Syria’s Lost Children

The collapse of a dictatorship is when its subjects can finally confront the past. It’s a time for finding the disappeared, for bringing up the bodies, for holding bosses accountable, for making victims whole. It’s also a time for journalism. The public has benefited from incredible reportage after the fall of despots in Argentina, Egypt, the Soviet Union and many other places. That sort of work, exposing atrocities, is what first made me want to be a journalist.

I felt similarly galvanized by Shane Bauer’s shocking Times Magazine story about Syria, which published this morning. During the 13-year revolt against Bashar al-Assad, the regime disappeared around 100,000 people, more than any government since the Nazis. “Among the missing,” Shane writes, “are thousands of children.” Syrian families were desperate for answers, so Shane — a freelance journalist who was in Damascus to write about the new government for the Times — started investigating. I spoke to him for today’s newsletter about what he found.

How did you get onto this story?

I visited abandoned prisons of the former regime’s secret police and kept seeing signs of children — tiny sandals, clothes with cartoon characters, a doll made from cloth scraps. Then I got ahold of some documents showing that kids were being taken from these prisons and hidden away in orphanages.

In broad strokes, what happened to them?

The secret police abducted many of them with their parents and brought them to interrogation sites. Then they were placed in orphanages. The regime changed some children’s names and let them be adopted. Many were so young that they forgot who their parents were. The boys in these places were often conscripted when they came of age.

Why did the government do this?

Sometimes to punish their fathers or other male relatives, or to pressure those men to turn themselves in. The children might be released if the men surrendered. Other kids were intended never to see their families again. Some Syrians speculated that the regime changed children’s identities to disconnect them from families who were associated with the opposition, or to prevent them from looking for parents who were killed under torture.

Where were the parents all this time?

Most were either in prison or killed.

Tell us the story of Laila and Layan Ghbees.

Laila was 8 and Layan was 4 when agents of the mukhabarat, the Syrian secret police, arrested them with their parents. Their uncle was a humanitarian worker in their hometown, which was under rebel control, so the government considered him a terrorist. It eventually became clear that they’d disappeared the family to punish him. This was a common tactic. The girls spent a week in an underground prison cell with their mother, then years in orphanages run by SOS Children’s Villages, an international nonprofit. Their mother didn’t know where they were.

SOS staff helped hide the children of political prisoners.

Documents I obtained showed that the government placed them in SOS facilities under orders to conceal their identities. Relatives typically had no idea where they went. Among the few who discovered the truth, some told me that when they showed up at SOS care centers to ask for the children, staff wouldn’t even admit to having them.

They were cooperating with the government?

I found several cases in which SOS wouldn’t hand kids over — even to their parents — without explicit permission from the mukhabarat. SOS told me that it “did not intentionally contribute to the disappearance of any child.” But an internal review concluded that Syrian security services placed at least 139 children into its custody “without proper documentation.”

Were families reunified after the war?

The morning after Assad fled the country, dozens of children of political prisoners were found by their relatives in orphanages in and around Damascus. The new government has formed a committee to investigate the abductions and locate the missing kids. It’s still not clear how many are still unaccounted-for. The head of the inquiry told me “it could be hundreds.”

You have an unusual relationship to political prisons. You spent two years in one.

I was living in Damascus in 2009 when two friends and I decided to visit Iraqi Kurdistan. We went on a hike from a local tourist site and unknowingly approached the Iranian border, where officials detained us. They brought us to Evin Prison in Tehran and placed us in a ward for Iranian political prisoners. That experience motivated me to spend years reporting on prisons afterward. I even worked as a prison guard in Louisiana. I didn’t intend to write about forced disappearance when I went to Syria after the regime fell. But when my reporting brought me to these prisons, I felt oddly fortunate. Only Assad’s dungeons could make Iranian prison seem bearable.

Read Shane’s story here.

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