The incoming president, William Ruto, promised that the new Social Health Authority (SHA) would bring affordable healthcare to all. In reality, Kenyans took to social media in shock and anger over the cost of insurance that the AI model was setting for them.

The AI system asks dozens of questions about how people live and what they own, then uses machine learning to make a prediction of their income based on their answers. A percentage of this predicted income is then set as their annual health payment.

We used a combination of access-to-information requests and government data to reconstruct how the government designed the prediction system, spoke to inside sources about its implementation, and obtained a previously unreported document describing where it went wrong. Our findings reveal in unprecedented detail how, from the start, it was designed to systematically overcharge the poorest Kenyans, while undercharging the wealthiest.

Increasingly, governments around the world are deploying AI in efforts to increase revenue and efficiency. Those implementing them understand that they come with inbuilt biases. In the context of access to healthcare, these biases can mean the difference between life or death.

METHODS

SHA’s AI system uses a machine learning model to analyse indicators (the answers to questions about how people live) and make a prediction of their income, based on a training dataset in the form of a household survey carried out in 2020. The government published the formula it would use for making the prediction, but not the details of the indicators or the training set. We made access to information requests for these. Under pressure from the Ombudsman, SHA released these details, which we used to build our own machine learning model to replicate and test their one.

We also uncovered a previously unseen report by a team of consultants who proposed a set of adjustments to the system. We refined our model to implement these changes and test what effects they had.

Our replication of SHA’s model was peer reviewed by leading academics at the University of Kent, Georgetown University and Delft University of Technology. We have written a full methodology here.

STORYLINES

Every day, Grace* sits in people’s homes and asks them questions. What type of toilet do you use? What is your roof made of? Do you own a radio? She helps them fill the answers into an online form. When the process is complete a number comes back: the sum the AI system dictates the household must pay that year for public health insurance.

Grace is a Community Health Promoter, working with marginalised people to help them access healthcare. The people she registers are some of the poorest in Nairobi, yet the majority are charged premiums they cannot afford. For some, this has meant they can no longer access life-saving medical treatment. “People are dying at home, many people have been unable to go to hospital,” Grace said. “Will they pay SHA, or pay for food, or pay for the small house they live in?”

Peris Nduta faces the same choice. Until last year she scratched a living as a mama fua, washing other people’s clothes. But when a fall left her with a broken leg needing metal pins, she found she could no longer work. The AI system set a premium for her that she couldn’t understand. Friends helped her make an initial payment but, now jobless, she could not maintain it to cover ongoing treatment and medication. “The priority is for my children to eat,” she said, “not to pay for SHA.”

In Huruma, a poor neighborhood on the northeastern outskirts of Nairobi, Africa Uncensored spoke to Florence Atieno about how she had struggled to pay the SHA premium when pregnant. She hoped that the automated appeal line could help her reduce her burden. But it was denied, without a reason given.

The post Hiding Behind AI appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

In an official statement, Mayotte’s police claimed the small boat’s pilots had “deliberately rammed” the police vessel. The two kwassa pilots were sentenced to three years in prison.

But a video and police testimony obtained by Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and Komune raise serious doubts about the official account.

The 30-second segment, filmed by a police officer, shows their boat closing in until it is directly alongside the kwassa. A passenger appears to throw a stone. An officer then uses a hooked pole to try to tear away a fuel line from one of the engines. At that exact moment, one of the two pilots (wearing a red shirt in the video) is seen releasing the helm.

The kwassa abruptly loses speed, spins and slides under the police boat. A flashlight beam cuts through the darkness. Passengers are already in the water as the vessel goes down. An officer shouts: “Shit – overboard, overboard!”

During the investigation, a policeman said their use of the hook was what caused a pilot to let go of the helm: “I was approaching, and to avoid the hook, the helmsman who was on the right-hand side of the boat let go of the 75-horsepower engine, causing their boat to veer sharply towards us”, he said, “their boat started taking on water, the passengers panicked and all went to the same side, which caused the boat to capsize.”

An officer stated that while he was trying to rescue a four-year-old girl, a passenger used the girl for leverage to climb aboard and he saw her eyes ‘roll back.’ She was taken to hospital in a critical condition. Earlier this week, the prosecutor of Mayotte confirmed she was out of danger.

The incident is part of a broader pattern. In September 2025, we revealed that French authorities in Mayotte routinely used aggressive interception tactics such as collisions, encirclement and wave generation despite the absence of any formal doctrine permitting these practices. We found that multiple shipwrecks and at least 25 deaths, including one as recently as March, have resulted from these interceptions, highlighting the risks.

METHODS

We obtained and analysed previously unseen footage filmed by a police officer. We cross-checked the footage against judicial hearings including police accounts to identify inconsistencies. In parallel, we interviewed lawyers and survivors to gather accounts of the interceptions. We also spoke to experts and police officers who provided technical assessments of the tactics used at sea.

STORYLINES

A month after the incident visible on the video we obtained, on March 28, 2026, a similar interception took place. This time it ended with the death of a passenger.

Officers say the kwassa’s pilot refused to stop and endangered those on board. They describe attempting to stop the engine by disconnecting the fuel line. They claim the pilot then made a sharp 90-degree turn into their path, causing the collision. The small boat took on water and capsized.

Among those thrown into the sea were three children, including a nine-month-old baby, five women and a 73-year-old man. Twenty-four people were rescued. Hidaya B., a woman in her fifties from Anjouan in Comoros, suffered head injuries and could not be revived.

Survivors interviewed, now held in a detention centre in Mayotte, blame the police’s maneuvers. “The police capsized our boat,” said Farid S., who alleges the victim’s head was crushed by the interceptor’s engine.

“They overturned us,” said another passenger, Ahmed S., 21.

A third survivor, Anzidine M., described officers “hitting the pilot on the arms with metal poles” and crashing into the kwassa before “driving straight over it”, adding: “There was blood everywhere.” Eleven passengers have filed civil complaints, according to their lawyer, Céline Cooper.

Responding to our questions, the Prosecutor of Mayotte said an investigation had been opened against the smugglers for aggravated manslaughter and aggravated aiding and abetting of immigration.

The Police meanwhile declined to answer our questions, but five officers were decorated for their intervention on March 28th. “Faced with the absolute emergency of shipwreck victims unable to swim,” officials stated, “the crew members of the interceptor showed exemplary courage by immediately jumping in to assist the victims and deploying rescue equipment.”

The post Caught on camera : French police cause capsize appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

But in Tennessee, where Republicans hold a supermajority in both state legislative chambers, many elected officials have welcomed ICE with open arms. GOP Gov. Bill Lee and other state leaders have actively paired state police with ICE agents, offering the federal agency a powerful force multiplier.

In May, a week-long enforcement effort dubbed “Operation Flood the Zone” that teamed Tennessee Highway Patrol with ICE on the streets of Nashville, signaled a new level of cooperation between state leaders and the Trump administration. Nine months after the state and federal operation, Nashville residents are still searching for answers about who was taken and deported, and the role that Tennessee played in targeting residents.

In the wake of the Nashville operation, state and federal officials turned their sights on Memphis, launching the “Memphis Safe Task Force.” More than 1,500 federal agents are still working alongside hundreds of state troopers and the National Guard. City leaders and residents in both Nashville and Memphis say they have received little information from the state or the White House about these collaborations.

Lighthouse Reports in partnership with Mother Jones, the Nashville Banner, Nashville Noticias, NewsChannel 5 and the Institute for Public Service Reporting spent six months collecting and analyzing data, including thousands of pages of ICE documents, hundreds of criminal court records and Tennessee Highway Patrol incident reports. We also examined 50-plus hours of Tennessee Highway Patrol dashcam and bodycam footage. We found that 75 percent of those detained in Nashville had no criminal record, and that state troopers and ICE appeared to racially profile Latino drivers. Troopers chose to ignore traffic violations to continue helping ICE, and they targeted neighborhoods with the largest number of Latino and immigrant families. For the first time, using a vast federal database, the investigation was also able to track those targeted, from their arrests on the street through the immigration detention system and onto deportation planes. Then, when federal and state officials moved their operation from Nashville to Memphis, we followed them, analyzing hundreds of pages of arrest affidavits to find that dangerous high-speed chases, initiated by state troopers deployed to the city to work alongside ICE, increased by more than 400 percent during the first five weeks of the “Memphis Safe Task Force.”

METHODS

To determine who was arrested during the May 2025 Nashville operation, we dug into more than a million ICE records released by the Deportation Data Project. The data trove contains anonymized individual-level ICE records covering arrests, detainers, and detentions from September 2023 to October 2025, in addition to encounters and removals data from September 2023 to July 2025.

By combining these data with bystander video, interviews, police dashcam and bodycam footage, and highway patrol incident reports, we reconstructed the anatomy of the operation carried out by ICE and Tennessee Highway Patrol. This allowed us to follow people through the deportation pipeline from arrest to deportation.

By analyzing bystander video, police video, and geocoordinates in Highway Patrol incident reports we were able to map the areas of Nashville targeted by state troopers and ICE.

Additionally, in Memphis we reviewed hundreds of arrest affidavits filed over the first five weeks of the Memphis Safe Task Force from September 29 to November 3. By isolating “evading arrest” charges we identified 75 separate vehicle pursuits.

STORYLINES

During a Nashville press conference, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said of the people arrested: “All of these criminals are evil, they’re horrible human beings, they’re the worst of the worst.” In reality, 75 percent of those detained had never committed a crime, and some were in the process of becoming legal U.S. residents.

Leugim Romero was on his way home after working a late shift when he was stopped by THP and ICE. From Venezuela, Romero had filed for asylum and was in the U.S. legally. Examining the police video, we discovered that ICE accused Romero of being part of the gang Tren de Aragua because he had tattoos. Romero has since been deported to Venezuela.

Tennessee Highway Patrol officers used traffic stop pretexts such as bent license plates, unlit temporary tags, and dark window tints to pull people over, so that ICE, which can’t make routine traffic stops, could check their immigration status—and bypass constitutional and legal protections. During the stops, some ICE agents were masked and carried assault rifles and “window punches,” in case drivers refused to roll down their windows.

In Nashville, the majority of people arrested and deported were Latino. Troopers and ICE agents appeared to racially profile drivers during the operation. “This might fill us up,” says a state trooper to an ICE agent in his squad car. “They’re definitely not English speakers.” Records also show that the traffic stops resulted in few criminal or traffic law enforcement actions, despite Tennessee officials and ICE claiming the enforcement was for public safety and to arrest the “worst of the worst.”

