The investigative team identified the locations of the recovered caches, most of them clustered within a corridor that runs from Deir ez-Zor to Iraq’s Anbar province, the same area the group previously used to smuggle money and weapons.

The group continues to tap into its buried treasure for the purpose of rebuilding its operational capacities, though these efforts are dwarfed by the group’s vast financial network that operates globally.

The findings detailing a literal underground financial network are based on a cache of Islamic State documents stored on a hard drive that was found in a known former command post of the group. The joint investigation has verified the authenticity of the documents through a series of interviews with local and international experts as well as known former Islamic State fighters.

In September 2020, as the Islamic State group was losing the last of its major strongholds in Syria and Iraq, an internal document issued by the “wali al-Sham” (the governor overseeing the group’s Syrian territory) carried a simple order to every provincial emir and unit commander in the group: “Bury the money.”

The directive concerned part of the wealth the group had amassed over years of controlling vast stretches of Syria and Iraq. It required the group’s financial officers to distribute the money across multiple secure burial sites, while keeping it retrievable when needed.

That document, along with more than 200 financial and security records obtained by the investigation team, reveals that the Islamic State group did not treat the collapse of the “caliphate” as the end of its project, but as a new phase that called for protecting financial resources and scattering them in secret caches across deserts and towns.

Over more than 20 months, the investigative team was able to document and authenticate nine major international coalition security operations in which money, gold and other precious metals hidden by the group were recovered in Syria and Iraq. The investigative team also analyzed internal Islamic State documents, expert testimony and security sources that reveal, for the first time publicly, the administrative and financial structure that governed these caches, and the role they played in preserving part of the group’s financial capacity after its territorial losses.

On the morning of April 1, 2023, there was nothing to draw the eye to the abandoned farm south of Raqqa. Barren land dotted with scattered trees, the remains of a mudbrick structure worn down by years of war — it looked just like dozens of forgotten sites strewn across the Syrian steppe.

Under the oppressive sun, members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by the U.S.-led Global Coalition Against Daesh, began to dig near the edge of the farm. It was not clear what they were looking for at first, until the color of the soil changed in one corner, and it became clear that the ground had been carefully sealed years earlier. As more dirt was cleared away, the rims of metal barrels buried beneath the surface began to show.

The surprise was considerable: four full barrels concealed inside a secret pit that had been meticulously camouflaged, alongside tightly sealed bags holding close to a million dollars in cash.

When the first barrel was opened, its gold glinted in the sunlight for the first time in years. Bars and pieces of gold were carefully preserved inside layers that insulated them from moisture and dust.

This discovery was not an isolated incident, but a window into a wide network of caches and hideouts spread across the deserts of Syria and Iraq, some of which certain cells of the group still rely on for funding and survival.

The group’s loss of the Iraqi city of Mosul in July 2017 marked the beginning of the collapse of its territorial control in both countries. By January 2025, the investigation team had documented nine major operations in which caches were found containing cash, gold and precious metals the group had hidden near the end of its years of control.

According to the investigation’s findings, the value of the uncovered cash exceeded $5.6 million. Another four barrels filled with gold, some 200 gold ingots, and other currencies and precious metals totaled at least $31 million.

The parties that found these caches varied: the Global Coalition, Iraqi security services, the SDF, forces affiliated with the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, anti-Assad Syrian factions and civilians hunting for treasure in abandoned areas.

Despite the scale of what has come to light, the evidence gathered by the team suggests that most of these discoveries were made by chance, whether during security raids and searches or as a result of information provided by former Islamic State members and detainees. The greater part of this wealth is likely still hidden, perhaps in locations now forgotten, though some of it is believed to remain a financial resource for affiliated cells and groups in different parts of Syria and Iraq.

In interviews conducted by the team with three security officials who focus on the Islamic State group and have asked to remain anonymous, as well as interviews with five former group members, all told the authors that the still-buried treasures are not mere rumor, but part of the group’s financial resources, which remain considerable years after the fall of the “caliphate.”

The hidden gold and cash remain a lifeline for the group. These assets are being used to help rebuild the Islamic State through the purchase of weapons and the creation of on-the-ground networks of fighters and allies, efforts that have been ongoing, the investigation has learned.

