Bashar al-Assad

Syrian commission confirms the deaths of Rania al-Abbasi’s six children, missing since 2013 under Bashar al-Assad’s rule.

Syria’s National Commission for Missing Persons (NCMP) says the children of dentist and former chess champion Rania al‑Abbasi, who disappeared with their parents more than a decade ago under then-President Bashar al-Assad, are likely dead.

“We have reached reliable and corroborating results that allow us to conclude with a high degree of professional certainty that Dr Rania al-Abbasi’s children are deceased,” the NCMP said in a statement on Saturday.

The fate of the children, unknown for years, became a symbol of the plight of other missing children of detainees and those forcibly disappeared during al-Assad’s rule, which ended with his ouster in 2024.

Al-Abbasi went missing along with her husband, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and their six children, aged three to 15, in March 2013 after government forces raided their home in Damascus, according to rights groups.

The commission, set up by the country’s new rulers in May 2025 to investigate missing and forcibly disappeared people, said its findings were “based on multiple verification and analysis procedures” conducted in coordination with national authorities.

“Efforts to find the remains … are still ongoing,” it added.

Hassan al-Abbasi, Rania’s brother, confirmed the children’s deaths in a video posted on Facebook.

He said the family had been able to view video recordings linked to the main suspect in a 2013 massacre in a Damascus district, including one showing him accusing children in a dark room of being “major financiers of terrorism”.

“They turned out to be our children,” Hassan al-Abbasi said. “We finally saw them … but they were martyred.”

The fate of Rania and her husband remains officially unknown after all contact with them was lost following their arrest on accusations linked to opposition to the Assad government.

Rights groups and media reports suggest they may have died, though their bodies were never found.

The issue of missing people remains one of the most pressing in Syria. They include detainees who vanished in government prisons as well as people who went missing during fighting, at checkpoints or while fleeing their homes over the years of civil war.

Tens of thousands of people were detained or disappeared during the war, which erupted in 2011 after a brutal crackdown on antigovernment protests by al-Assad.

The NCMP said last year that the number of people who went missing over decades of al-Assad family rule may exceed 300,000.

Notorious al-Assad regime figure linked to killings

Separately on Saturday, the Syrian Ministry of Interior said its investigation into the disappearance of al-Abbasi’s children had uncovered evidence linking Amjad Youssef – a notorious figure during al-Assad’s rule and the perpetrator of the 2013 Tadamon massacre – to their killing.

In a statement, it said interrogations of detainees, together with videos and information shared by the NCMP, had helped strengthen the case.

Youssef was arrested in April, prompting many Syrians to demand “just punishment” for a man they say carried out the massacre in cold blood.

The Tadamon case drew international attention after footage surfaced documenting the killings.

In 2022, The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom published footage it said had been leaked by a conscript in a pro-government militia showing members of the Assad-era Military Intelligence Branch 227 killing at least 41 people and burning their bodies.

The video showed an intelligence officer, identified as Youssef, shooting blindfolded and bound detainees.

Atef Najib, former head of political security in the Deraa province, is charged with ‘crimes against the Syrian people’.

Syria has begun its first public trial of officials who served under longtime leader Bashar al-Assad, 15 years after the start of the civil war.

Trial proceedings opened in Damascus on Sunday for Atef Najib, the former head of political security in southern Syria’s Deraa province.

He is accused of overseeing a violent crackdown on protesters there during the 2011 uprising, and faces charges related to “crimes against the Syrian people”, according to Syria’s state-run news agency, SANA.

Najib, who is a cousin of al-Assad, was the sole defendant in court for Sunday’s preparatory session of the trial set to continue next month.

Charged in their absence are Al-Assad and his brother, Maher, former commander of the Syrian military’s 4th Armoured Division. Along with other former high-ranking security officials also charged in absentia, they are accused of killings, torture, extortion and drug trafficking.

Crowds gathered outside the court on Sunday in celebration, as families of victims, including some from Deraa, attended the session.

Speaking to Al Jazeera Mubasher, a spokesman for Syria’s Justice Ministry said holding the trial in public was important to ensure transparency and judicial independence as part of the transitional justice process.

Najib oversaw political security in Deraa when teenagers who scrawled antigovernment graffiti on a school wall in Deraa were arrested and tortured, in a case that became a catalyst for the broader uprising.

Further protests were met by a brutal government crackdown and spiralled into a 14-year civil war that ended with al-Assad’s overthrow in December 2024 in a lightning rebel offensive. Al-Assad then fled to Russia, and most members of his inner circle have also escaped Syria.

The government of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa has faced criticism over delays in launching a promised transitional justice process following the civil war, in which an estimated half a million people were killed. But authorities now appear to be moving more aggressively to prosecute officials linked to al-Assad.

On Friday, Syrian authorities arrested former intelligence officer Amjad Yousef, the main suspect accused of the 2013 Tadamon massacre in Damascus, when at least 41 people were killed.

In 2022, a leaked video appeared to show Youssef shooting civilians who had been detained and blindfolded, with their hands bound.