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.

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.

Over a decade, Syria’s security services took hundreds of children from their parents and hid them in a network of orphanages in order to coerce their families into cooperating with the regime. Some of the orphanages were run by major European charity SOS Children’s Villages, whose leadership knew for years and remained silent.

Hundreds of cases confirmed; thousands still missing

Over nine months, Syrian and international reporters from six media outlets built a database of children hidden by the Syrian regime as part of the Syria’s Stolen Children investigation.

Following the fall of the al-Assad regime in December 2024, we reviewed thousands of leaked and gathered documents with the names of over 300 children who were confined to orphanages by Syrian intelligence, some of them for years. Analysis of these records shows many were still toddlers when they were taken from families, and several were newborns. The files reveal systematic coordination between intelligence agencies, government ministries, and Syrian and international orphanages.

We found evidence of missing and possible falsified records that indicate the actual number of children who disappeared into orphanages is likely much higher. Some children were falsely recorded as abandoned orphans; others were referred to by new names. Families are still searching for at least 3,700 children who went missing under al-Assad.

Orphanages used as prisons; children as pawns

Over 100 interviews with families, whistleblowers and officials uncovered disturbing new details that undermine the orphanages’ justification that they were simply protecting children whose parents were jailed. Most parents were refused information about where their children were being taken. When grandparents and uncles did track them down, orphanages often refused to give their children back and sometimes denied they were even there.

While living at the orphanages, the children remained under the strict control of the security services. Leaked intelligence files show that top security officials ordered orphanages to keep the children’s presence confidential, deny relatives’ custody and ask permission before making any decisions about the children, such as whether they could attend school. Staff were told not to talk to them about their families and to keep them out of publicity materials and public activities.

Intelligence records show why: the children were explicitly being held at orphanages in order to pressure their parents to collaborate with the regime. Many children were only reunited with their families as part of a prisoner exchange with armed opposition groups. Some, the children of suspected foreign fighters, were deported to Russia and Iraq.

A major international charity was complicit and kept silent

The largest number of children in our database were sent to orphanages run by an Austria-headquartered charity, SOS Children’s Villages International, which operates in more than 130 countries and raises around €1.6 billion annually, including from the UN, European governments and personal donations.

SOS’ top leaders kept this quiet until the regime fell, seven years after whistleblowers first informed international staff. During this time, the international charity did not apologise, compensate or offer support to families. A senior staff member told us “senior executives didn’t want to know the details and hid away from concrete action and responsibility.” Most of the children were returned to government custody and until today, SOS says it does not know what happened to them.

The charity, whose Syria branch was led by the daughter of a close Assad aide, says it stopped accepting children of detainees in 2018. But official records indicate that intelligence agencies continued to refer several children to SOS as late as 2022. SOS denies receiving the requests or the children.

SOS Syria is funded by European donations as well the United Kingdom and United States. Bashar al-Assad was sanctioned by the EU in 2011, his wife Asmaa al-Assad in 2012. But several whistleblowers told us that most of the senior positions at SOS Syria were appointed directly by the Assad palace and that Asma al-Assad played a leading role in the organisation. SOS Children’s Villages International said it is investigating what happened in Syria and said it was not in line with their usual policies.

Families lack support or a path to accountability

We spoke to over 100 families, orphanage employees and government officials. Some parents still lack basic details about where their children were held. Their children remain traumatised by the forced separation during formative early years. Many more families are still searching for any clues that their children might still be alive, their identities and whereabouts potentially lost in the chaotic orphanage archives.

Syria’s new transitional government has struggled to respond to the families’ needs and demands for answers and accountability. An official inquiry established in January was folded into a new committee in May, which led to a series of high profile arrests in July, but it has few resources and is yet to release any findings.

Leading human rights lawyer Kimberly Motely says, “the key findings of the project indicate that the children could be the victims of crimes against humanity, particularly in the forms of imprisonment or deprivation of liberty, persecution, and enforced disappearance.”

Syria’s Stolen Children is a joint investigation coordinated by Lighthouse Reports in partnership with Syrian investigative journalists from Women Who Won the War and SIRAJ and international journalists from BBC Eye, The Observer, Der Spiegel and Trouw, and also published by Sowt and Al-Jumhuriya.

METHODS

When al-Assad’s security state suddenly collapsed, journalists, activists and families had access to sources, locations and documents that were previously unimaginable under the decades-long dictatorship. Some families began to speak out about a secret they’d held for years – that their children had been forced into orphanages.

