Mideast: Families Continue To Wait For Answers as Syria’s Investigation Into al-Assad Disappearances Stalls
OMAR ALBAW
While the al-Assad regime has not ruled Syria for nearly two years, the pain and suffering it caused has not been forgotten by the loved ones of the more than 160,000 Syrians who the regime forcibly disappeared since 2011. They must now rely on the work of the new Syrian government and the humanitarian organizations leading investigations into the regime’s innumerable abuses, systematic torture and murder, and forced disappearances. As of September 2026, however, that work has struggled to produce answers and has stalled in the face of funding shortfalls, leaving scores still waiting and desperate to understand where their loved ones went and what happened to them.
What Syria and its people seek answers to is the single largest contemporary case of mass forced disappearances in the world. It spans decades and touches essentially every corner of the country, from large cities like Damascus to the rural countryside, from fortified state detention complexes to makeshift interrogation hubs found everywhere from warehouses and basements to schools and hospitals. The harm and immense suffering inflicted reached essentially the entire populace, with humanitarian organizations concluding virtually every single Syrian family had at least one member subjected to violence or torture at the hands of the regime.
Over five decades, al-Assad and his collaborators established an internal security and policing apparatus that did not merely tolerate human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, but instead made them an intrinsic part of how it functioned. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria called them “systematic violations of international law,” and made explicitly clear that this treatment under the al-Assad regime was not the exception, but the rule. While the systematic torture, murder, and disappearances pervaded Syria long before the start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, with an estimated 300,000 people disappeared in total over the entire five decades of the al-Assad regime, between 2011 and 2019 alone 1.2 million people were detained, and very likely tortured, by the regime. It is estimated that around 1 million Syrians today are survivors of the torture by the al-Assad government.
For the tens of thousands that did not survive, the answers as to what happened to them and their bodies are slow to be uncovered. Since the fall of the regime in December 2024, human rights investigators, international monitoring organizations, and local teams have documented between as many as 88 mass grave sites, with the International Commission on Missing Persons formally confirming the existence of 71 of these sites. Some large-scale sites, such as the Al-Qutayfah Site, hold an estimated 100,000 people, many of whose bodies bear the signs of torture. Forensic experts on the ground estimate that fully exhuming, examining, and identifying all the bodies from even a single mass grave could take four years, making the complete investigation the work of decades — but with the current difficulties facing the exhumations and investigations, it could well take even longer.
The task of finding out what happened to thousands of individuals, now years or even decades after the fact, would be a significantly difficult task for any government, and the new Syrian government is no exception. It grapples with an undertaking so large the International Center for Transitional Justice has called it “the most complex missing persons case in modern history,” all while it also seeks to ensure a long-lasting transition to democracy as well as rebuild a gutted economy and its internal infrastructure. As such, the new government remains pressed for both fiscal and non-fiscal resources.
With limited means to complete investigations and forensic procedures needed to identify and separate remains from graves that held many people’s bodies, the undertaking has essentially ground to a halt. Currently, Syria only has one lab that can test DNA, and the costs associated with testing the DNA of not only the remains but also the families who are desperate to be matched to their missing loved ones are extremely steep; as one DNA test costs roughly $250 and remains that have been mixed with others during decomposition can require numerous tests to be matched, the price tag of such a project is staggering. As the Syrian Identification Center is of very limited financial means and the forensic work itself is largely dependent on donated funds, this produces a fundamental block in moving identifications forward.
To the benefit of the investigation, the vast majority of the meticulous records kept by the al-Assad regime — detailing detainment, torture, death, and even including pictures of the deceased — survived the overthrow and provide a papertrail of what happened, including one dossier that includes more than 134,000 records. Cataloguing, analyzing, and incorporating all remaining records into investigations, however, remains a massive undertaking, and one that is complicated by the need to protect the documents from unauthorized leaks and degradation.
As such, while the desire of the Syrian people is, no doubt, extremely great for the investigations to continue unobstructed and those who were disappeared to be identified as quickly as possible, the new government simply does not possess the means to accomplish such a momentous task rapidly and likely will not for quite some time. With that, families who have already waited years to receive answers have no choice but to continue to wait.
