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Dead or Detained? A Private Hell for the Families of Syria’s Missing

Thousands of people are missing in Syria, their whereabouts unknown.

Written by Karen Leigh Published on Read time Approx. 3 minutes

The Damascus office of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) regularly fields requests from family members attempting to locate their loved ones and tracks their cases with government authorities.Rina Kamal, the ICRC’s spokeswoman in the Syrian capital, told Syria Deeply about the scope of the problem, why the number of missing is increasing and why so many families are unable to get information.

This year so far we’ve received 1,000 requests from people whose relatives are presumed to be detained or missing, and that number has increased from last year. We are aware that the total number of people missing out there is greater than what we have. Not every family turns to us, and there are thousands of families battling this uncertainty [of a missing loved one]. It is challenging to put a credible number on how many are missing.

The main reason behind the blurriness of the figures is that the Syrian authorities do not provide statistics on how many they have detained, nor do the different armed opposition groups do it either. The ICRC, which would normally, in global conflicts, have access to places of detention, does not currently visit places of detention in Syria despite its wish to do so. Discussions with Syrian authorities on this matter have been very slow and have not resulted in a prison visitation program yet. So it’s hard to give a credible figure and to know for sure the number missing or detained.

You have a big overlap in people who could be missing, detained or dead. When you talk about a “missing person” in Syria, you are talking about a person who could be any of those three.

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Detention facilities worldwide usually include central prisons, and interrogation centers and temporary internment facilities for the different security services. We are not in a position to say how many people are dead or detained, and this is very unfortunate. This is where we are attempting to talk to Syrian authorities to effectuate prison visits, but the progress has been slow.

[The ICRC] did visit two central prisons in Syria, one in Damascus in 2011 and one in Aleppo in 2012. Both were central prisons in which people usually arrested on criminal charges are held.

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It is really people from everywhere, from all walks of life. Young men, old men, women, under-18s. There are also cases of foreign journalists reported missing. It’s a wide range of people. Absent of information on their whereabouts and circumstances of disappearance, it’s difficult to say who the targets are. It is difficult to speak about patterns or to talk in generic terms. A few cases are linked to the rising crime in the country, the kidnapping for ransoms and so forth.

Of our 1,000 cases, 800 are presumed detained. The fate of the other 200 remains unclear. The majority of people reported detained to us are, according to their families, presumed to be detained by the Syrian authorities. But the armed opposition groups do have internment facilities and they are increasingly holding people in their custody, too. According to international law, any detaining authority should report on the identifications and whereabouts of these people. These obligations are unfortunately not reflected in Syria today.

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We have been able to find quite a lot of people. I wouldn’t say it’s a satisfactory rate. If you have 1,000, you want to find all 1,000. We submit these requests regularly to Syrian authorities, and at times we have had replies to one-third or half or even two-thirds of the requests, and we can bring news to the family that their son or daughter is alive. It’s wonderful news to hear when you think they’re dead. It means a lot to us to be able to close just one case. We have also submitted similar requests to some of the armed opposition groups. It is important to highlight that armed opposition groups are also holding people captive, and that we are requesting that they, too, specify people’s whereabouts.

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You have an overlap in the number of people reported dead and missing. If you look at the overall number of fatalities in Syria in the last year, you have an increase. So the “missing” number increases overall, and that includes people who are dead and have disappeared. A lot of people are buried without identification. Last summer the conflict entered into a different phase with increasing violations on all sides, and this will be accompanied by an increase in problems like the number of people reported missing or detained.

Life is so different, really, in government areas. There’s still some normalcy. At times, you can rarely see or feel the conflict. It’s two parallel worlds. Some people come to government-controlled areas of Damascus and wonder where the conflict is.

I want to highlight how difficult it is not to know where your son or daughter is. When a person is dead, you can put the mourning process behind you and move on. But these families wake up every day not knowing this is the day they might hear something. The media is talking about the number of people killed, about atrocities, but this is not brought into the open.

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