In April 2021, Iraqi police found a cache worth more than $1.5 million inside a house in the old city of Mosul, along with 17 million Iraqi dinars, 15 kilograms of silver and roughly half a kilogram of gold. The house had previously served as an Islamic State finance office, or “bayt mal al-Muslimin,” an Arabic term for a public treasury that traces back to the time of the original caliphate.

“After the erosion of the group’s central authority in Syria, it came to rely more heavily on a decentralized model built on small cells,” Ayman al-Dassouky, a researcher on Syria’s economy and local administration, told the investigation team. “This explains the turn to burial as a tactic to sustain operational capacity and reduce the risks of infiltration and security pursuit.”

Prior to that, the group stored its cash and gold in central locations, including inside secure vaults at the central banks of Raqqa and Mosul, areas that had come under its control.

Undiscovered caches continued to surface throughout 2025. Three million dollars were found buried in the Iraqi town of al-Baaj, more than $1.5 million in Mosul, and a cache of gold and dollars estimated at around $16 million near al-Qaim on the Syrian-Iraqi border.

“Right before the loss of Mosul,” said the Jordanian researcher Hassan Abu Hanieh, “the Islamic State set up a commission to bury the money and gold, drawing up a full strategy for it. It understood its inevitable fate once the Global Coalition intervened.”

To uncover how the group used this tactic to preserve its financial resources, our investigation drew on analysis of internal documents issued by the group’s leading figures, alongside the testimony of experts as well as interviews with security sources and local residents. The documents further show that the group developed an integrated system for managing these caches, one that included pinpointing their locations, encrypting information about them and distributing responsibility for their management across different organizational levels.

Although the documents we obtained reveal an institutional effort to bury money and gold, the role these caches still play in financing the group is debated among researchers of jihadism.

Craig Whiteside, professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and one of the most prominent Islamic State experts, believes the group has been tapping into its resources to keep alive some semblance of operational presence.

“I know the group has had to use large amounts of its financial reserves since 2019 to sustain its members and operations, however limited they may be,” Whiteside said.

Our analysis shows that six of the nine caches were uncovered in the desert or remote areas, while the rest were found inside houses or private farms, indicating the group relied on sites that were hard to reach rather than conventional military installations.

Despite losing most of its Syrian and Iraqi territory, the Islamic State has not vanished. Amid the security vacuum that accompanied the fall of the Assad regime, the group stepped up its activity again in various parts of Syria.

The group’s efforts to preserve its financial resources also extended beyond Syria and Iraq. A former Islamic State member who was detained by the SDF at al-Sinaa prison in the Ghuwayran district of Hasakah told the investigation team that, shortly before the group’s territorial collapse, three senior leaders moved to Yemen, taking large amounts of cash and gold with them, with the aim of rebuilding the group’s cells. According to his account, they sought to take advantage of Yemen’s rugged mountainous terrain, which makes them difficult to track, as well as the country’s instability.

But the group that years ago ran something resembling a state, with security, military and financial institutions, no longer operates on that level. According to the Syrian Interior Ministry’s data on the dismantling of Islamic State group cells in several governorates, most units and cells now operate separately, using light weapons and improvised explosive devices to carry out limited-scale attacks.

The discovered money and gold are enough to pay the salaries of some 10,000 fighters for a full year, based on estimates of the group’s salaries at the peak of its activity. The verified recovered amount surpasses previous international estimates of what the Islamic State might have retained in its coffers after its demise.

In August 2024, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point published a study estimating that the Islamic State group, after the fall of its caliphate, retained financial reserves ranging between $10 million and $30 million, while the U.S. Treasury judged that the group still held between $10 million and $20 million in liquid and cash assets inside Syria and Iraq, beyond the reach of the authorities and security services.

The value of the buried treasure lies not only in its size, which at times may not be substantial in dollar amounts, but in its ability to provide ready funding sources for small militant cells located in disparate areas, according to al-Dassouky.

“The group’s ability to make use of these hoards depends on several factors,” al-Dassouky said. “These include the continued presence of the hoards, the sleeper cells and the operational decision.”