To understand the scale and inner workings of this system of state-run disappearances, over nine months we conducted more than 100 interviews with families, current and former orphanage staff in Syria, government officials, whistleblowers, activists, lawyers and other witnesses. We spoke to over 50 SOS insiders around the globe and scrutinised their internal investigations, financial documents and public statements.

We obtained thousands of official documents from the Syrian Ministry of Social Affairs, Airforce Intelligence and orphanages in Syria, including confidential correspondence, detainee lists, referral files, log books and detailed case records, making sure not to remove or otherwise interfere with these documents in order to preserve evidence for potential future justice mechanisms.

In order to authenticate the documents, we carefully reviewed them for inconsistencies and compared their contents to publicly available information, including social media posts, media and human rights reports and detailed documentation collected by Syrian civil society over the years. In some cases, we accessed legal records to verify charges against parents. When the same children appeared in files from multiple sources, we cross-checked key information such as file numbers, names and dates of birth across different sources.

Using these documents, we built a database of verified children of national security detainees who were transferred to orphanages, which ultimately included over 320 unique names. To distinguish between them and the thousands of minors arrested by Syrian security services for political activity or routine crimes, we applied the following minimum criteria:

• Child was under the age of 18 at the time of arrest
• Arresting agency was one of four intelligence services, not civilian polic
• Child was not personally accused of any crime, but an immediate family member was accused of a political or national security-related crime
• Child was separated from their guardian(s) and transferred to a civilian childcare organization without any attempt to locate relatives or other suitable caregivers

We gathered contact information for parents and relatives through open sources and our networks of contacts. Informed by trauma experts on how to interview families experiencing “ambiguous loss”, we spoke to the families of 54 children placed in orphanages by the security services, as well as dozens of others still searching for missing children. We compiled information about each of the 320 cases through interviews and documents, which we used to analyse key trends in how and why the regime hid children in orphanages.

STORYLINES

Over 100,000 people went missing under the Assad regime, including thousands of children. Syria has one of the largest populations of missing people in the world. After the regime fell in December 2024, thousands poured out of prisons and some mass graves were discovered. But most families found no trace of their loved ones.

Syria’s Stolen Children, a documentary by BBC Eye, follows the journeys of three mothers who are still trying to find their missing children, reunite with those held in orphanages or seek justice for what happened to their family. They confront a labyrinth bureaucracy, missing and falsified records, and broken promises.

The system that swallowed their children was overseen by the top levels of al-Assad’s security apparatus and government, Al-Jumhiriya reports. In a podcast series, released on Sowt as well as Syrian radio stations, grandmothers describe begging the orphanages to see their children, while jailed parents were taunted with their disappearance during interrogations.

Mohammed Ghbeis was a few days old when he was taken by security agents from an incubator in a Damascus hospital. His mother, still recovering from a C-section, was also detained, along with seven other family members. The next time she saw Mohammed, during a prison visit, he was a year old, already taking his first steps. They did not recognise each other.

Mohammad and his cousins spent three years living in orphanages before they were released in a prisoner exchange. They are still living with the impact of those lost years. The Observer reports how families like Mohammad’s were harmed by the very institutions meant to protect them, and documents years of allegations of abuse across SOS’ global operations. In Syria, the investigation found evidence staff subjected young children to virginity tests and abuse allegations were not properly investigated.

The charity, founded in 1949 by Austrian Hermann Gmeiner, is popular in Europe and collects millions of euros in personal donations. Der Spiegel reports how a German association of SOS funded the majority of SOS Syria’s budget until this year, when it decided to phase out funding because “the well-being of the children… can no longer be reliably guaranteed.” In the Netherlands, Trouw reports that the Dutch association has also suspended funds. SIRAJ reports that SOS had partnered with Asma al-Assad’s Syria Trust for Development for many years, despite international sanctions on the al-Assads.

The post Syria’s Stolen Children appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

But nine months on, Lighthouse Reports, The Independent and Etilaat Roz have found that many former Triples are still waiting to hear from the UK government, and that military recruiters have meanwhile been circling with offers to fight for Russia in Ukraine or for Iranian-backed forces in the Middle East.

The recruitment effort is taking place in Iran, where many former Triples are now living after fleeing the Taliban. Some said they were approached for recruitment initially by contacts within the former Afghan army or security forces over the phone; others said Afghan people smugglers approached them in person. One former army doctor said he got as far as meeting Russians from the embassy in Iranian capital Tehran face-to-face about the recruitment.

Separately, we obtained evidence that Ryan Routh, the man charged with Donald Trump’s attempted assassination, had tried to encourage former Triples to fight for Ukraine against Russia days before he was charged with attempting to assassinate the now president-elect.

