Syrian fee confirms the deaths of Rania al-Abbasi’s six kids, lacking since 2013 underneath Bashar al-Assad’s rule.
Printed On 31 Could 2026
Syria’s Nationwide Fee for Lacking Individuals (NCMP) says the kids of dentist and former chess champion Rania al‑Abbasi, who disappeared with their mother and father greater than a decade in the past underneath then-President Bashar al-Assad, are doubtless lifeless.
“We’ve reached dependable and corroborating outcomes that permit us to conclude with a excessive diploma {of professional} certainty that Dr Rania al-Abbasi’s kids are deceased,” the NCMP stated in an announcement on Saturday.
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The destiny of the kids, unknown for years, turned a logo of the plight of different lacking kids of detainees and people forcibly disappeared throughout al-Assad’s rule, which ended along with his ouster in 2024.
Al-Abbasi went lacking alongside along with her husband, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and their six kids, aged three to fifteen, in March 2013 after authorities forces raided their house in Damascus, in response to rights teams.
The fee, arrange by the nation’s new rulers in Could 2025 to analyze lacking and forcibly disappeared folks, stated its findings have been “based mostly on a number of verification and evaluation procedures” performed in coordination with nationwide authorities.
“Efforts to seek out the stays … are nonetheless ongoing,” it added.
Hassan al-Abbasi, Rania’s brother, confirmed the kids’s deaths in a video posted on Fb.
He stated the household had been in a position to view video recordings linked to the primary suspect in a 2013 bloodbath in a Damascus district, together with one exhibiting him accusing kids in a darkish room of being “main financiers of terrorism”.
“They turned out to be our kids,” Hassan al-Abbasi stated. “We lastly noticed them … however they have been martyred.”
The destiny of Rania and her husband stays formally unknown in any case contact with them was misplaced following their arrest on accusations linked to opposition to the Assad authorities.
Rights teams and media studies recommend they could have died, although their our bodies have been by no means discovered.
The problem of lacking folks stays one of the crucial urgent in Syria. They embrace detainees who vanished in authorities prisons in addition to individuals who went lacking throughout combating, at checkpoints or whereas fleeing their houses through the years of civil struggle.
Tens of 1000’s of individuals have been detained or disappeared through the struggle, which erupted in 2011 after a brutal crackdown on antigovernment protests by al-Assad.
The NCMP stated final 12 months that the quantity of people that went lacking over a long time of al-Assad household rule could exceed 300,000.
Infamous al-Assad regime determine linked to killings
Individually on Saturday, the Syrian Ministry of Inside stated its investigation into the disappearance of al-Abbasi’s kids had uncovered proof linking Amjad Youssef – a infamous determine throughout al-Assad’s rule and the perpetrator of the 2013 Tadamon bloodbath – to their killing.
In an announcement, it stated interrogations of detainees, along with movies and data shared by the NCMP, had helped strengthen the case.
Youssef was arrested in April, prompting many Syrians to demand “simply punishment” for a person they are saying carried out the bloodbath in chilly blood.
The Tadamon case drew worldwide consideration after footage surfaced documenting the killings.
In 2022, The Guardian newspaper in the UK revealed footage it stated had been leaked by a conscript in a pro-government militia exhibiting members of the Assad-era Navy Intelligence Department 227 killing at the very least 41 folks and burning their our bodies.
The video confirmed an intelligence officer, recognized as Youssef, capturing blindfolded and certain detainees.