According to interviews conducted with several security officers and former fighters in Syria and Iraq, over the years an informal network of brokers and treasure hunters has also arisen, including former Islamic State group members, motivated to find and retrieve the buried caches in exchange for a share of the proceeds.

The group’s wealth goes back to the years of its ascent, when between 2014 and 2017 it seized wide areas of Syria and Iraq. In June 2014 the group captured Mosul and took hold of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold held in banks and government institutions. It also took over oil fields, mines, factories and farmland, and set up networks to sell oil, metals and antiquities on the black market.

Within a few years, and thanks to these various revenue streams, the group had become one of the richest armed organizations in the world; some studies put the size of its assets and holdings at around $6 billion by 2015.

Losing territory did not necessarily mean losing wealth.

Our analysis of the financial documents shows that the vaults and caches spread along the Syrian-Iraqi border were a major funding source after the collapse. The data shows that money transferred out of these vaults made up a significant part of the group’s operating budgets in Syria from 2019 onward.

According to internal correspondence reviewed by our team, the group also relied on forced levies, external transfers, support from sympathizers and armed robbery — along with investments and funds managed outside Syria and Iraq.

Ammar Farhoud, an Istanbul-based researcher of nonstate actors, said that the group’s financial plans go beyond stashing away its assets. These were moves taken by desperate regional commanders rather than representing overarching Islamic State strategy.

“The strategic financial solutions for IS rest on investing money and circulating it, more than on burying and freezing it,” he said.

The investigative team contacted the Syrian Interior Ministry, the SDF and the command of the Global Coalition to ask about their estimates of the size of the caches that are still undiscovered and how they are being dealt with, but received no reply by the time of publication.

Despite the importance of the caches, experts point out that most of the group’s operations rely heavily on local funding sources — such as extortion, kidnapping for ransom and smuggling — while the reserve funds serve as an additional source of support or to finance the establishment of new strongholds or expand current ones.

Whiteside noted that hidden financial reserves are a logical solution for a group that has lost the resources tied to controlling territory, but he agreed that current funding sources connected to extortion, financial networks and illicit economic activity have become more important than the buried money itself.

“I expect the other funding sources to be of greater importance today than the cash reserves or hidden assets,” Whiteside said.

He also pointed out that tracing ownership of this money and its locations is one of the biggest challenges facing security agencies, noting that part of this wealth may be vulnerable to corruption and embezzlement within the group itself, given previously documented cases of Islamic State officials who fled to other countries after embezzling large sums.

Among the documents the team obtained, one stands out for its directness, providing evidence that the burial of money and gold was a policy rather than an ad hoc occurrence. The document, issued by the wali al-Sham and dated May 14, 2021, contains a binding order to all provincial emirs and unit commanders to distribute the money across multiple secure burial sites and to retrieve it when operationally needed.

“We direct you to order your commanders to bury the money available to you, to distribute it among several safe locations, and to extract from it in accordance with your needs, as your brothers do in Iraq,” the directive, signed by Abu al-Hareth, reads.

The document shows that the group’s leadership regarded burial as a precautionary measure meant to protect money, weapons and organizational secrets from confiscation or from falling into the hands of adversaries. It also indicates clearly that this policy had already been applied in Iraq, and that it was being extended to all areas of the Islamic State’s presence in Syria, whether they were zones of direct activity or areas where sleeper cells were present.

The document also reflects a systematic institutional approach to managing assets, built on dispersing the wealth and reducing the risk of losing it should leaders fall or administrative structures collapse. It also reveals that the caches were not merely temporary hideouts, but part of a long-term strategy aimed at ensuring financial capacity even in periods of military and security retreat.

“This clear order from the highest authority in the group in Syria indicates that burying money was a fundamental part of the Islamic State’s financial strategy in Syria and Iraq,” said Khaled, a pseudonym for a security source working in northwest Syria who tracks Islamic State cells in Aleppo. “It served to disperse the wealth and reduce the chances that local parties or the Global Coalition could reach it. This also reflects the group’s determination to keep its financial operations running even under difficult conditions, which confirms its capacity and resolve to adapt and survive.”

