Syrians face grim prospect of never finding missing relatives

A week after Bashar al-Assad’s government was overthrown, one of Syria’s top human rights workers has a sobering message: 100,000 missing people are almost certainly dead.

Fadel Abdulghany, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), has been working for years with a team of 21 people within Syria to record everyone who was detained or simply vanished without a trace.

As rebel forces bore down on Damascus, seizing city after city, the SNHR visited every prison and detention centre as they fell, documenting as many detainees freed from their cells as they could.

“Our records show that approximately 136,000 people were either being detained or had been forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime,” Abdulghany tells Middle East Eye. 

The figure includes more than 5,000 children.

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