Elsewhere in Tennessee, during the first five weeks of the Memphis Safe Task Force operation, dangerous high-speed pursuits initiated by Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers increased by 400 percent. Troopers sent to Memphis are working alongside ICE and other federal agents. In one case, a pursuit lasted for a quarter-hour, as troopers at high speeds pursued a blue Chevy Malibu with a woman and infant inside. The vehicle struck a trooper’s squad car, then a telephone pole. The pursuit was initiated because the driver had “failed to dim his bright lights.”

The post License to Profile appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Both sides have targeted civilians with unimaginable brutality. The US State Department has sanctioned RSF leadership for ethnically-targeted atrocities and genocide. The EU has also sanctioned the RSF and its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo for grave human rights abuses. Crimes against civilians by the RSF have been widely documented. The army’s leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is also sanctioned but Burhan has managed to keep the alleged crimes his forces have committed in the shadows while redirecting war crimes allegations to the RSF.

In a monthslong investigation in collaboration with CNN and distributed in Sudan War Monitor and Trouw, Lighthouse Reports and CNN can reveal evidence of the Sudanese Armed Forces’ systematic targeting of civilians in al Jazira state on an ethnic basis.

In early 2025, after more than a year under the occupation of the RSF, the central city of Wad Madani in al Jazira state was re-taken by SAF. SAF announced a cleanup operation of the city and surrounding “rebel pockets.”

In reality, the Sudanese Armed Forces and Islamist-backed allied militias including the Sudan Shield Forces used the operation in Madani as a pretext to launch an operation targeting non-Arab civilians across al Jazira state. Attacks on these communities began in October 2024 in the leadup to the campaign to retake Madani and continued for several months after SAF regained Madani.

Sudanese farmers in al Jazira state are known as the Kanabi, a farming community largely of non-Arab, Black Sudanese descent. Much of this community is from Darfur and Kordofan and moved to al Jazira state in the 1950s as labourers. They have long been marginalised by the Arab-led state due to their ethnicity and live in villages called kambos. The same ethnic divisions that have plagued Sudan since the state-led Darfur genocide in the early 2000’s have driven the marginalisation of the Kanabi for decades. SAF capitalised on these divisions in part to target the Kanabi and drive them from their land in their vicious early 2025 campaign.

Our joint investigation uncovered extensive evidence of ethnic violence, mass killings, and dumping of bodies into mass graves and canals.

The verification of hundreds of video, satellite imagery analysis and exclusive, on-the-ground interviews with SAF whistleblowers and survivors of attacks in different kambos reveals a harrowing picture of a targeted military campaign against civilians, the unleashing of undisciplined SAF-aligned paramilitary groups, and hurried efforts to hide evidence of their crimes.

SAF and the General Intelligence Service didn’t respond to our questions about our investigation. The Sudan Shield Forces stated that their forces are not targeting civilians based on their ethnicity and that their troops ‘strictly adhere to the rules of their engagement and International Humanitarian Law’.

Lighthouse Reports and CNN spoke to several high-level sources who all indicated that the orders for the campaign came from the highest ranks of SAF and influential Islamists who exert pressure on SAF leadership.

METHODS

Our primary sources, which included exclusive interviews with survivors and whistleblowers, informed two databases that we created to organize and store crime base and linkage evidence. The first contains nearly 600 archived open-source visual materials from social media platforms such as Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp, and occasionally X, which we made searchable by thumbnail and thematic tags related to the type of atrocity crime. The second contains location, date, and descriptive information on kambo attacks. It links visual evidence with rural geolocations and witness testimonies. This database contains additional references to secondary sources, including satellite imagery, fire data, historical weather data, and shadow analysis, as well as local media, civil society reports, and conflict data from Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) and Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project.

Using a three-source standard, we confirmed 59 verified kambo attacks between October 2024 and May 2025. An additional 87 attacks were reported across our collected interview and open sources. We also verified and geolocated over 50 videos documenting SAF presence, attacks against civilians during the police bridge massacre, and attacks on kambos, including arson and mass graves.

We took various measures to protect sources, such as hiding faces, deleting material from hard drives, using encrypted communication (Signal), and storing notes locally rather than in an encrypted Google Drive.

STORYLINES

The war in Sudan has consumed the nation – at the will of two warring generals and foreign, proxy powers fueling both sides – for over two years, with relatively little news coverage. Estimates put the death toll at over 150,000 Sudanese people.

Many massacres have gone undocumented, many still wonder if their loved ones are dead or alive, and most have been forced to choose sides at one point or another.

In the case of the Kanabi killings, SAF and their paramilitary and local militia allies capitalized on military operations to retake cities and towns from RSF to clear the land of people who their leadership fundamentally believes does not belong there.

Through a network of on-the-ground reporters and a Lighthouse Reports team on the ground in Sudan, we met survivors of the Kanabi killings and whistleblowers in the SAF and SAF-allied ranks.

In reports on CNN, Trouw, and Sudan War Monitor, civilians including Miriam (whose name has been changed for her own safety), told us about the day the Sudanese Armed Forces marched through the streets of her central Sudanese home town, in al Jazira state, to take it back from the Rapid Support Forces. Miriam was at home with her sons and the army marched onward to Wad Madani but four soldiers came to her house and demanded the men – namely her four sons – come with them. “They said that no one from the Blue Nile region was allowed to stay,” Miriam explained, referring to an area where non-Arab, African tribes live. Her sons and brother were driven away by motorcycle. Shooting continued throughout the day and houses set alight by the army. Later, she would learn at least some of those shots killed her sons and brother. She managed to escape with her other brother, Suleiman.

At least 7 other survivors from al Jazira State told similar stories of merciless targeting of civilians based on their ethnic group and the perception that – despite decades of living in al Jazira state as farmers – they were foreigners, from non-Arab regions of Sudan that have long been persecuted by SAF and the former regime.

Whistleblowers within SAF and aligned groups shared accounts of targeting civilians that support the patterns of violence the survivors described to a Lighthouse Reports team on the ground.

One community leader in al Jazira state recalled watching SAF soldiers dump three bodies into the canal and later traveled throughout al Jazira state, taking account of destroyed kambos, including those that were never occupied by RSF in the first place.

“What is happening now in al Jazira,” he said, “is that they [SAF] want to destroy the area[s] where an African majority lives.”

The post The Kanabi Killings appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

After 18 months of relentless bombardment and fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Al Fashir fell to the RSF last week, igniting a wave of horrific, large-scale massacres that many in the international community warned about.

In an investigation with Sky News and Sudan War Monitor, Lighthouse Reports has learned that the top commanders of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) reportedly brokered a deal to secure their own escape, while leaving junior soldiers and thousands of civilians at risk.

An estimated 70,000 people – mostly civilians and some fighters – have fled the city. In what humanitarians on the ground say is a deeply worrying trend, less than 10,000 have arrived in the first city outside of Al Fashir, Tawila, where the UN and international NGOs have a limited presence.

Through open source analysis and on-the-ground sources, Lighthouse Reports has investigated the fates of those nearly 60,000 civilians who fled and are missing and the others who remain trapped in Al Fashir. Lighthouse Reports confirmed that the RSF separated women and children from the men as they attempted to flee Al Fashir and later killed hundreds of men visible in the video. Some of the men visible in videos verified by Lighthouse and partners were confirmed by sources to have been chased by cars, motorcycles and camels with intentional cruelty and chaos.

Two sources from the Rapid Support Forces confirmed to Lighthouse Reports that the killing was at least in part carried out on the basis of ethnicity. They detailed strategic planning to target specific ethnic groups within the city.

One of the commanders explained that the Rapid Support Forces allowed members of non-targeted ethnic groups to flee while forcing others to remain in the city. He said the paramilitary also removed non-Arab fighters within their ranks and allied ranks and prevented them from entering the city during the attack. These men were reportedly gathered in nearby towns in order to ensure they would not intervene to stop the massacre of their own ethnic groups.

So far, RSF sources estimate that the death toll is at least 7,000, with thousands unaccounted for.

Finally, according to videos verified by Lighthouse Reports, the Rapid Support Forces are terrorizing civilians as they attempt to escape to safety in Tawila. Fighters are detaining civilians as they attempt to flee and demanding ransoms in order to keep them alive and secure their release.

Lighthouse Reports and our partners have documented evidence and firsthand testimony of rolling massacres and potential war crimes in the days after the Rapid Support Forces cemented their grip on Al Fashir. Humanitarians on the ground today now warn of a worsening and catastrophic situation for Sudanese civilians in and around Al Fashir who continue to struggle for their safety.

METHODS

Lighthouse Reports, Sudan War Monitor and Sky News combined open-source investigation, video verification, satellite analysis and interviews with sources on the ground to document killings and detentions carried out by the RSF in Al Fashir, and the movement of civilians toward the Guernei area northwest of the city.

We collected and archived dozens of videos filmed by RSF soldiers and shared on platforms including TikTok and Facebook between 25 and 31 October 2025. Each video was reviewed for time and location based indicators, such as landmarks, vegetation, road layout, and shadows, to establish where and when they might have been filmed. All footage was catalogued in a structured spreadsheet that enabled cross-referencing of relevant overlaps in the content.

By comparing recurring visual details and clothing across multiple clips, we were able to identify the same individuals in civilian attire appearing across different locations. This allowed us to reconstruct verified sequences showing groups under RSF control progressing in the fields northwest of Al Fashir, on the way to Guernei. Across these videos, violence against detained groups can be observed including hitting, kicking, forced chanting, and in some executions or killing by gunfire.

Satellite imagery from Planet Labs and Maxar was also used to assist in this analysis and corroborate findings.

The post The Killing Fields of Al Fashir appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

At least 110 former members of Afghanistan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) have been killed since 2023, according to the new data. Amongst those killed and tortured are members of elite Afghan units who worked in close partnership with US and UK Special Forces.

The deaths demonstrate the hollowness of the Taliban’s professed amnesty for former Afghan forces. After they seized control of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban claimed that their enemies had nothing to fear – former soldiers and officials would be protected by a general amnesty. A spate of killings followed.

