Content warning: This piece includes images of deceased people and contains content that may distress.
Editor’s note: Last week, a rapid rebel offensive to the five-decade-long despotic rule of the Assad family in Syria. Former , who will go down in history for brutal suppression of pro-democratic protests and war crimes against the Syrian people, has fled to Moscow.
After rebel forces captured the Syrian capital of Damascus, they opened the doors of the Sednaya prison, where political prisoners were routinely tortured and executed. Videos circulating on social media show prisoners pouring out of crowded cells and cheering in jubilation, many barefoot and emaciated, in disbelief that they were free, and Assad was gone.
Outside, families of the imprisoned for news about their loved ones.
Over the years, tens of thousands of Syrians have disappeared inside prisons like Sednaya. In 2023, Dateline profiled two families and their search to discover the fates of their missing relatives.
Growing up in Syria’s northeastern city of Deir Ezzor, Yasmen Almashan and her six brothers lived a peaceful life.
They would play card games together and make figurines out of mud, acting out made-up stories.
“We once made flying ships for space invaders,” Yasmen says. “Like what we’d seen in science fiction movies.”
Source: Supplied / Yasmen Almashan
Yasmen recalls her hometown being deeply conservative but says her brothers were always challenging tradition.
“They spoiled me a lot,” she says. “I was given a lot of freedom.”
“Few girls in the Middle East have what I had, to be honest.”
When Yasmen had finished her high school exams, her brothers were so proud that they took her out for dinner.
“This was a rare thing in my city — for brothers to organise a luxurious dinner for their sister in a restaurant.”
For Yasmen, these moments were filled with “unimaginable love”.
But as war broke out, the unimagined inched closer.
Twelve years after pro-democracy protesters first rallied against the regime of Bashar al-Assad,
Bashar al-Assad was re-elected as Syria’s president in 2022, gaining over 95 per cent of the vote. It’s estimated that eight million Syrians, mostly displaced people, refrained from casting votes.
United States and European authorities questioned the legitimacy of the result — claiming it violated United Nations resolutions designed to resolve the conflict and highlighting the lack of international monitoring.
Since 2011, the country has seen the rise of various rebel groups, revived extremist outposts, and foreign forces reeled into a complex proxy war.
Amidst their competing interests, areas of control shifted constantly.
Credit: The Carter Center
The battle for control crippled the country’s institutions and , making it the largest refugee crisis of our time.
The war also claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, tearing families apart.
Amidst the chaos and carnage, Yasmen lost five of her six brothers.
“Losing them wasn’t a simple or easy loss,” she says.
“It is not normal to lose three-quarters of your family in the blink of an eye.”
Yasmen’s brothers who were killed or disappeared. From top left to right. Source: Supplied
In the recent earthquake, Yasmen also lost her cousin and their family of five children.
She has been shaken by violence and loss at every turn.
But it was Oqba’s disappearance, and the uncertainty of his fate, that weighed most heavily on her.
Forced disappearances
Enforced disappearance is an international crime.
It is typically characterised by three key elements: depriving someone of their liberty, involvement of government officials, and concealment of the victim’s fate
In Syria, families seeking information about their loved ones often describe deliberate deflection by authorities and sometimes, as in Yasmen’s case, intimidation tactics.
“We were always either faced by threats or someone warning us to stop asking about him,” she says.
It’s the combination of these elements that makes a disappearance particularly distressing to both the victim and those searching for them. Because of this, disappearance is often described as having a “double paralysis” effect.
Cumulative number of people disappeared by the regime. Credit: Syrian Network for Human Rights
Victims like Oqba who are disappeared from the protection of the law are often subjected to humiliation and torture.
At the other end, their families wait for news that may never come.
Enforced disappearances are not anomalies.
They are frequently used in conflicts to systematically sow fear, suppress political dissent, and destabilise communities.
According to the latest report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, 137 people, including six children and three women, were arbitrarily arrested or disappeared in February alone.
The majority of disappearances that continue to this day are carried out by the regime.
The details of Oqba’s disappearance and his fate may have remained a mystery had it not been for Yasmen’s tenacity and a whistleblower that changed the course of her search.
The Caesar files
Code-named Caesar, a military defector smuggled 53,275 photographs out of Syria in late 2013. He was the official forensic photographer for the Syrian authorities.
This cache of images would come to be known as the Caesar files.
Amongst the photographs, evidence of crimes against humanity — images of detainees who reportedly died from torture, starvation, beatings and disease in Syrian regime facilities.
Source: Supplied / Caesar Families Association
Yasmen’s brother Oqba was among the dead.
One of 6,786 victims was eventually identified in the photographs.
For Yasmen, learning Oqba’s fate was agonising, but the pain was made worse by losing more of her brothers while she waited for news.
“We waited and waited for so long and this caused so many losses,” she says.
“If we knew of his death when it happened, maybe we would have left Syria before we lost Tishreen, Obaida and Bashar.”
In the depths of her grief, Yasmen was haunted by the injustice of it all.
“One way to survive and move on from the tragedy…was to find a purpose or a goal,” she says.
“I could have collapsed and retreated to a corner in my house crying and wailing all day. But I know this will not help me or bring back my brothers.
“I found that the best way to continue with my life and to honour my brothers is to prevent other families from suffering my loss or experiencing my tragedy.”
