Over 4,000 families seek relatives missing, detained by Assad regime

GAZIANTEP, Türkiye

Since 2017 more than 4,000 families have sought help from an association based in southeastern Türkiye to locate relatives imprisoned or kidnapped by Syria’s Assad regime.

Families whose relatives were lost have been applying to the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison in the border province of Gaziantep to find their relatives.

The group arranges video calls between families and former prisoners to help trace missing relatives in Syrian prisons.

Riyad Avlar, a founder of the group who himself endured torture during his 21-year imprisonment in the notorious Sednaya Prison near Damascus, created a database in 2017 to record information from former inmates he met during his confinement.

The database contains photos and information from former detainees, helping Syrian families locate their missing relatives.

"Unfortunately, I've had to deliver sad news to many families," Avlar told Anadolu.

Syrians hopeful for their missing relatives

Fatma al-Hariri, 58, is searching for her two sons, Suhayb, 34, and Mehmet Iqbal, 32, both arrested for being regime opponents.

She said she last spoke to Suhayb by phone in 2012, just two days before his arrest. Saying that she has not heard from their children in years, Hariri added that many of her other relatives are also missing.

"I still keep up hope and ask relevant authorities to act quickly," Hariri said.

Ruveyda Recep Aha has not heard from her brother, Mohammed Hamza, an anti-regime university student when he was taken by police, for a decade.

"He was arrested in 2008, and we visited him until 2014. Then we lost contact … My brother was being held in Sednaya Prison," she said.

Aha also described the joy of the Assad regime's fall earlier this month: "We felt reborn, our spent hopes were renewed. The happiness we felt in those hours can’t be expressed in words. Though we haven't heard from my brother, we shared the joy of every Syrian family with missing relatives."

"There are reports of secret prisons still operating in Syria … We'll maintain hope as long as there's no evidence of his death," she added.

Sednaya Prison, located near Damascus, has been widely documented as a site of systematic torture and extrajudicial killings under the now-ousted Assad regime.

Bashar Assad, Syria’s leader for nearly 25 years, fled to Russia after anti-regime groups took control of the capital Damascus on Dec. 8, ending the Baath Party regime, which had been in power since 1963.

The takeover came after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) fighters captured key cities in a lightning offensive that lasted less than two weeks.