At first, Western nations tried to bring their former allies to safety, but these routes have been shrinking, with some advocates concerned that the Taliban’s supposed amnesty – which the group reiterated this year – is being used to justify those decisions. Meanwhile a growing climate of fear in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan has made it harder to verify deaths. The United Nations last issued a standalone report on these killings in 2023.

This investigation shows killings have continued unabated since then and well into 2025, even as the Trump administration ended Temporary Protection Status for Afghans in the US and suspended other immigration pathways that were relied upon by the Afghan special forces community.

In the UK, the government announced the closure of two resettlement schemes for Afghans in July with no prior warning. Meanwhile, Afghans with pending and even successful applications remain in danger as they face grindingly slow waits for evacuation. We spoke to former Afghan commandos working with the British who were tortured in recent months while waiting for British visas.

While Taliban officials have acknowledged some ANDSF deaths, they have put these down to “personal enmity or revenge” and have said perpetrators will be punished.

Yet, interviews with torture victims raise concerns of a more systematic effort to hunt allies of international forces. Three former soldiers with elite special forces units say they were tortured for the contact details of former colleagues. An additional source indicated that this practice was so widespread people no longer stayed in touch with each other.

METHODS

Lighthouse Reports was approached by Hasht-e Subh (8am Media) and Etilaat Roz, two Afghan media outlets, to work on a story about ANDSF killings. Both Afghan partners had doggedly covered the killings since the fall of Kabul, with 8am producing a landmark investigation with the New York Times looking at revenge killings in the immediate aftermath.

We assembled a coalition of partners to investigate these deaths and their implications, including the Military Times in the US and The Independent in the UK, who worked to spotlight specific cases impacting international allies as immigration protections were being rolled back in both countries.

We built a database of ANDSF killings that were verified by two independent sources. We began by reviewing the reporting archives of our two Afghan partners and sought additional verification for each death by working with PhD researcher Besmillah Taban who had built his own database of killings. Previously the General Director of the Afghanistan’s Crime Investigation Department (CID), Taban has a strong network of former ANDSF sources who helped corroborate the reporting.

Outside of the wider figures, the team wanted to demonstrate how dangerous the immigration rollbacks in the UK and US were by verifying the deaths of soldiers from units that worked shoulder to shoulder with international special forces. Many have had promised routes to safety stymied by failing immigration systems.

But fear amongst the special operation forces community has significantly grown since we reported on the torture and killings of the British paid and trained Triples unit in early 2024. Verification proved extremely challenging as a result.

Due to these challenges and our verification criteria, our final figures are highly likely an undercount: tens of reported cases were not included in the final number because we were not able to confirm their deaths with two independent sources.

Given the real risks to Afghans who speak to international media, we avoided contacting sources in Afghanistan where alternative verification methods were possible. We relied on a network of Afghan special operation forces in exile, and the community of American special forces advocating for them, to connect us to relevant sources and corroborate details.

STORYLINES

Ali Gul Haideri had been one of Afghanistan’s most elite soldiers. His work with American Special Forces put a target on his back when Kabul fell to the Taliban.

Ali and his young family struggled to get on one of the planes departing Afghanistan as the Taliban took over. Soon after, he was captured and tortured for over a month. When he was released, Ali fled with his wife and child to a neighbouring country. But mass deportations sent them back into the Taliban’s arms one year later. In early 2024, Ali was shot dead in Kabul.

In a letter shared with the reporting team, his wife Hawa spoke of how his loss has affected his two daughters, Hana and Elena. Elena was just a baby when he was killed.

“Hana remembers her father every day and asks why he doesn’t come back to take us out, and how painful are the moments when she asks why the Taliban shot my father,” she wrote.

“Elena is my little girl, but before she could feel the warmth of her father’s hand, she was deprived of him forever.”

Ali’s death is just one of the dozens of tragic cases the investigation team dug into over six months of reporting. Other cases documented by the investigation include a former Afghan special operations forces member who lived in such fear of reprisal that he refused to marry. In 2024, his body was found riddled with bullet holes.

The team also interviewed former soldiers from elite special forces units that had been arrested and tortured.

A former member of the top tier counter terrorism unit known as the Ktah Khas or KKA, described being tortured particularly brutally to gain access to his phone contacts. He recalls being interrogated about one particular colleague. When he was released, that colleague had been killed. We were able to independently verify this death.

Another member of the same unit, who was also arrested and tortured, shared a letter signed by a US army captain that stated his operations led to “outcomes of sizable strategic significance”. It also noted that if he or his family were identified, they would be subject to “substantial risk”.

The family, who are now residing in a neighbouring country, say the document was given to him in case he needed help from the Americans.

“It didn’t help him during the collapse,” they say. “He was one of these group members that they were working shoulder to shoulders with US special forces”

Similar fates have befallen those who worked closely with British forces. One former commando, who served in UK-funded special forces units known as the Triples and was approved for relocation to Britain after years of waiting, was also detained and tortured by the Taliban earlier this year.

His family told The Independent and Lighthouse Reports that they believed he had been targeted because of his work for the British: “They didn’t have any mercy on him. They beat him on his back, and other parts, and took out his nails.”

The post Hunted by the Taliban appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The executive, Günther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for advanced surveillance technology companies. He went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software called Altamides, capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protestors. “I think we’re the only ones who can deliver,” Rudolph said.

What Rudolph did not know: he was talking to an undercover reporter from Lighthouse.

The road to that conference room in Prague began with a vast archive of data, found by a Lighthouse reporter on the deep web, containing more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. Investigating that archive — and First Wap’s activities — drew together more than 70 journalists from 14 media outlets.

What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry. The tracking archive is unprecedented in scope, and reveals how the company and its clients surveilled all types of people from all over the world. Reporters interviewed more than a hundred victims, as well as former employees and industry insiders. A trove of confidential emails and documents provide a detailed inside account of how First Wap’s tech was marketed to authoritarian governments and accessed by corporate actors. Behind closed doors, First Wap’s executives touted their ability to hack WhatsApp accounts, and laughed about evading sanctions.

The surveillance industry has long maintained that its tools are deployed exclusively by government agencies to fight serious crime, portraying instances of misuse as rare exceptions. This investigation definitively dismantles that narrative.

Making sense of a secret data trove

This investigation began with an archive of data. This is not the first archive related to a surveillance company’s activities, but it is certainly the most granular. It contains 1.5 million records, more than 14,000 unique phone numbers, and people surveilled in over 160 countries. It represents an extraordinarily detailed account of when and where people were tracked, and what users of the tracking tool saw.

The only clue to a target’s identity was a phone number. A team of reporters at Lighthouse and paper trail media spent months painstakingly identifying the owners of those phone numbers. To drill down into the data and better understand it, we divided it into “clusters” of targets — networks of people connected in time or space. As we investigated clusters and put names to phone numbers, stories began to emerge.

For a more in-depth explanation of how we analysed the dataset, see our technical explainer.

The Altamides archive is global in scope. We found high-profile individuals, including powerful political figures such as the former Prime Minister of Qatar and the wife of ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. We found Netflix producer Adam Ciralsky, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Benny Wenda, Austropop star Wolfgang Ambros, Tel Aviv district prosecutor Liat Ben Ari and Ali Nur Yasin, a senior editor at our Indonesian partner Tempo.

In Italy, investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi was tracked days after publishing a dramatic exposé of corruption in the Vatican, as police closed in on his source. In California, Anne Wojcicki, founder of DNA startup 23andMe and then married to Google’s Sergey Brin, was tracked more than a thousand times as she moved across Silicon Valley. And in South Africa, associates of Rwandan opposition leader Patrick Karegeya were tracked before his assassination in a Johannesburg hotel room.

As our reporting partners dug into the archive, they found other traces of surveillance activity on their doorsteps. In Austria, home of First Wap’s founder Josef Fuchs, Der Standard uncovered a mystery surrounding a tracking spate of high-ranking employees at energy drink giant Red Bull. In Norway, NRK examined how Altamides zeroed in on a top telecom executive. In Indonesia, interviewees told our partner Tempo that they believed they had been targeted because they had taken part in political activities or spoken out against the government. In Serbia, KRIK identified targets in the energy industry, while in Israel, Haaretz located high profile lawyers and businessmen with interests in Africa and the Gulf.

First Wap said in a response to this investigation that it denies “any illegal activities” or “human rights violations.” The company said it could not comment on specific allegations that could “enable client identification.” It further elaborated that the company does not perform any tracking itself and that “after installation” of Altamides it has no further knowledge of how the product is used. First Wap emphasized that its technology is used by law enforcement to “fight against organized crime, terrorism and corruption.”

Surveillance without borders

In 2012, Sophia (not her real name) was walking near the coast of Goa on vacation, unaware that her movements were being monitored from halfway around the world with government-grade surveillance tech. But she was not being tracked by an intelligence or law enforcement agency. She was being stalked by a man who had been pursuing her, following her over the course of ten months.

Sophia’s case illustrates how Altamides proliferated far beyond the hands of governments to non-government actors, who used it to surveil victims for commercial and personal purposes. In addition to business leaders and politically-exposed individuals, the Altamides archive contains hundreds of regular people: a teacher, a therapist, a tattoo artist.

First Wap’s surveillance software was marketed through a shadowy network of middlemen who resold the system to clients worldwide. Confidential documents obtained by this investigation detail the operations of one such company, the British corporate investigations firm KCS Group. As the Arab Spring unfolded across the Middle East and North Africa, documents show that KCS attempted to capitalise on the unrest throughout the region, making concerted efforts to sell the tracking system to governments in Morocco and Algeria, as well as other countries in Africa and Asia. But at the same time it was using Altamides for corporate investigation work, digging for dirt on clients’ opponents. The company told us that it “has not been involved in selling or using inappropriate surveillance materials” and is “committed to maintaining ethical standards in all our operations.”

A ruthless pioneer

Unlike other industry heavyweights, which have seen years of adverse coverage because their customers targeted journalists, activists, businesspeople and diplomats, First Wap has thrived for two decades without falling under the spotlight. The story of Altamides dates back to the early 2000s, when former Siemens engineer Josef Fuchs recognised a critical vulnerability in the global telecom network. By exploiting an outdated – but still essential – communication protocol known as SS7, he could trick phone networks into revealing the locations of their users. Seeing a new business opportunity, Fuchs quickly pivoted his Jakarta-based company away from its focus on marketing messages, turning it into one of the world’s first phone-tracking firms. Its arrival on the market was seismic. At a time when Blackberrys ruled and Nokias were everywhere, a user could enter a phone number and the software would pinpoint its location anywhere in the world, within seconds.