Now living in Germany, she is fighting for the right to know what happened to tens of thousands of missing people in Syria and to hold those responsible accountable.
“A right is never lost, as long as someone strives to claim it.”
Source: Supplied / Yasmen Almashan
Yasmen’s brothers left behind 20 family members who she felt compelled to take care of.
Much like hers, thousands of other families have faced loss and the despair of not knowing the fate of their loved ones.
With this in mind, in 2018, she banded together with other relatives of those identified in the defector’s photographs and co-founded the Caesar Families Association (CFA).
CFA developed facial recognition software that spares families the trauma of searching through photos, looking for identifiers such as scars, birthmarks, tattoos or unique facial features.
Missing father
For Ezzat Alian and his brother Mohamad, searching for their father was a painstaking process.
When they were only young teens, their father Khaled was arrested by Syrian government authorities in Damascus in January 2013.
Source: Supplied / Ezzat Alian
“I can remember every moment,” Ezzat says.
“When they arrested my father, he had all our money. He wanted to bring it to the hospital for my uncle because he had a gunshot in his foot.
“[The regime] thought he was going to give that money to opposition fighters.”
Khaled was taken to a regime prison and was never seen again.
For two years and two months, the Alian family waited for news.
“There were people that said they had information about him, but they were all liars,” Ezzat says.
The turbulence of not knowing was unbearable, as his family tossed between hope and despair.
“Keeping waiting is burning hearts,” he says.
It wasn’t until they trawled through the Caesar Files that they discovered his fate.
It was Mohamad who went through the photos individually, searching for his father.
“I had to scroll through a lot of pictures of mutilated faces and tortured bodies,” Mohamad says.
Source: Supplied / Ezzat Alian
“I remember I saw hundreds of pictures and they were all the same, all with bruises and faces full of blood. But my father’s face was different, I recognised him immediately.
“I felt that he was smiling at me in that photo. Others might see him as the rest of the faces in those pictures, but he was different to me.”
For years they kept their hope alive, hoping they would find he had survived. But like many of those identified in the Caesar Files, Khaled had met an early death.
“He died after just 15 days in prison,” Ezzat says.
Despite the heartbreak, the brothers feel grateful to know their father’s fate.
“I think we are still lucky to at least have his [prisoner] number with the date he died, because many families are still looking for this information, more than 10 years on,” Ezzat says.
But there are still many unanswered questions for Ezzat and Mohamad.
“I want to know what rights my father had.
“Until now, we still don’t know if they buried him respectfully or not.”
After hearing about its mission to gather data on missing persons, Ezzat contacted the Caesar Families Association to try to find these answers.
Credit: Syrian Network for Human Rights
Searching for truth and justice
As new reports continue to flow in, CFA’s work remains a key resource for those left behind. But the team not only helps those whose relatives have been disappeared by the regime, but by any group across Syria.
“I thought no one should go through what I experienced and lose so many people,” Yasmen says.
There are a host of organisations fulfilling various roles in the search for missing persons — each one a different link in the chain.
Some gather information for the purpose of prosecution, others purely collect testimony from former detainees.
“It is a complex operation,” Yasmen explains.
Source: Supplied / Yasmen Almashan
And so CFA, together with a collective of other groups, launched the Truth and Justice Charter and began to lobby the UN for an international body dedicated to their cause.
“Having one institution that unites the multiple efforts aimed at revealing the fate of the disappeared and preserving evidence is crucial.”
“It would also help to significantly reduce the suffering of victims’ families, by providing one centralised place for families to turn to when they seek answers about their missing loved ones.”
After years of silence from the international community, in late 2022 UN Secretary-General António Guterres recommended the creation of such an institution.
At the time of writing, Yasmen is preparing to fly to New York to meet with representatives from Argentina, Chile and Mexico, all throwing their support behind the now-global initiative.
Yasmen has had to appear before the UN, lawyers and decision-makers numerous times to recount the loss of her brothers and she describes how devastating it still feels.
“Nothing is easy about telling my story,” she says.
“I try not to cry … so I don’t look weak. I know there is nothing shameful about crying, but it is important to stay strong to encourage them to make initiatives and take action.
Source: Supplied / Yasmen Almashan
“I don’t want them to comfort me and say ‘Oh, poor Yasmen, you made us cry.’ No, I don’t want this. I want them to take effective steps.”
Beyond procedural justice, Yasmen hopes it will bring closure to families who have spent years waiting for truths that have been kept from them.
Changing one’s story
Despite the tragedies they have endured, Ezzat says his family will recover and he is determined to change his story.
His family fled the war and came to Australia, settling in Adelaide, where Ezzat is now studying to become a pilot.
“It has been my dream since childhood,” he says.
“Whenever I heard the sound of a plane flying in the sky, I would look at it and watch it as it was flying. I loved living in the sky and among the clouds.
“I always imagine myself sitting in the cockpit, flying through the clouds, feeling joy and pride in what I’m doing with something I love.”
More than his own dream, he hopes it will mean something for his father.
“I will make him proud.”
Source: Supplied / Ezzat Alian
To those still seeking information about their loved ones, he leans on what brought his family some peace.
“Just be patient and the truth will appear.”
Watch more of Dateline’s coverage on Syria