While all former Triples we spoke to have turned down the offers as they hold out hope of relocation to the UK, desperation is growing as the Iranian government cranks up pressure on Afghan refugees in the country. Mass deportations and new restrictions have left ex-commandos in fear of being sent back to Afghanistan and into the arms of Taliban, causing them to reconsider offers they had previously rejected.

METHODS

We contacted more than 100 former Triples from two lists we obtained for our Abandoned Afghan Commandos investigation. More than 60 responded, of whom we established that 12 had been relocated to the UK, with the remaining were either still in Afghanistan or in Iran or a number of other countries.

Of the 14 we heard back from who said they were in Iran, the majority had heard about the offers to fight in Ukraine and the Middle East, and six reported having directly received such offers.

A number of former Triples sent us forms they said they were given and asked to fill out after expressing interest in fighting in Ukraine. We analysed these forms, which asked for personal details and contact information – although it wasn’t possible to verify their veracity.

We obtained screen shots of WhatsApp messages in which a phone number matching the one on Ryan Routh’s website discusses with former Triples how they can go to Ukraine to fight against Russia. The messages are dated 12 September – just days before Routh allegedly tried to assassinate Trump at a Florida golf course.

STORYLINES

Mahibullah, who fought alongside British troops in one of the Triples units, Commando Force (CF) 333, for 15 years and fled to Iran with his wife and children in 2022, is among the Triples who have been approached with an offer to fight for Russia.

He turned it down because he was hopeful that he would hear from the UK soon, but said there was a “very big risk” of commandos taking up the Russian offer if the UK didn’t relocate them soon. The Iranian government plans to deport around two million migrants, the majority of them Afghan, by March and new restrictions cull any of the limited freedoms that Afghans had.

“If [Iran] deports me to Afghanistan, I’ll get killed there. And if they send me to Russia, I’ll get killed there as well. So if I’m getting killed I’d prefer to do it in a way that gives my family a better life,” said Mahibullah.

“I would definitely consider [taking up the offer] if it gets longer and longer. How can we wait like this? The current situation is that it’s almost impossible to live. You are not able to find a job and as a refugee we only have so many savings. There will be an end line for me and I will pick one of these offers.”

The post UK-trained commandos lured by Russia appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The authorities say they are combating land grabbing, returning displaced communities to their homes and investing in infrastructure projects.

However interviews with residents, humanitarian organisations and urban planning experts reveal a darker side of the development efforts: homes bulldozed with children still inside and vulnerable communities paying the price.

Partners at the Centre for Information Resilience’s Afghan Witness project found a third of the total area of land demolished impacted informal settlements. Typically home to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and displaced Afghans returning from neighbouring countries, these settlements house some of Afghanistan’s poorest communities.

Outside of informal settlements, the investigation found large-scale residential demolitions appeared to be impacting areas that are predominantly home to ethnic minorities. For example, Police District 13, a predominantly Hazara district, lost the largest area of residential homes to demolitions since 2021 compared to other police districts in Kabul.

Residents say fear has prevented them from protesting the demolitions.

“Most of these plans were part of previous government plans, but they were unable to be implemented because they couldn’t force people to evacuate the area,” said Fakhrullah Sarwari, an urban planning researcher who worked with the former Afghan government.

“But now the Taliban doesn’t care about that.”

METHODS

Our partners at the Centre for Information Resilience’s Afghan Witness project analysed videos showing demolitions and development projects across the city. Many of these had been uploaded by the Kabul Municipality itself.

The team geolocated the videos and scoured satellite imagery to confirm demolitions and identify new sites destroyed. The data was mapped and then analysed to spot trends in where demolitions were occurring and who was being impacted.

Etilaat Roz and Zan Times began interviewing people from the sites identified. The reporters collected testimonies from a dozen residents who provided disturbing accounts of the demolitions themselves and described the turmoil that followed their evictions.

Interviews with urban planners, humanitarian organisations and former government workers helped contextualise the demolitions and confirmed trends spotted in the data analysis.

STORYLINES

Ahmadullah*, who lived in an informal settlement in PD 4, described being woken up as homes were being demolished one morning in August 2024.

“I woke up with kids crying around me… My nephew came by, crying that her mom and brother were inside the house and the bulldozer was demolishing it,” he said.

Another resident from a demolition, where the NRC reported the deaths of two children in July 2023, also described scenes of mayhem.

“Women, children and elderly men were begging for them to stop the destruction until we can find a shelter, but they wouldn’t listen…They had pipes and sticks in their hands and they wouldn’t let anyone say a single word,” he told reporters.

While the Taliban have reportedly said residents of informal settlements can return to their place of origin, those we interviewed remained in Kabul in precarious living situations.

