in front of the committee is “very complicated and needs a lot of preparations.”

“We still haven’t started any work on the ground and don’t have answers, as we believe it’s too early to have them,” she explains. “If you look at the experiences of other countries, they’ve started this work years and years after the end of a conflict.”

For the families of the affected, it has already been years. Nada Awad Suleiman, a resident of Damascus originally from the Golan Heights, shares how she lost two of her sisters to the black hole that was Assad’s detention system. In 2013, like many members of her family, she had been displaced to Kharabat Al Shia, in the outskirts of the southern Daraa province. She was in a minivan with her two sisters Mayada and Khadija when Assad’s soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint and led the two of them away.

“Throughout the 12 years [until the fall of the regime], we kept paying,” she says, explaining how people in power often extorted her when she visited various security branches in search of her sisters.

“We’d pay money and wait, just to hear their voice, or an update that they were well.”

When the regime fell, Suleiman went to Sednaya prison in search of her sisters. Surrounded by families of the missing, piles of clothes on the floor, and a machine that was at first believed to be a human press, which was later debunked by investigations, she wishes she hadn’t seen what she did.

“I knew what was happening, and I know what happened to [my sisters] — I know,” she says, her voice rising in frustration. “The horror was unnatural.”

Still today, Suleiman has no clue about the fate of her sisters.

Shahla explains that the NCMP is currently working on a national database for missing persons in Syria, as well as informing mechanisms to enhance communication between the commission and families of the missing.

“We’re building capacity to deal with all the documents that are in the security branches, hospitals and the military courts,” she says.

“We’re also trying to learn from the experiences of other countries like Bosnia, Rwanda, and other countries with similar contexts, to see what they’ve done.”

Hassan believes that documentation needs to be faster, emphasizing families’ willingness to help and contribute to the issue.

“For me, it’s important to know where they were buried, how they passed away, in which place or security branch,” she says.

She looks up at the photo of her son and husband, frozen in time. To its right is a photo of her daughters’ graduation ceremony.

“I’m not at peace, I can’t say ‘May they rest in peace,’ without a lump in my throat, as I’m still not sure, I haven’t seen anything.”