The reference to burial as following what the group does in Iraq points, too, to a unified policy across the ranks. This indicates the strategy was carefully studied and applied across all Islamic State-controlled areas. It also suggests the group placed great importance on maintaining financial operations even amid shifting security situations.

The instructions in the document do not set fixed criteria for the sites where gold and money are to be buried, something also confirmed by experts and researchers familiar with the group’s methods. But analysis of the documents indicates that the larger caches are concentrated in the deserts and barren lands close to population centers, especially around the key centers of influence during the group’s rule.

By contrast, the dataset of documented cache discoveries in Syria and Iraq through the end of 2025, which we showcase on a map below, points to smaller caches distributed inside towns, villages and inhabited areas, and even in areas that were not directly controlled by the group.

Internal documents point to a clear hierarchy for managing these assets, dividing the caches into three main types according to the amount of value stored and the body responsible for it within the organizational chain.

The Islamic State group also succeeded in smuggling part of its money out of Syria and Iraq, and invested some of it in legitimate commercial activities, including real estate and the car trade. Estimates indicate that a portion of these assets was moved out of the country through cross-border financial networks.

The documents the team obtained reveal that the highest level of Islamic State caches was known as the central caches, facilities prepared specifically to hold large quantities of money and gold away from adversaries.

These caches consist of one or more underground rooms, built to an engineering design that ensured long-term preservation, fitted with concrete ceilings, cement walls and small ventilation pipes to prevent moisture buildup and rainwater seepage.

Unlike smaller caches, these sites were not meant for storing weapons or munitions, but were reserved exclusively for holding gold and hard currency. Nor was their construction an emergency measure imposed by military imperatives; it was part of advance financial planning overseen by the highest levels of the group’s leadership.

According to the documents, these caches lay under the authority of figures of “wali” or “caliph” rank, while the movement of money in and out of them was subject to direct oversight and periodic reports on the size of the holdings and the financial flows.

The investigation has identified three central caches of this kind, which together functioned as the main treasury, or something like the group’s “central bank,” through which the largest pool of funds was managed and from which the lower levels of the financial network were fed.

Our team’s map of the uncovered caches shows most of them clustered within a corridor running from Deir ez-Zor to Iraq’s Anbar, the same area the group previously used to smuggle money and weapons.

At a level below the central caches, the group relied on a wide network of provincial and unit caches, financial hideouts belonging to bureaucrats and financial officers in the provinces, administrative divisions and specialized units such as the security and armament units.

These caches were smaller and less complex than the central ones, but greater in number. They were usually concentrated inside the cities and villages that had seen a heavy Islamic State presence in Syria and Iraq, functioning as the financial and logistical depots that fed the daily activity of local cells, and at times holding weapons and munitions alongside the money.

The documents show that the burial process was subject to a strict administrative chain. The financial officer carried out the burial, while the bureaucrat kept the site’s information and coordinates, before this information moved gradually up the chain of command to the wali, and from him to senior leadership.

Unlike the central caches, which were built specifically for the purpose, these hideouts were simpler; they were often pits beneath houses, or metal tanks and containers buried in the gardens of homes belonging to families linked to or loyal to the group.

The documents reveal that these caches performed a function resembling “sub-banks” within the provinces, receiving money transferred from higher levels, then distributing or disbursing it according to written instructions issued by the walis and senior financial officers.

The reserves and caches kept after 2019 were not used only to support the group’s cells in Syria and Iraq; they also helped to fund and establish Islamic State branches in Africa and Asia, through transfers and support networks connected to what is known as the “General Directorate of Provinces.”

Our team reviewed a document titled “Financial Allocations,” issued by the wali al-Sham on March 6, 2020, and addressed to the amir of Aleppo. The document sets out part of the mechanism for managing money within the group: The amirs received allocations periodically, along with instructions specifying the purposes and mechanisms of spending — compensation paid out to the wives, widows and children of Islamic State fighters or bureaucrats — reflecting a financial and administrative system that kept working even after the group lost most of its territories.

Burials were not confined to the group’s central vaults or the provincial caches; they extended to Islamic State members themselves, who treated their money, weapons and valuables the same way.