Since then, the company has quietly built a globe-spanning phone tracking empire, operating in the shadows, without any apparent red lines. It has also expanded its surveillance arsenal, adding features to Altamides that allow it to intercept SMS messages, listen in on phone calls, and even breach encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp.

“We can find a way”

Our initial reporting surfaced dozens of non-criminal people surveilled without their knowledge by the company. Data, sources we spoke to and documents we examined indicated that Altamides had been used by authoritarian governments and, without lawful basis, by non-governmental clients. We decided it would be in the public interest to carry out an undercover operation to better understand what red lines the company placed around use of its products.

In a statement, First Wap insisted to us that it “vets and verifies any government client/final user for sanctions compliance prior to the signature of any agreement” and that “there has never been any exception to this.”

Testing the red lines required a fake character, complete with a fake company name and LinkedIn. One of Lighthouse’s reporters became Albert, a South Africa-based businessman who runs a boutique “research consultancy” registered in the British Virgin Islands. Accompanying him was Abdou, a colleague, who would be playing a mover and shaker with political connections throughout West Africa. They signed up for ISS World in the Czech Republic, the largest annual surveillance technology fair, to pitch some projects and see how the company responded.

So this June, our reporter found himself in a Prague hotel room, straightening a suit jacket outfitted with a hidden camera.

Albert and Abdou met First Wap’s sales director Günther Rudolph at the company’s booth, to discuss a series of business propositions. Could First Wap help a government monitor opponents abroad? Could the company crack encrypted WhatsApp chats? Could it help the owner of a mining company disrupt protests by environmental activists? “He knows already who are the leaders, or he wants to find out?” asked Rudolph.

Rudolph drew the undercover reporters’ attention to a potential snag: some of the people they propose selling to might be under sanction from the EU or US, meaning that European nationals like First Wap’s executives risked imprisonment if it were known they organised the sale. “That’s why when we make such a deal we make it through Jakarta,” Rudolph said, referring to First Wap’s corporate base in Indonesia. It was a “grey area”, he said. But “we can find a way”. What this way might look like became clear the following day: using a newly invented shell company to mask the connection in the papertrail between First Wap and the sanctioned client.

When confronted with our undercover operation in Prague, the company said that “misunderstandings evidently arose” and that the statements by its executives referred merely to technical feasibility.

The production of this investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.

The post Surveillance Secrets appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Much of the reporting on it has focused on Blair himself, ever newsworthy, his Davos lifestyle and meetings with the world’s rich and powerful. But the TBI isn’t just a UK concern, it’s now a global force working in at least 45 countries, employing other former heads of state, ex ministers and civil servants and paying more than a million dollars to its top earners.

While previous Blair vehicles ranged around from development and peacebuilding to reputational work for petro-states, the TBI has an overwhelming focus: technology.

The ex-premier’s trademark evangelism is now focused on AI, its power to transform government –with his Institute now going as far as to try to build its own AI tools to sell to Gulf states– and why everyone should listen to Larry Ellison, the founder of technology firm Oracle.

While the institute relies on Blair’s political brand, its money comes, in large part, from Ellison, who has had a remarkable 2025. He was briefly the richest man in the world in September, as Oracle’s stake in AI infrastructure drove its share price into orbit. In the 1990s Ellison was known as “the man who would be Gates” as he battled the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, for pre-eminence. This year, the 81 year old has been feted by US President Donald Trump as the “CEO of everything” and an essay in the New York Times called him the billionaire “who will soon own the news” as his family’s media interests in Paramount-Sky Dance seem set to expand to include Warner Bros. Discovery.

Ellison invested $130 million in the TBI between 2021 and 2023, with a further $218 million pledged since then. The scale of funding took the TBI from a headcount of 200 to approaching 1,000. Blair himself takes no salary from TBI but over this time the institute has been able to recruit from bluechip firms like McKinsey and Silicon Valley giants Meta. In 2018 before the Oracle founder’s funding surge, TBI’s best-paid director earned $400,000. In 2023, the last year where accounts are available, the top earner took home $1.26 million.

Blair and Ellison have a relationship that goes back to the former’s time in office. In 2003 Ellison and Blair, then in his pomp, had a photo opportunity at Downing Street to mark a gift of supplies to 40 specialist schools. In tech circles this is known as “land and expand”. Oracle has since been contracted hundreds of times by the British government and earned £1.1 billion in public sector revenue since the start of 2022, according to data collected by procurement analysts Tussell.

METHODS

The full extent of Ellison funding for the TBI became clear from the institute’s own accounts and a survey of US non-profit financial data, including that of the Larry Ellison Foundation, through which major donations were made to both the TBI and the Tony Blair Foundation.

Lighthouse Reports and UK partner Democracy for Sale then spent four months interviewing 29 current and former TBI staff, most on condition of anonymity, to build an insider account of the institute. This work included conversations with over a dozen former TBI employees who advised or drew up policy recommendations for governments across nine countries in the Global South and revealed how their work ranged from explicitly promoting Oracle’s services and acting as a “sales engine” to recommending tech solutions that are potentially harmful or bizarrely divorced from local realities. Former staff described a symbiotic relationship between TBI and Oracle, with the two entities holding joint retreats, and one ex-employee characterising them as “inseparable”.

This testimony was supported by public documents and those obtained under the UK’s freedom of information laws. Matched with interviews, they revealed an organisation unusually close to the British government, holding regular meetings with ministers in which they push policy recommendations that serve Oracle’s interests.

STORYLINES

There is a reason why men whose fortunes are built on AI investments would target the UK, and that is the National Health Service (NHS) and its unique population-level health data. Tech experts talk about Britain’s health records in almost hushed tones. While Europe and the US have some comparable health data sets – such as US veterans’ medical records – none have the depth and breadth of NHS records dating back to 1948. Its potential commercial value, from drugs to genome sequencing has been estimated at up to £10bn per annum.

When Labour came to power last July it did so promising economic growth and an end to the UK’s productivity crisis. Just five days after Keir Starmer was elected, Blair told the TBI’s ‘Future of Britain’ conference that AI was the “game-changer” they were looking for. Within months, Starmer was parroting Blair’s language – and the TBI was in the box seat of the government’s nascent AI policy pushing Oracle’s interests and its founder’s world view.

The FOI documents highlight two TBI staff who took direct, influential roles in government and reveal the institute’s influence over Peter Kyle, a former advisor in Blair’s second term, who was appointed technology secretary despite little experience in the sector, and came into office calling for governments to show “a sense of humility” to Big Tech companies.

At the same time the TBI’s policy director Charlotte Refsum was invited into the UK health department to meet digital policy chief Felix Greaves. She was later given an official role in a government working group advising on data and technology policy in Labour’s 10 year plan for the NHS.

Throughout this period, the TBI has championed initiatives designed to unify public data, including a national data library (NDL). The NDL was little more than an idea when Labour put it in their election manifesto. And there are still competing visions for what it should be. AI boosters foresee data from across government used for training and inference by Large Language Models; while many tech experts want to minimise privacy risks inherent in pooling data from so many sources and ensure that any benefits accrue to the UK.

Ellison told Blair of his interest in NHS data when he was interviewed by him at the Dubai World Governments Summit in February 2025: “The NHS in the UK has an incredible amount of population data,” Ellison enthused, but it was “fragmented”.

Two weeks later, Blair’s institute published a report entitled Governing in the Age of AI: Building Britain’s National Data Library. In it, the not-for-profit institute echoed Ellison on the UK’s data infrastructure, calling it “fragmented and unfit for purpose”.

“There is a real hard sell going on here that says: ‘these kinds of gains are inevitable.’ But they are not,” said Professor Gina Neff of Queen Mary University London. “TBI is not advocating for building that capacity within the NHS. They are saying: let’s outsource to our buddies.”

Multiple staff working for TBI during the Ellison cash injection speak of a sea change in culture. McKinsey consultants took senior positions and clashed with staff from humanitarian and development backgrounds. Ex-employees say this led to the institute pivoting away from writing reports and recommendations by well-meaning development experts towards pushing aggressive tech solutions across the board.

Oracle and TBI’s connections are not just rhetorical. By 2023, joint retreats had become commonplace. At the institute’s headquarters at One Bartholomew Place in London, the teams would convene in the basement with executives from Oracle, Blair’s key advisor Macon-Cooney and Awo Ablo — who came to sit on the board of both TBI and Oracle sometimes present. Senior TBI employees have been hosted at Oracle’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, coordinated by a TBI employee whose role is to “scale and manage” the partnership with Oracle. Former staff recall that there were other earlier “hush hush” joint retreats at Ellison properties in the US.

“It’s hard to get across just how deeply connected the two [organisations] are,” a former TBI staffer said. “The meetings were like they’re part of the same organisation.”

As the TBI’s partnership with Oracle deepened, employees told us they started to see Oracle staff started to slide into TBI employees’ calendars and schedule meetings in order to find out what the institute was doing in different countries and “scope out opportunities”, recalls one former TBI staffer. Soon employees from the two entities were having regular joint calls.

This sat uncomfortably with many TBI staff, with some describing having to push Oracle’s technology despite knowing they were not in the best interests of the country in question, and even had the potential to cause harm.

The risk of so-called vendor-lock in – tying a buyer to a single supplier – was a source of unease, with one former staffer saying that advising governments to use Oracle cloud services risked “trapping” and “indebting” them in systems that are “initially free but will start charging in future”.

Rwanda, a country where TBI has been present for more than 15 years, was so frustrated with Oracle that it issued a public tender in 2021 for a database management system, stating that it had been “experiencing a very high cost for support and licensing for Oracle systems and it would like to migrate to an affordable system”.

Marvin Akuagwuagwu worked as a data analyst for TBI’s Africa Advisory unit in 2022 and 2023, focusing on Covid vaccine delivery. He said when he raised legitimate concerns, such as a lack of power supply and cyber security threats, when introducing new technologies to African countries these were dismissed by more senior colleagues.

“I’m an African, I have lived experience, and I’m saying these things, but I wasn’t being listened to. You have to downplay those negative things,” he said.