Without the money to rent a house in the nearby areas, Ahmad** is now living in an abandoned factory. His house was home to nearly 50 family members. He claims a Taliban official had promised them shelter, but so far, there has been nothing.

“We don’t even have tents, we have just shelters that we made from plastic pieces…For some days, we don’t have anything to eat, we sleep with an empty stomach.”

The post Inside the Taliban’s demolition campaign in Kabul appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Over the last decade, millions of refugees fleeing persecution from Taliban rule and the ongoing Syrian civil war have sought refuge in Turkey. The EU deems it unsafe to deport Syrians and Afghans back to their home countries, yet makes Turkey a buffer zone to stop them reaching Europe – in return for billions of euros.

In recent years, with the Turkish economy nosediving and anti-refugee sentiment rising, Turkey has stepped up efforts to deport migrants. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Afghans have been returned from Turkey. This has been made possible by a vast infrastructure of arrest, detention and expulsion – one of the largest migration detention systems in the world – built and funded by the EU.

An investigation by Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with El País, Der Spiegel, Politico, Etilaat Roz, SIRAJ, NRC, L’Espresso and Le Monde, provides an unprecedented look inside this deportation system and how the EU knowingly helped create and sustain it.

 

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We documented €213 million euros in EU funding for the construction and maintenance of around 30 removal centres in Turkey, with a total of nearly €1 billion given to the country to help manage the flow of people across its borders. Some of these funds have been used to expand fingerprinting systems now used to track down and pick up migrants on the streets, and to kit out removal centres with barbed wire and higher walls.

Documents, visual evidence and interviews show that detainees are often denied legal aid and are exposed to unsanitary and overcrowded conditions as well as abuse and even torture. Many are violently coerced into signing documents stating they will voluntarily return to the countries they fled.

We found that the EU is aware that it is funding this abusive system, with its own staff raising alarm about it internally – yet senior officials choose to turn a blind eye.

METHODS

We spoke with over 100 sources, including 37 people who had been detained in 22 different EU-funded removal centres, as well as Turkish, Syrian and Afghan officials and former removal centre staff. Their testimonies about poor conditions, systemic violence and being forced to sign “voluntary” returns documents were supported by an extensive review of visual evidence, court rulings and hundreds of pages of EU documents.

In the most detailed analysis of EU funding for migration management in Turkey to date, we combed through EU and Turkish official reports and briefings, research papers, and procurement and call for tenders documents. We submitted more than 20 freedom of information requests to European Commission agencies, many of which were denied on the grounds that they could harm EU relations with Turkey.

We talked to over a dozen European diplomats and officials in both Brussels and Turkey to better understand the level of official awareness of these abuses and issues with EU monitoring mechanisms meant to provide oversight over how EU funds are used.

We also captured images of EU-funded equipment being used by Turkish officials to conduct mass arrests targeting refugees on the streets of Turkey and transport refugees back to Syria, and traced the equipment in internal EU documents to try to establish their original purpose.

STORYLINES

Abdul Eyse, 28, had been living legally in Turkey for four years when he was detained on the street, imprisoned in an EU-funded centre and violently forced to sign a “voluntary return” paper. Shortly after, he was driven to Syria in a bus with the EU flag emblazoned on it, and left there.

“I was going to buy household supplies when the Turkish police arrested me,” says Abdul. “In prison, we were severely tortured, beaten and insulted, they also detained us in a refrigerator for up to 12 hours. They forced us to sign voluntary deportation papers.”

He had left Syria in 2019 after being injured in a shelling and was living in Turkey with his wife and four-year-old son, who suffers from a heart condition. Unable to support themselves in Turkey without him, they were forced to join him in Syria.

The family is now living in the Syrian province of Idlib, which is controlled by a group the EU deems “terrorist” and where medical care is severely lacking. Ahmad is unable to get a much-needed operation that could save his life.

In some cases, the consequences of being deported from Turkey are fatal. Jamshid*, a father-of-one, served as a member of the Afghan special forces. When the Taliban advanced on Kabul, he fled from Afghanistan and reached Turkey in the summer of 2023.

He was arrested a month later and deported first to Iran, and then to Afghanistan, according to two of his relatives. Weeks later, he was shot dead, with gunshot wounds to the neck and head.

Several European diplomats told us they raised concerns about the EU funding abuses and deportations to senior officials but were ignored. Seven European diplomats in Turkey, who work for the EU or its members, stated that they were aware of forced deportations of Syrians and/or the appalling conditions inside the centres. These issues were “systematically erased” from the EU’s annual reports on Turkey, according to a former EU official. “Everybody knows. People are closing their eyes,” they said.

