The Orphanage That Hid Us

In an orphanage in Damascus, 11-year-old Fawaz sat silently watching a man who had entered the room to repair the wooden door. He was busy with a screwdriver and nails. Fawaz saw an opportunity.

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.