This investigation was part of the series “The invisible Hand of Big Tech” led by Agência Pública and by Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP), with the participation of 16 other organizations from 13 countries: ICL (Brasil), Núcleo (Brasil), La Bot (Chile), Primícias (Ecuador), Factum (El Salvador), Televisa N+ (Mexico), Cuestión Pública (Colombia), El Diario AR (Argentina), El Surti (Paraguay), IJF (Canada), Tech Policy Press (US), Tempo (Indonesia), Crikey (Australia), Daily Maverick (South Africa), Reporters Without Borders (International), El Veinte.

The post Blair and the Billionaire appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

A year-long investigation with Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Times and Arte proves for the first time that the French police are responsible for the deaths or disappearances of at least 24 people – including pregnant women and children – during violent interceptions at sea off the coast of Mayotte. The incidents span from 2007 to July 2025.

The revelations come as Paris, under pressure from London, has announced a shift in the English Channel – that French forces will soon be permitted to intercept migrant boats at sea, a move that has raised concern among the French search and rescue authorities, police unions and government ministers.

Tens of thousands of people attempt the crossing from the nearby Comorian Island of Anjouan each year in search of better work opportunities, healthcare and education on the French Island, which is situated off the east coast of Africa. It’s estimated 10,000 people have drowned while trying to make this journey since 1995.

METHODS

Journalists collected 20 detailed survivor testimonies, including accounts from recent shipwrecks, as well as interviewing former smugglers, local residents and children who made the crossing, many of whom described lasting trauma.

In parallel, the team gained access to judicial and administrative case files documenting past incidents, as well as police and gendarmerie reports. These provided corroboration of incidents where police vessels collided with migrant boats.

To cross-check these accounts, reporters conducted confidential interviews with six serving and former officials from the French interior and defense ministries who had been posted to Mayotte. Their statements confirmed that aggressive tactics were part of routine practice.

Finally, the investigation relied on official statistics and records from the prefecture of Mayotte, maritime surveillance centers and court archives, allowing reporters to establish a count of at least 24 deaths linked to interceptions since 2007.

Together, these methods revealed a consistent pattern: while authorities publicly frame operations as rescue missions, evidence from witnesses, documents and insiders show that dangerous interception practices are commonplace.

STORYLINES

In the early hours of 15 July 2025, a small fishing boat known as a kwassa approached the shores of Mayotte after a ten-hour journey from the Comoros. On board were 27 passengers, including children and the elderly, hoping to reach French territory. Instead, the crossing ended in tragedy.

Zoubert*, 25, had boarded the kwassa in Anjouan, Comoros, to return to Mayotte, where he grew up. Land was in sight when a French police vessel struck them. “Our boat tore apart, everyone fell into the sea,” he recalled. He says the officers pulled back about 30 meters and waited up to 15 seconds before reacting. “Everyone was screaming. They watched us drown without moving.” Zoubert claims he saw a teenage girl and an elderly man disappear beneath the water.

Ahamada*, 24, was traveling with his young niece and nephew. He remembers their pilot trying to flee towards the beach when the police boat rammed them from behind. “That’s when they hit us,” he said. After the impact, he saw his four-year-old nephew sink into the water. “It’s really vile. If they had let us land, they could have arrested us without killing people.”

Farid Djassadi, 31, told us how both his legs were severed by the engine of a police boat that collided with the small boat he had boarded in Anjouan. The impact threw him overboard. Court documents we obtained detail the incident, noting that the police boat’s permit had expired and that none of the officers had completed the required training to drive the boat. Despite multiple investigations, prosecutions have largely targeted smugglers, not security forces.

Other survivors echo these accounts. In total twenty people described police circling boats to churn up waves until water flooded the fragile vessels, or colliding with the bow to destabilise them.

Six officials from the interior and armed forces described the use of collisions and wave-making to force kwassas to stop.

One senior gendarme admitted that patrol boats sometimes “cut across the route” of migrant vessels or even “hit their bows” to block them. “We get behind the boat, into its wake, and then we go after it,” he explained. “Once we’re in their trail, they stop because their lives are at risk — but if they keep going, we are forced to ram them.” Another officer justified creating “artificial waves” by steering in S-shaped movements, which flood the kwassas and force them to stop, even if it risks capsizing them.

A former maritime affairs official who served nearly 15 years in Mayotte criticized the lack of training and seafaring knowledge among police units. “They might get three weeks of training at best, then shadow colleagues on interceptors. They’re sent out without the proper skills,” he said.

France announced it would now authorize the “boarding” of boats leaving its northern coast for Britain — a concession to London’s demands amid record crossings. For years, French authorities resisted such a shift, warning that police-style interceptions at sea posed grave risks. Hervé Berville, then Secretary of State for the Sea, wrote to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal in spring 2024 urging against it. In his letter, he described such actions as “ineffective and even dangerous,” carrying risks both for officers and for migrants, including “the risk of mass drownings.”

Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior pressed forward, arguing that standard rescue operations were insufficient as crossings surged past 28,000 since the start of the year. According to one senior official, the new doctrine envisions the possibility of encircling migrant boats to force them back or stop them mid-sea.

The Mayotte investigation suggests what this may mean in practice. For more than two decades, aggressive interception maneuvers — collisions, wave-making, ramming — have been used out of sight in the Indian Ocean, causing at least 24 deaths.

*Identities have been protected

The post “They hit us and watched us drown” appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

He approached the carpenter and asked him quietly:

“Please, uncle, for God’s sake… I beg of you… Could you do me a favor?”

The man stopped working and looked at the little boy in surprise:

“What do you want, my son?”

Fawaz answered, his voice trembling:
“I need you to call this number. I need to talk to my grandfather, it’s urgent… it’s very urgent.”

The man was confused:
“But my son, you’ll get me in serious trouble.”

Fawaz didn’t say a word. He stared into the man’s eyes, waiting for his reaction. The man turned around behind the door to make sure no one was watching him, then took out his phone and dialed the number, handing it to the child.

Fawaz held the phone with both hands, as if his whole life was hanging in the balance.

“Grandpa…” he said, his voice choking. “My siblings and I are in the orphanage… in Dar Al Rahma… and my mother and grandmother are in Al-Jawiya Air Force Intelligence prison… My grandmother was badly beaten. Use your connections and get us out… God bless you Grandpa.”

Then the call ended.

In the first days following the fall of the regime, Syrians were torn between hope and despair. Like ghosts, detainees emerged from Syrian prisons: jailed mothers carrying children who had spent their childhood behind bars. Meanwhile, thousands of Syrians rushed into the prisons, searching for their loved ones, breaking down doors, digging underground, and sifting through documents scattered on the floor. But the painful reality was that most of the detainees weren’t there.

During the Syrian war, more than 600,000 people were killed and 157,000, including 5,000 children, were detained. Reports by Syrian and international organizations documented between 3000 and 4000 Syrian children who remain missing. It remains unknown how many were lost in the regime’s prisons and how many remain alive today.

This investigation reveals how the former Syrian regime detained and hid hundreds of children in government-funded orphanages supported by international donations.

This spring, we visited Damascus for the first time in years. We drove toward a town in the Damascus countryside to meet the mother of a former detainee. On both sides of the road, torn portraits of Bashar al-Assad hung like remnants of a bygone era. On the walls were scrawled endless insults. It was a surreal scene – one we never imagined we would see.

Over the following days, we met other families, entered prisons and security branches, and visited orphanages in the capital. Gradually our team grew. Journalists and digital investigators from Syria, Europe, and the Middle East joined, and what began as a local story led to us uncovering a much more complex network involved in hiding Syria’s stolen children.

We conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with families, children forcibly separated from their parents, and staff at orphanages and care institutions inside and outside Syria. We spoke to whistleblowers, witnesses, and international and local investigators. We collected hundreds of Air Force Intelligence databases and dozens of confidential documents from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, which we photographed and copied for investigative purposes only.

What we uncovered revealed the involvement of security agencies, government institutions, and even international organizations supposedly protecting these children.
Every lead led to another, and every secret opened a door to a new one.

A Family Cell

A year earlier, in rural Damascus, Fawaz heard a loud knock on the door. He looked at his mother, Sabah, and his heart sank.

The intelligence officer standing at the door told Sabah: “We need you at the branch for ten minutes, then we will bring you back. Bring the children with you because the brigadier general wants to see them.”

Everyone in the house got into the intelligence officer’s vehicle: Sabah al-Harmoush and her children – Fawaz, 11, Omar, 5, and Anoud, 3 – in addition to the children’s grandmother and Sabah’s mother-in-law, Huda al-Ajami.

The three children were taken to a cell with their mother in Mazzeh Prison, run by the Air Force Intelligence Service. Their grandmother, Huda, was placed separately in solitary confinement. The children witnessed their mother and grandmother being interrogated, beaten, and tortured. The children were also interrogated, and Fawaz, the eldest of the three, was beaten.

“There was a lot of physical violence,” Sabah told us. “He threatened me with the children. They would bring us in for interrogation at 2am, and the interrogator would say to me: ‘If you don’t want to talk, I will bring your son Fawaz and kill him in front of you.’”

The investigators wanted information about Sabah’s husband, Naim Rahma, who was a fighter with the Syrian opposition. They also wanted to know the whereabouts of other relatives of Sabah’s who were fighting against the Syrian regime. Sabah said the investigator severely beat her when he learned that her uncle was Hussein al-Harmoush, the first officer to defect from the Syrian regime’s army and the founder of the Free Officers Brigade (which later evolved into the Free Syrian Army.)\

Children at Intelligence Bureaus

Since the 1980s, it was not only men and women of the opposition who were detained by the Syrian regime – children were also imprisoned alongside their mothers. Some were born behind bars and spent their childhoods in detention centers. Prison was their place of birth and the site of their early education. With the outbreak of war following the 2011 uprising, the situation for child detainees became more complex and dangerous.

During our investigation, we relied on official documents we collected over several trips. Some were from the Ministry of Social Affairs or orphanages, while others were leaked from Air Force Intelligence. These documents reveal a system with a clear motive: detainees and their children were held as bargaining chips, to be used in negotiations and prisoner exchanges with opposition groups.

Investigators from the UN-affiliated Independent Mission on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic (IIMP) told us they have found the names of approximately 400 children who were transferred to orphanages by the regime’s security services.

We independently documented the names of 323 of these children by obtaining their transfer papers or locating their names in Air Force Intelligence databases. These included 14 babies under one year old, and more than 72 children under three years old. But the records we viewed were chaotic and incomplete, indicating the true number is possibly much higher.