“European leaders are fully aware of what is going on, they just don’t want to get their hands dirty,” said Emma Sinclair of Human Rights Watch, referring to the forced deportations carried out by Turkey and facilitated with EU money. “The EU is indirectly facilitating forced returns. They subcontract human rights violations to third countries.”

*Name changed for security reasons

This investigation was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe and the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund

The post Turkey’s EU-funded deportation machine appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Much of that money quickly made its way to Dubai — a convenient three-hour flight from Kabul and with a glistening construction boom primed to absorb massive infusions of cash.

Our latest investigation pulls back the curtain on the profiteers of the Afghan war. Working with OCCRP and other media partners as part of the Dubai Unlocked project, we traced the vast property empires they built in the secretive emirate, often at the expense of ordinary Afghan citizens.

METHODS

The property data at the heart of the project comes from a series of leaks of more than 100 datasets from Dubai. Together they provide a detailed overview of the ownership or usage of hundreds of thousands of properties in the city. Most of the data is from 2020 and 2022.

Over seventy media outlets from 58 countries worked on the Dubai Unlocked project. Journalists combed through the data looking for familiar names, triangulating those names with key identifying information in the records, such as date of birth or passport number, to confirm a match.

Lighthouse Reports worked with Afghan journalists from Etilaat Roz and other outlets to dig into the names of importance to Afghanistan.

Verifying matches in the data proved challenging: it is not commonplace to record birth dates in Afghanistan. In other countries, these were key to confirming the identities of people in the data. Reporters deployed OSINT tools, spoke with sources and combed archived versions of old corporate records to help close this gap.

We then worked with reporters in multiple countries to delve into other assets and businesses of key Afghans in the Dubai Unlocked dataset, investigating company records in Afghanistan, passport purchases in Cyprus and properties ownership in Germany.

STORYLINES

Experts told us how the US Department of Defense’s lack of oversight over large reconstruction contracts fuelled corruption in Afghanistan, with contracts enriching the elite and warnings falling on deaf ears.

One anti-corruption expert, speaking to us from hiding in Afghanistan, said efforts to crack down on fraud and corrupt politicians were thwarted by Western advisers who argued it was important to maintain what “little political stability” existed in the country.

“That was the justification. To maintain that little political stability, we have to keep those corrupt officials,” she said.

“And what happened on August 15th, 2021” – the Taliban’s dramatic takeover of Kabul and the withdrawal of U.S. troops – “that was the direct result.”

The post Afghan War Profiteers appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Qaboun, a suburb of Damascus, was one of the first areas to protest against President Bashar al-Assad’s government in 2011. It has now been almost wiped off the map, following a campaign of Russian and Syrian military demolitions. Government blueprints show the working class area will be rebuilt with high-rises and a gleaming shopping mall.

Allies of the president and his family are well-placed to profit from the dismantling of the old Syria – and the construction of its shiny new replacement. Mohammed Hamsho, a Syrian businessman and politician close to the al-Assads, is a key player in the Syrian metal industry. Rubble workers told us his company helped demolish Qaboun and extract iron from the rubble for his steel factories.

On the other side of Damascus, the neighbourhood of Basateen al-Razi was razed to the ground by bulldozers in the earlier part of the war. The government’s flagship reconstruction project, Marota City, will be built there, though it has been delayed by international sanctions and lack of investment. The first tower blocks in the Dubai-style development have slowly started going up, some using steel from the very same factory run by Hamsho.

METHODS

We worked with Syrian partners to analyse hundreds of images, videos and social media posts of the demolitions in Qaboun and companies doing construction work in Marota, using satellite images to track the progress of the development. We spoke to former residents displaced to other parts of Syria and scattered around the world about the demolition of their homes and communities. We also interviewed workers collecting the rubble of demolished communities and companies involved in the construction of the redevelopment.

STORYLINES

Um Alaa, in her early 40s, was one of the first female driving instructors in Syria. She taught women from some of the most powerful and privileged families around Damascus how to drive. This work helped her pay for her pride and joy – her house in Qaboun.

When the government recaptured Qaboun, Um Alaa’s house was still standing, according to relatives in the area. But soon it was stripped bare of furniture, metal doors, roof, electrical wiring – until the house was completely demolished. Now Um Alaa works as an Uber Eats delivery driver in Denmark.

Hussam, whose name has been changed for security reasons, was desperate for a job after the government took control of Qaboun. He heard there was work available removing rubble from his old neighbourhood – but he soon realised the real task was helping dismantle the homes of his former neighbours. “Now, when I think about the work I did and how I used to pull iron from people’s homes – I regret it a lot,” he said.

The post The Rubble King appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.