Syrian fee confirms the deaths of Rania al-Abbasi’s six kids, lacking since 2013 below Bashar al-Assad’s rule.
Revealed On 31 Could 2026
Syria’s Nationwide Fee for Lacking Individuals (NCMP) says the youngsters of dentist and former chess champion Rania al‑Abbasi, who disappeared with their dad and mom greater than a decade in the past below then-President Bashar al-Assad, are possible useless.
“We now have reached dependable and corroborating outcomes that enable 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 youngsters, 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 together with his ouster in 2024.
Al-Abbasi went lacking alongside together with her husband, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and their six kids, aged three to fifteen, in March 2013 after authorities forces raided their dwelling in Damascus, in line with rights teams.
The fee, arrange by the nation’s new rulers in Could 2025 to research lacking and forcibly disappeared individuals, stated its findings have been “primarily based on a number of verification and evaluation procedures” carried out in coordination with nationwide authorities.
“Efforts to search out the stays … are nonetheless ongoing,” it added.
Hassan al-Abbasi, Rania’s brother, confirmed the youngsters’s deaths in a video posted on Fb.
He stated the household had been capable of 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 reviews counsel they might have died, although their our bodies have been by no means discovered.
The difficulty of lacking individuals stays one of the urgent in Syria. They embrace detainees who vanished in authorities prisons in addition to individuals who went lacking throughout preventing, at checkpoints or whereas fleeing their houses through the years of civil warfare.
Tens of hundreds of individuals have been detained or disappeared in the course of the warfare, 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 many years of al-Assad household rule might 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 knowledge 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 printed footage it stated had been leaked by a conscript in a pro-government militia exhibiting members of the Assad-era Army Intelligence Department 227 killing a minimum of 41 individuals and burning their our bodies.
The video confirmed an intelligence officer, recognized as Youssef, capturing blindfolded and certain detainees.