Testimonies from families and leaked documents indicate that the arrests targeted Syrian citizens from prominent opposition families or relatives of fighters for opposition groups. We documented dozens of cases of arrests at checkpoints, where people were caught by security forces while trying to flee besieged neighborhoods in search of food or safe shelter. Some families were arrested after the father or husband defected from the regime army, to pressure the defectors to turn themselves in.

The system mostly followed a pattern: People were arrested with their family. The first interrogations were by officers from the Air Force Intelligence branch, who would then submit a report to their superiors, with recommendations such as “holding the children” for use in prisoner exchanges or for other purposes that serve the interests of the regime.

After the branch’s director approved these recommendations, a complex bureaucratic process began, transferring the children’s documents from Air Force Intelligence to the governor of Damascus or Rural Damascus. The governor received the documents and wrote, in his own handwriting, a directive to transfer them to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor. The Ministry then distributed them to its respective directorates, including the Directorate of Social Policies, the Directorate of Social Services, and the Directorate of Social Affairs and Labor in Damascus.

At the final stage, the Ministry’s directorates were responsible for finding a place to house these children, by communicating with childcare organizations and orphanages – including Dar Al Rahma, Lahn Al Hayat, Al Mabarah Women’s Association, and SOS Children’s Villages.

The documents we obtained show that most security referrals for children came from the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, but we also found a few referrals that were transferred from Military Intelligence Branches 227 and 235 and the General Intelligence Directorate Branch 251.

Official correspondence between Air Force Intelligence, the Ministry of Social Affairs, and orphanage directors frequently repeated the same directions:

“Keep the names of the children confidential, do not leak them, and do not take any action pertaining to them except in coordination with our administration.”

”Please accept this child… do not reveal his identity.”

“Do not provide any information about them.”

“Top secret.”

The orders were clear: keep the children’s names confidential, prevent any leaks of information, and make no decisions about them without the approval of the intelligence branch.

“Memorise this Number”

As we sat in the living room of Rahma’s family home in Rankous, Fawaz’s mother, Sabah, stared out the window.

“The women who were with me in prison, along with their children, would stay in prison for 15 or 20 days,” she recalled. “The intelligence officers would take the children to the orphanage, and the women would be put in prison so the men would surrender.”

Fawaz and his brothers remained with their mother in the cell for twenty days before they were summoned by a prison guard.

Fawaz, Sabah, and his younger siblings all lined up in front of the jailer. Fawaz’s grandmother, Huda, was brought out of her cell at the same time. The interrogator informed them that the children would be transferred from the Air Force Intelligence branch to another location. He gave them half an hour to say goodbye.

Neither Sabah nor Huda knew where the children would be taken. Huda turned to her eldest grandson and recited his grandfather’s phone number. “I told him, ‘Take care of your siblings and memorize the number 23523. Don’t ever forget it and call your grandfather as soon as you get the chance.’”

Five months later, Huda was released from prison. Sabah remained in detention.

Huda began searching for her grandchildren, looking for clues at police stations, detention centers, and orphanages. They found nothing, until Fawaz secretly called his grandfather using the mobile phone of the carpenter who had come to repair the doors at Dar Al Rahma.

The family immediately went to look for Fawaz and his siblings, but Dar Al Rahma employees denied having the children.

Huda sought out middlemen who might be able to obtain information about her grandchildren and daughter, for a price. She paid some, without results. Others were unaffordable. “They asked me for five gold liras to provide information about my grandchildren,” she said. “I didn’t have that kind of money.”

Huda was eventually able to get permission to visit the children at Dar Al Rahma once every two weeks. We obtained an official document issued by the Air Force Intelligence branch and addressed to the Ministry of Social Affairs, which clearly refuses to give Huda custody of Fawaz and his siblings. They were forbidden from being reunited with their grandparents.

Sabah and Huda’s story was not an isolated incident. In most cases, families were left completely in the dark about their children’s fate. Grandparents, uncles, and aunts had no idea where the children had been taken, and visits remained impossible except by chance, a hefty bribe, or the intervention of powerful individuals.

Some families have told us they paid thousands of dollars to find out where their children were, often to no avail.

In other cases, sympathetic employees helped families by secretly leaking the locations of children’s detention, in direct defiance of intelligence instructions.

One family told us that after the management of SOS Children’s Villages refused to help them, a sympathetic employee secretly dropped their phone number in their car in 2016 and helped them find their child. Air Force Intelligence documents show that at least one SOS Children’s Villages employee was arrested for trying to find out the fate of detained children, highlighting the risks that employees face if they dared to help families.

The House of Mercy

Sabah’s three children were sent to Dar Al Rahma orphanage (the “House of Mercy”). Located in the Rukn Al Din area of Damascus, it is affiliated with the Abu Al Nour Mosque and Al Ansar Charitable Society, part of a religious advocacy organization founded by Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, a regime-friendly sheikh who served as Grand Mufti of Syria from 1964 to 2004. Despite Dar Al Rahma’s official image as a charitable shelter for orphaned children, the stories of Fawaz Rahma and many other children reveal an organization that falls far short of its name.

Fawaz and his siblings’ release from prison marked the end of one miserable period and the beginning of another equally miserable one. After being forcibly separated from their mother, they were separated from each other inside Dar Al Rahma. Fawaz was placed on the ground floor, his sister Anoud on the second floor, and his brother Omar on the third floor. Fawaz said his only fond memories of his time at Dar Al Rahma were the times he spent at school with his fellow students away from the facility.

Although Dar Al Rahma is a foster home, Fawaz’s interrogation continued throughout his stay there. “There was a woman called Sanaa, who worked with the police,” Fawaz told us. “She would interrogate me. She would always ask me about my father, and I wouldn’t answer her. I would beat around the bush. Once, I told her he was in Lebanon, and another time, I said he was in Germany. Because I lied, she slapped me on the back.”

The conditions inside the orphanage were stark. “I had to work for them to provide food for me and my siblings,” Fawaz said. “I worked in the kitchen, washed the dishes, cleaned the floors, tidied up, cleaned the closets, and sometimes cleaned the living room. When we were being punished, they would deprive us of food. There was a woman who worked in the orphanage who would sometimes secretly bring me food.”

At Dar Al Rahma, Fawaz lived in isolation from his family and siblings, whom he was only allowed to see once a week. Fawaz thought about running away every time he went to school. He stayed, despite everything, because he didn’t want to leave his siblings alone at the mercy of the orphanage’s management. In addition to the loneliness, Fawaz lived in fear of the punishments meted out to him and the other children.

His phone call to his grandfather gave him hope that he would soon be released from Dar Al Rahma. Hearing his grandfather’s voice made him feel happy again. But one of the other children told the orphanage staff about the phone call. “That’s when I was punished,” Fawaz said. “They isolated me from the other children and refused me food or drink for the next day. I had to sleep in the same corner until I kissed their hands and apologized the next day.”

Huda, Fawaz’s grandmother, said she filed a lawsuit against two staff members from Dar Al Rahma. “Every time I went to the orphanage, I found bruises on Fawaz’s face. I swear to God,” she told us. “When I saw the boys, I cried for hours. When I talked to the boys, they looked dazed, it was clear something was wrong. Fawaz told me things I am scared to tell you.”

Another parent who was detained by the regime also described abuse and violence inflicted on her children at Dar Al Rahma. When she visited them in prison, she found marks on her children’s bodies. “My children came back burned several times. My youngest son was burned with a spoon. It was heated and placed around his neck.”

In the fall of 2019, a major scandal erupted when a woman living near Dar Al Rahma spoke publicly about seeing a little girl being beaten in the face with a “women’s shoe” and repeatedly hearing children screaming at night. She said she received threats from Dar Al Rahma to withdraw her testimony, which sparked a widespread campaign of solidarity on social media. The Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor launched an investigation, but it eventually denied all her claims, and the case was swept under the carpet.

We attempted to contact the management of Dar Al Rahma to comment about the investigation, but we were unable to reach them. Bara’a Al Ayubi, the director of the orphanage, had previously stated to the media that she did not voluntarily cooperate with the regime, and that the facility provided adequate care to all of its children.

Intergenerational Arrests

“Congratulations, Mohammed has arrived!”

Abdulrahman’s mother was the first to call him with the good news that his son had been born. He didn’t hear her voice again for the next three years.

Abdulrahman never saw his son as a baby, never hugged him, or held his little fingers. He lived in the opposition-controlled areas of Harasta east of Damascus, while his wife was staying in the town of Al Tall north of the city, in an area controlled by the former regime.

Abdulrahman posted a photo of his newborn son online: “May God grant him the ability to protect Syria and live free,” he wrote.

In early August 2015, a few days after Mohammed’s birth, Abdulrahman’s sister Omama visited the new mother and baby at Al Abbasiyyin Hospital in Damascus. Her husband, Musab, and their two daughters, eight-year-old Laila and four-year-old Layan came too.

When they tried to return to the city of Tal, their car was stopped at a roaming security checkpoint.

“As soon as we pulled over to the side, they opened the road and all the cars started moving quickly,” Omama said. “At that moment, we realized that the checkpoint had been set up especially for us. They were waiting for us.”

Intelligence agents arrested the entire family and took them to the Air Force Intelligence prison. Omama and her two daughters were placed in a narrow cell used for solitary confinement. “I saw my father handcuffed,” Laila, who is now 18 years old, recalled. “They pulled his shirt over his face so he couldn’t see.” Musab disappeared to another location.

From her cell, Omama later learned that her mother, Ghada, had also been arrested, followed by her sister-in-law, Iman – the mother of newborn Mohammed – and Iman’s mother, Amina. It was a cross-generational campaign of arrests that turned almost the entire family into prisoners: three children, two mothers, a father, and two grandmothers.

The interrogation focused on Abdulrahman, Omama’s brother, who lived in Ghouta and worked in relief work. She had nothing to share about him, as he kept his activities secret, even from his family.

Laila and Layan watched their mother returning from the interrogation room every day with obvious signs she had been beaten. She refused to answer her daughters’ questions about the bruise marks. Days later, the interrogators explicitly threatened her: her daughters would be taken to an orphanage, and she would never see them again.

That night, when Omama returned to the cell, she faced an impossible decision. She sat her eight-year-old daughter down. “I am going to tell you some very difficult things, my love,” she told Laila. “You must memorize your name, your surname, and the names of your parents, because they will take you to a place far away from me. You must grow up and know how to make it back to us… and you must become a mother to your sister Layan.”

