DAMASCUS – Syria’s commission for missing persons said on May 30 that the children of dentist Rania al-Abbasi, who disappeared with their parents more than a decade ago under former president Bashar al-Assad, were likely dead.
The fate of the children, unknown for years, became a symbol for the plight of other missing children of detainees and those forcibly disappeared during Mr Assad’s rule, which ended with his ouster in 2024.
Dr Abbasi, who was also a Syrian chess champion, went missing along with her husband and their six children, aged three to 15, in March 2013 after government forces raided their home in Damascus, according to rights groups.
“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 National Commission for Missing Persons in Syria said in a statement.
The commission, set up by the country’s new Islamist authorities 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.
Mr Hassan al-Abbasi, Dr Abbasi’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,” Mr al-Abbasi said. “We finally saw them… but they were martyred.”
The fate of Dr Abbasi and her husband, Mr Abdul Rahman Yasin, 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 former government prisons as well as people who went missing during fighting, at checkpoints or while fleeing their homes over 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 anti-government protests by Mr Assad.
The commission said in 2025 that the number of people who went missing over decades of Assad family rule may exceed 300,000. AFP
