Former prisoners of the Saydnaya Military Prison and those close to them dance during a demonstration to celebrate their freedom and demand their right to hold their jailers accountable, at Umayyad Square in Damascus, Syria, in January. File Photo by Hasan Belal/EPA
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov. 25 (UPI) — Almost a year after the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, the fate of the tens of thousands of people who were arbitrarily arrested or forcibly disappeared since the civil war began in 2011 remains unknown.
For their families, it is a deep, unhealed wound — a continuing tragedy that leaves them with little hope of learning what truly happened, let alone whether they will ever find their loved ones, dead or alive.
This is the case for Lina Salameh and her only son, Hicham, who would have turned 32 this year. He vanished without a trace after being arrested at a checkpoint in a Damascus southern suburb in 2015.
When the peaceful anti-regime protests broke out and soon escalated into a bloody civil war, the Salameh family decided to seek refuge in neighboring Lebanon. Two years later, Hicham was forced to return to Syria to renew his travel documents.
He was stopped at the Syrian border crossing, prevented from returning to Lebanon and instructed to go back to Damascus to have his case reviewed at a Military Intelligence branch.
His mother refused to let him go to the branch, fearing he would be arrested, and she rented a new house — away from their original home in the southern suburb of Maadamiyeh — to keep him out of sight of the security services.
But he was soon arrested at a checkpoint, and “since that day, we have never heard anything about him or his fate,” she told UPI in a telephone interview from Damascus.
Hicham’s ordeal and his family’s agony was only just beginning. The only piece of information came two years later, when a prisoner released from Saydnaya Military Prison called them to confirm that Hicham had been held with him in the notorious jail.
Despite rushing to the prison and paying pro-regime lawyer, who had promised to find out whether their son was actually in Saydnaya, and paying him between $600 and $1,000, Hicham’s family was never able to see or even locate him.
Others, claiming to have good connections with security officials, demanded $25,000 to secure his release. But the family did not have that much money.
“Anyway, these were all lies,” Lina Salameh said. Like many other families, she was a victim of manipulation and financial extortion.
The U.K.-based Syrian Network for Human Rights documented more than 181,000 people who were arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned or who forcibly disappeared between March 2011 and August 2025
Its founder, Fadel Abdul Ghany, said that Syria continues to face an overwhelming crisis of missing and detained persons and “the fact that these individuals are still listed as missing does not imply they are alive.”
Abdul Ghany said his network’s analysis and statements by the new authorities suggest that surviving detainees held by the former regime have largely been released, and that no official acknowledgment has been made of remaining secret detention sites.
“In practice, this means that the vast majority of those still missing are presumed to have been killed in detention or extrajudicially executed,” he told UPI.
Abdul Ghany said Syria’s new authorities established the National Commission for Missing Persons and the Transitional Justice Commission with “broad formal mandates, but their operational performance is hampered by serious structural deficits.”
He cited key obstacles, including the failure to clearly define investigative powers and the lack of sustainable funding, which undermine their capacity to “deliver meaningful truth, accountability, or reparations.”
The commission’s independence and impartiality emerge as another issue, deepening concerns about “victor’s justice” with the focus so far heavily concentrated on the crimes committed by the former regime “with far less visible progress in addressing violations committed by armed opposition groups, extremist organizations and other non-state actors,” he added.
“Political sensitivities, fear of destabilizing the transition and the weakness of records related to non-state actors have slowed efforts to address their crimes,” he said. “As a result, databases on non-state perpetrators remain incomplete or contested, and many victims of these actors continue to be excluded from emerging accountability frameworks.”
Bissan Fakih, a Middle East campaigner with Amnesty International based in Beirut, called for “a justice process that is inclusive of everyone.”
While the Assad regime was responsible for a vast majority disappearing, it is important to recognize that armed groups in northwest Syria, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the Islamic State, also were responsible, Fakih said.
“Their families are not in less agony. They also deserve answers,” she told UPI.
Despite the chaos in the first days after Assad’s fall, with families storming prisons to search for their loved ones, Faqih said there was “much evidence” about the missing people in documents found in jails, hospitals and government institutions.
“To date, we haven’t seen actual practical steps to start the search for the disappeared,” she said, noting that DNA testing has not yet begun, despite the excavation of dozens of mass graves across Syria.
She emphasized the need to ensure that existing evidence is protected and analyzed correctly, adding that there are “dozens, even hundreds, of witnesses to these crimes,” including former prison guards who also hold important information.
This evidence would be crucial for Lina Salameh and for the thousands of families who have been unable to find any trace of their loved ones — not even their names or identification cards — in any of the prisons, hospitals or government records.
For many years, she tried to stop thinking about her son and whether he had been tortured or killed with acid. However, she clings to the small hope that “he will come one day, knock on my door and I will be able to see him.”
Khaled Arnous, several of whose relatives and hundreds of others disappeared in war-torn Maadamiyeh on the outskirts of Damascus, said they were now all convinced that 99% of the missing had been killed and “became martyrs,” although no burial place for them is known.
Arnous, whose son was killed in 2013 during clashes and is body recovered, said he used to comfort his wife by saying, “At least we know where he is buried and can go pray at his tomb.”
He added: “We mostly felt that Assad’s fall, the end of his suppression, and the victory of the revolution somehow eased our pain,.”
He recalled that most of the arrests and killings under the former regime were arbitrary, targeting people from specific regions, even though they had nothing to do with the revolution and did not carry arms.
The arrest of several former Saydnaya prison officials and guards accused of severe human rights abuses, torture and extrajudicial executions has raised families’ hopes for justice.
“They should be tried for sure…. They should pay the price for what they did to our children, and feel the same pain.” Lina Salameh said. “Only God knows how much they tortured them and how they killed them.”
To Fakih, justice is not just possible. She said it is the duty of the Syrian government to achieve it for all the victims of the Syrian conflict.