Laila froze for a moment, then lay down next to her sleeping sister and hugged her. Then she turned back to her mother. “Mom, this is too much for me to handle… I’m too young to hear you speak like this.”

Omama hugged her and cried. ‘I know this is hard for you, but you have to know, and be careful,” she told her.

Before they left the cell, Laila found a yellow crayon and drew a sun and a little girl wearing a dress on the wall. “This drawing is for you,” she told her mother. “The sun will stay with you, and the girl will keep you company when we’re not here.” The next day, Omama hugged her two daughters one last time.

SOS: A Loving Home for Every Child

Layan and Laila were transferred to SOS Children’s Villages within a week of their arrest, according to records obtained from Air Force Intelligence.

Meanwhile Muhammad was still a few days old. He was suffering from severe hypoglycemia requiring him to remain in an incubator when his mother and grandmother were arrested. The newborn was placed under heavy security at Al Abbasiyyin Hospital – a prisoner almost from birth.

Official correspondence, including letters addressed to Major General Jamil Hassan, reveals Air Force Intelligence’s confusion over what to do with the baby. The hospital where he was born refused to keep him there because he was “no longer sick.” He was transferred to a “safe hospital” under security supervision, then to an orphanage called the Al Mabarrah Association in November 2015.

Later, he was moved to SOS Children’s Villages to join his cousins, Laila and Layan.

SOS Children’s Villages is an international non-profit organization founded in 1949 that claims to provide “a loving home for every child.” Since 1981, the organization has run several orphanages in Syria, most notably in Qudsaya and Sabboura, villages west of Damascus. In the orphanages, a “foster mother” lives with a group of children in small units, assisted by a “foster aunt,” meant to simulate a family environment for orphaned or unaccompanied children.

The earliest cases we documented of detained children being transferred to SOS Children’s Villages date back to 2013, a fact confirmed by the organization itself. SOS acknowledged receiving 139 children “without proper documentation” and that Syrian authorities imposed these transfers on them between 2013 and 2018.

For SOS Children’s Villages staff in Syria, these children were an “open secret.” “Before 2019, we all knew when intelligence referrals arrived,” said Fatima, a former employee who used a pseudonym. “They would give the foster mothers and supervisors specific instructions. Some children were not allowed to mingle with others or attend school. Sometimes, the children were not allowed to appear on the village’s Instagram accounts.”

Mustafa, another former SOS Syria employee, said the headquarters of SOS Children’s Villages International in Austria was “in constant contact with the Syria office, and knew exactly who these children were and what their backgrounds were.”

In 2023, an Independent Commission of Inquiry (ISC), commissioned by SOS International, published a report on safeguarding issues at the organization’s branches around the world. The report mentioned the Syrian branch’s involvement in housing detained children, alerting some donors and members of the organization about the children for the first time.

After reviewing the report, a branch of SOS in Germany, one of the largest funders of SOS Syria, launched an independent investigation into the situation of these children.

“We first learned about [the children of detainees] in 2016, and confirmed it in 2017,” said Benoît Piot, interim executive director of SOS Children’s Villages, in an exclusive interview with our team. “That’s why we decided in 2018 to ask SOS Children’s Villages Syria to stop receiving these types of referrals.”

A report by the German-commissioned inquiry, which was made public in August, provided details about the children referred to SOS by Air Force Intelligence and the circumstances surrounding some of the referrals, based on documents they reviewed and conversations with current and former employees.

The report addressed some of the topics that have been subject to intense discussion by Syrians, such as whether children’s names were changed in the orphanages. ‘Foster mothers’ at SOS told the investigation team that some of the children in their care did not respond to the names they had been given at the orphanage, and they found out their real names only once they later returned to their families. These children appear to have been admitted to SOS using names other than their own. One ‘foster mother’ said she cared for a child for two full years, only to discover when he was reunited with his biological mother that he had a completely different family name and first name.

“In 2017 and 2018, the rebels asked the regime to hand over some children in exchange for a captured Syrian army officer,” said Dima, who worked in the child safety department at SOS Children’s Villages for many years and spoke to us under a pseudonym. “When we were told to hand these children over to the regime, we learned they had different names.”

The report commissioned by SOS in Germany also included the number of children referred by security forces each year. From 2016, when the SOS Executive Director said they first learned about the children, until the end of 2018, when the organisation said it stopped accepting these cases, at least 94 children of detainees were held at SOS. The high number of children illustrates the cost inflicted on Syrian families by the organization’s slow response to the Assad regime’s control over its Syrian branch.

SOS International said late last year that it had demanded that the former regime stop sending children of detainees to the organization’s centers in Syria in 2018. However, one of the documents we obtained shows that four Iraqi children were transferred to SOS Children’s Villages in 2022 by the Ministry of Social Affairs, which ordered SOS to keep the transfer confidential. The internal investigation report said that the Syrian branch of SOS Children’s Villages denied receiving the children or even receiving the transfer paper from the Ministry.

SOS’ Syria branch was close to the Assad regime. The Syria Trust for Development, a non-profit organisation founded by Asma al-Assad (Syria’s First Lady at the time), received approximately 7% of its budget from SOS from January to May 2018, according to an internal financial document obtained by Syrian researchers. Meanwhile Samar Daboul, the daughter of Abu Salim Muhammad Dib Daboul, the office manager of Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez for decades, was chairwoman of the Board of Directors of the SOS Children’s Villages Syria until this year.

In a conversation with our team, Samar Daboul distanced herself from Asma al-Assad, saying that she only visited the SOS Children Village once to break the fast with the children and mothers during Ramadan. She also denied that her father’s position had any influence on the organization’s work, and that he did not interfere in its affairs. “The support [from Syria Trust for Development] was part of an emergency program to help vulnerable people secure their lives,” she told us.

In response to our questions, SOS International stated that of the 139 children it received from intelligence, only 34 were returned directly to their families. Intelligence services took custody of 104 children after they left SOS, and to this day, SOS Children’s Villages has no information about what happened to them. SOS also told us that only one family who was separated from their children received support from the organization before the fall of the regime. Several other families who tried to inquire about the whereabouts of their children since the fall of the regime told us that they had not yet received any answers from the organization.

In the early years of the Syrian revolution, Omama’s brother Abdulrahman Ghbeis worked with the international humanitarian organisation the Red Crescent in the Damascus suburb of Harasta. Later he decided to stay in Eastern Ghouta to work as a paramedic.

Abdulrahman believed his work with the Red Crescent would protect him from the regime. However, several of his colleagues were arrested and beaten at a regime checkpoint, and by late 2012, Abdulrahman was wanted by four intelligence branches. “The regime considered people like me, who stayed to help, a real threat,” he said. He then decided to send his wife, Iman, to the regime-controlled town of Al Tall, where their extended family lives.

On the day of their arrest, Abdulrahman tried to call his sister, Omama, but there was no answer. He started calling his wife and his mother: “I called everyone I knew, hoping they could help me. I was going crazy and wanted to run home to Al Tall.”

In total, intelligence services had arrested eight members of Abdulrahman’s family, his humanitarian work in opposition controlled areas marking him as a “terrorist” in the regime’s eyes.

“Everything was under surveillance,” Abdulrahman said. “Facebook, informants, double agents, wiretaps. Any call to ask about my family could result in another arrest.”

Two weeks after his family’s arrest, Abdulrahman activated his network of contacts within the Red Crescent to search for his newborn son, Mohammed. He discovered that he had been transferred to another hospital in Damascus and placed under heavy security. A relative tried to contact the officer in charge, offering money in exchange for the child or any news about him, but the officer did not respond. Days later, the officer updated his WhatsApp status with a photo of him holding baby Mohammed. He wrote that he had named him Ali.

Abdulrahman remembers his emotional tumult upon reading the message that day. “I actually love this name, but he chose it to provoke me [by choosing a name associated with the Alawite sect of al-Assad]. I had no problem with that. What comforted me was seeing Muhammad’s happy face. It looked like he was eating and well nourished. But I was also afraid for him because he was in the hands of dangerous people. It looked like my child was comfortable in the officer’s arms, so I could only entrust him to God. God willing, I told myself, one day I will bring him back.”

Leaked Air Force Intelligence documents and messages shared by Abdulrahman reveal what happened next. On August 15, 2015, an intelligence officer sent Abdulrahman a Facebook message with a photo of Mohammed, and a demand: “If you want your family back, give us 15-20 prisoners from [Syrian opposition commander] Zahran Alloush. Bring them and you’ll get your family in exchange.”

“I kept asking myself: Did they beat them?” Abdulrahman recalled. “Is Mohammed with his mother now? Will they let her hold him? Breastfeed him? I imagined my wife dying after her caesarean section and Mohammed crying.”

Air Force Intelligence files obtained by this investigation show instructions to detain the family’s female members for use in a prisoner exchange.

Abdulrahman tried his best to negotiate with opposition leaders in Ghouta, asking for captured regime soldiers to exchange for his imprisoned family. “I visited all the factions in Ghouta. Everyone promised me prisoners, but no one would hand them over,” he said. “I even went to Zahran Alloush and asked him, ‘Do you have prisoners? My family is with the regime, and we are the sons of Ghouta.’ Every time he would reply, ‘May God bless you,’ but just delayed his response.”

At one point, a planned prisoner exchange collapsed at the last minute. “One of the faction leaders promised me to secure the prisoners, and we prepared everything,” Abdulrahman remembered. “On the day of the swap, Zahran Alloush’s men prevented the exchange from taking place.” The family remained in prison, while the three children were returned to SOS Children’s Villages.

“Layan was unable to speak for three months” when she first arrived at SOS, a mental health worker at SOS Children’s Villages told us. “She would cry all night.”

Laila, who was eight years old at the time, tried to take care of her little sister as her mother had asked her. “Layan would wake up at night, crying, screaming, and thrashing about, having nightmares, and I would put her to sleep next to me,” Laila said.“Sometimes I would cry too. For almost the entire first month, I didn’t talk to anyone because of the shock.”

About a year after their arrest, Laila and Layan were allowed to visit their mother in prison for the first time. Laila sat in Omama’s lap, but Layan was hesitant. Even though she was still young, Laila noticed that her mother had changed. “She was very thin, and she looked tired,” she said. The visit only lasted a few minutes before the sisters were taken back to SOS Children’s Villages.

