Syrian fee confirms the deaths of Rania al-Abbasi’s six youngsters, lacking since 2013 beneath Bashar al-Assad’s rule.
Revealed On 31 Might 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 mother and father greater than a decade in the past beneath then-President Bashar al-Assad, are possible lifeless.
“We now have reached dependable and corroborating outcomes that permit us to conclude with a excessive diploma {of professional} certainty that Dr Rania al-Abbasi’s youngsters are deceased,” the NCMP stated in an announcement on Saturday.
Really useful Tales
listing of three gadgetsfinish of listing
The destiny of the youngsters, unknown for years, turned an emblem of the plight of different lacking youngsters of detainees and people forcibly disappeared throughout al-Assad’s rule, which ended together with his ouster in 2024.
Al-Abbasi went lacking alongside along with her husband, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and their six youngsters, aged three to fifteen, in March 2013 after authorities forces raided their house in Damascus, based on rights teams.
The fee, arrange by the nation’s new rulers in Might 2025 to research lacking and forcibly disappeared folks, stated its findings have been “primarily based 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 youngsters’s deaths in a video posted on Fb.
He stated the household had been in a position to view video recordings linked to the principle suspect in a 2013 bloodbath in a Damascus district, together with one displaying him accusing youngsters in a darkish room of being “main financiers of terrorism”.
“They turned out to be our youngsters,” Hassan al-Abbasi stated. “We lastly noticed them … however they have been martyred.”
The destiny of Rania and her husband stays formally unknown in spite of everything contact with them was misplaced following their arrest on accusations linked to opposition to the Assad authorities.
Rights teams and media studies counsel they could have died, although their our bodies have been by no means discovered.
The difficulty of lacking folks stays one of the vital urgent in Syria. They embody detainees who vanished in authorities prisons in addition to individuals who went lacking throughout preventing, at checkpoints or whereas fleeing their properties through the years of civil conflict.
Tens of hundreds of individuals have been detained or disappeared throughout the conflict, 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 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 youngsters 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 printed footage it stated had been leaked by a conscript in a pro-government militia displaying members of the Assad-era Army 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.