The next year passed slowly. One day, SOS staff told Laila that they would be returned to their families. “I trusted her because she was the one who told us about visiting our mother the first time, but this time she told me we would be returning to our families,” Laila said. “I thought about it a lot.” When the sisters arrived at the prison, they met their grandmother, their aunt, and her mother for the first time since their arrest. They also met their cousin Mohammed for the first time. He had just turned two.

This time the family had been transferred from Air Force Intelligence to the Military Intelligence branch. Omama recalls being told their release was imminent: “We thought we were getting out. The children had been with us in the cell for three days. Then the prison guard came and told me, ‘Bring me these children and prepare them for me.’”

The family was taken out into the corridor and the women were ordered into a group cell.

“This is when Laila started crying and stamping her feet on the ground and shouting, ‘Oh God, oh God!’” Omama said. “Layan started crying and Mohammed started crying too.”

After the exchange deal failed, the children were sent to SOS Children’s Villages while the women remained in detention.
“Can you imagine how a mother feels when she is helpless in front of her children in such a situation?” Omama said. “My daughters are being taken away from me and my daughter is collapsing and I am unable to do anything?”

The Melody of Life

Lahn Al Hayat Orphanage (literally, “The Melody of Life”), formerly known as Dar Zaid bin Haritha, was established in Damascus during the 1970s as the only government-run orphanage. In 2013, its name was changed to Lahn Al Hayat and a private association, Al Raja Development Fund, assumed management of the orphanage in partnership with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor.

In 2023, a presidential decree established Lahn Al Hayat as the “public entity” responsible for the care of children of unknown parentage, both financially independent and affiliated with the Ministry.

The Lahn Al Hayat complex consists of two buildings, one for girls and one for boys, and a section for infants. Like the SOS Villages system, the children are distributed among apartments within the complex. Each apartment is managed by a female employee responsible for approximately seven children, referred to as “Mother,” and assisted by a second employee, referred to as “Auntie.”

Lahn Al Hayat was the only childcare organization legally authorized to change the names of children of unknown parentage and issue them new identity documents. In contrast, organizations such as Dar Al Rahma, Al Mubarrah Association, and SOS Children’s Villages had no legal authority to change names.

During our research, we found documents showing that the intelligence services sometimes placed children in the Lahn Al Hayat facility claiming that they were parentless and without names, yet ordered that they should not leave without the prior consent of intelligence. However, other documents showed that many children were transferred by the intelligence services under their real names.

Today, Hanadi Al Khaimi, the former director of the orphanage appointed by the Ministry of Social Affairs, faces charges related to changing the children’s parentage records. She has been detained since early July of this year. We were unable to reach Hanadi Al Khaimi or her lawyer for comment.

Syrian authorities had previously arrested two former Lahn Al Hayat officials, Nada Al Ghabra and Lama Al Sawaf, who are both board members of the Al Raja Development Fund Association. They were subsequently released.

When we contacted their lawyer, Mr. Majd Rajab, he denied that the two women had any connection to or knowledge of the intelligence services’ placement of children in the orphanage, emphasizing that their role was limited to care of children and resource management alone.

Prospects of Justice

In early January 2025, following the fall of the Syrian regime, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor announced an investigation into the transfer of children of Syrian opposition members and detainees to the orphanages. Families were invited to contact the Ministry to submit any information or complaints via a hotline. However, this process was short-lived. A new government was formed in March, appointing Hind Qabwat as Minister of Social Affairs and Labor. In May, it was decided to replace the first investigation committee with a new one.

The committee’s goal is to “research, count, and uncover the fate of children who have disappeared in Syrian regime prisons.” The committee is chaired by Raghdaa Zeidan, advisor to the Minister of Social Affairs and Labor, and includes representatives from four ministries, civil society organizations, families of missing persons, and several human rights and forcibly disappeared persons specialists. The committee has not yet issued any findings.

The committee’s official spokesperson, Samer Qurabi, a representative of the Ministry of Interior, told us the committee’s work resulted in the arrest of former ministers Rima Al Qadri and Kinda Al Shammat. Several orphanage directors were also detained: Fidaa Al Daqouri, Hanadi Khaimi, and Samer Khaddam. They, along with the two former ministers, face charges of altering children’s records and concealing their true family background.

“This is a crime, because orphanage workers are obligated to inform families of the whereabouts of their children,” he said. “Accordingly, the suspects were arrested, and documents bearing their signatures were found, indicating their complicity in collusion with the security services in this shameful act.”

According to the spokesperson, the two former ministers issued official letters to orphanages ordering them to accept the children, withholding their real identities and preventing any disclosure under penalty of accountability. As a result, the orphanages effectively became detention centers: if a child’s grandfather or uncle came to inquire about them, they were told that the child was “not present.” According to the spokesperson, the hotline has received approximately 100 calls and 50 reports of missing children whose names do not appear on the committee’s current lists.

The committee – none of whose members are full time – is overwhelmed by the large number of documents which require review. “In our recent meetings, we discussed hiring a team to organize, archive, and sort the documents to facilitate access to information,” Qurabi said.

At the international level, the Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria was established two years ago by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly to search for missing persons and support their families. It was first able to enter Syria last December. The organisation’s mandate encompasses all missing persons in Syria, regardless of the cause of their disappearance or their nationality.

We spoke with Karla Quintana, who leads the organization. She and her team are working to collect information and documentation related to missing persons in collaboration with civil society and Syrian authorities. Quintana said the team holds regular meetings with the National Committee for Missing Persons and the Syrian Ministry of Social Affairs, in addition to building a presence on social media and other channels to facilitate communication with families and the community.

All these organisations face a major challenge in meeting the expectations of families desperately searching for their loved ones. Establishing the fate of those who have disappeared is often a long and complex process, especially given the large number of people who are missing. DNA testing is important, Quintana says, but not the only answer – as first of all, they need to gather as much information as possible about the missing persons.

Open the Door!

On the night the Syrian regime fell, Fawaz was lying on his bed thinking of a way to escape from Dar Al Rahma with his siblings. He dozed off for a while until he was suddenly woken by the sound of loud knocking on the door. “I heard gunfire, and outside I heard them saying, ‘Open the door! Open the door!’” Fawaz said. “I told myself, ‘This must be my father coming to take me home!’ I went out and saw my uncle Abu Rawad, my uncle Jihad, his siblings, and his cousins. They put my siblings and me in the car and took us away.”

On the same day, Fawaz’s mother, Sabah, was freed from prison, along with thousands of other detainees, both men and women. She was finally able to hold her children again.

But Fawaz’s joy was short-lived. “I told [my grandmother], ‘After I change my clothes, I’m going right to see my father.’” His grandmother had no choice but to break the news to him. His father, Naim Rahma, had been killed a week before the opposition fighters arrived in Damascus. Members of the former Syrian regime’s army had sent him a box filled with explosives. It exploded as he opened it, killing him instantly along with some of his relatives.

Fawaz’s voice grew quiet as he remembered his grandmother’s words. “When she told me my father had died, I came and sat next to my grandfather and put my head on my hands.”

Fawaz now lives with his family in Rankous, in the Qalamoun region north of Damascus. Despite his family’s constant attempts to persuade him to return to school, he left his education and has begun to work with his family in the fields.

The Ghbeis family was released in 2018 in a prisoner exchange deal, after nearly three years of detention. Omama and her two daughters, and Iman and her son, Mohammed, were reunited at SOS Children’s Villages before heading to Idlib, where they were reunited with Abdulrahman. He had arrived on one of the notorious green buses transporting Syrians displaced from formerly opposition-held areas like Ghouta.

But the reunion wasn’t what they had expected. Their long separation and time in the orphanages left the children with deep scars. Omama said her younger daughter, Layan, didn’t recognize her when she left SOS. “She was clinging to her alternative mother [at SOS], crying and calling for her, and refusing to look at me or come near me.”

Abdulrahman Ghbeis showed us the first photo of himself with his son, taken when they met after years of forced separation. “When I saw Mohammed for the first time in Idlib, I held him but I didn’t feel like I was smelling my son,” he said “I was worried. I asked myself, ‘Is this really him?’”

“He also didn’t feel like he was hugging his father. I tried to bring him closer to me, but he didn’t hug me back.”

Abdulrahman said he and his wife agreed not to talk about what happened, for the sake of their own and their son’s mental health. “Every time we remember this story, we get depressed,” he said. “But when Mohammed grows up, I will tell him the story in all its details so he might follow the same path I did and prevent injustice and tyranny from returning to Syria.”

After escaping to Turkey and living there for many years, Abdulrahman and his family moved back to Syria this spring. His son, Mohammed, who mostly spoke Turkish, is now adjusting to life back in Syria and making new friends.

Omama Ghbeis’s family lived in Turkey for six years before being accepted to the US through the refugee resettlement program, where they still live today. Laila will soon graduate from high school and hopes to receive a scholarship to specialize in programming, while Layan, who completed most of her primary education in Turkish, is working hard to learn English. Her mother, Omama, is keen to teach her Arabic at home so she can communicate with her family and relatives.

During our reporting, we repeatedly found that children who were separated from their jailed parents did not recognize them when they were reunited, and later had difficulty integrating into the family or school, and suffered from psychological and behavioral effects such as social withdrawal, anxiety and bedwetting.

One father said his young daughter had not come near him for months after he left prison. A woman told us that her daughter gets good grades in school, but is withdrawn. “My daughter is afraid of men and starts crying when she sees her gym teacher at school,” she said.

Childcare organizations, some of which received international funding, who claimed to protect children and give them a dignified life, were instead infiltrated and controlled by war criminals. They became complicit, disregarding local and international laws as well as human rights principles, pursuing their own interests at the expense of the most vulnerable.

The children of the Rahma and Ghbeis families have been reunited with their loved ones, yet more than 3,700 children are still missing. Their families continue to search tirelessly, holding onto a glimmer of hope and justice.

This report is a translation of the Arabic version of a joint investigative report titled “Syria’s Stolen Children,” produced by Lighthouse Reports in collaboration with several international and Syrian media organizations: BBC Eye, The Observer, Women Who Won the War, Der Spiegel, Siraj, and Trouw newspaper.

This collaboration includes documentary film, TV segments, written investigations, social media posts, podcasts, and radio segments to a global audience in up to 35 languages, including Arabic, English, German, and Dutch.

The post The Orphanage That Hid Us appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.