The documents and testimony the team gathered indicate that many took to burying their personal savings of gold, money and weapons inside their homes or in their immediate surroundings. Some would share the locations of these caches and their markers with close family members or with other members within the same geographic or family group, in case they were killed or captured.

According to Farhoud, a significant portion of the caches found today is this type of individual hoard, rather than the group’s strategic treasury, reflecting personal or local decisions taken by officials and members during the Islamic State’s rule.

One incident the team documented reveals the importance the group attached to these caches.

On July 5, 2021, Islamic State members detained a boy from Deir ez-Zor and interrogated him after his relatives, working as hired diggers, found a cache of gold in the garden of another member’s house.

According to video recordings and internal documents we obtained, the group accused the family of taking the gold. After they denied knowing where it was, the boy’s older brother was shot dead by one of the members while trying to flee a secret Islamic State detention center.

This indicates that individual caches were not merely personal savings hidden underground, but assets that, although they fell outside the formal financial system maintained by the group, were to be protected and recovered at any cost.

Despite the long years since the collapse of the group’s territorial caliphate, its hidden financial caches continue to help some cells to endure and operate, especially in the desert areas stretching between Syria and Iraq.

The documents and testimony the team gathered indicate that this money was not merely emergency savings, but part of a financial and administrative plan aimed at ensuring the group’s survival and repositioning should it lose territory.

Yet it is difficult to ascertain the exact portion of the Islamic State’s budget the buried caches represent.

Farhoud considered the presence of sleeper cells in the lost territories natural, but noted that these cells do not work exclusively on managing the hoards. Rather, they form part of a broader economic system that includes money transfers, investments and illicit trade.

He added that the buried money is no longer the mainstay of the Islamic State’s economy, which now possesses funding sources and financial networks in other regions, including Africa, but that it can provide fast, limited support to the cells capable of reaching it.

For his part, al-Dassouky saw burial not only as a means of hiding money, but as part of an integrated logistical system. The burial sites sometimes served as supply centers holding financial resources, provisions and weapons, distributed according to the needs of the various operational areas.

As security teams, civilians and treasure hunters continue to dig in the deserts of Syria and Iraq in search of Islamic State caches, the documents the team obtained indicate that part of the group’s wealth remains unaccounted for.

For further comment on our findings, we contacted U.S. Central Command, the body responsible for U.S. security operations in the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq and the Gulf. We received a reply from Henri-Nicolas Grossman, director of the Syria and Iraq portfolio at the office of the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (Middle East).

Grossman referred us to two public affairs officers at the office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense: Patricia Kreuzberger, a media affairs officer in the secretary’s office, and Lt. Col. Grace M. Geiger, responsible for media relations and official communications concerning the Department of Defense. We received no reply.

• Creative direction and visual solutions: Radwan Awad.
• Source: NEW LINES MAGAZINE
  

The post The Buried Treasure Left Behind by the Islamic State appeared first on SIRAJ.

Then, without warning, Hussein disappeared.

He had not been released, nor had he been transferred to another prison known to the family. News of him stopped coming from the facility where he had spent roughly nine months in the custody of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). His father received no court order or official notice explaining where he had been taken or why.

Weeks later, the family’s phone rang. The call was from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The message was brief: Hussein was in Iraq.

For Ali, the question was not only how his son had been taken across the border, but how his case had reached this point in the first place.

Hussein was born in 2008. He worked alongside his father in agriculture in Deir ez-Zor, eastern Syria. His father says Hussein never carried a weapon and never joined any armed faction. According to Ali, the case began with a family dispute involving a relative, which ended with a report accusing the teenager of belonging to ISIS. From that point on, the father tried to prove his account through what he believed were the available legal channels: a lawyer, witnesses, complaints, and documents he expected a court would eventually review.

Ali found the irony in the accusation against his son difficult to accept.

Nearly a decade earlier, Ali himself had been detained by ISIS. He says the group arrested him in 2016 for allegedly smuggling food into areas outside its control, confiscated his money, and sentenced him to qisas—retributive punishment—before releasing him after a payment was made. Hussein was still a young child at the time.

Today, Ali flips through the documents he collected for his son’s case.

“I was among the first people harmed by ISIS. They arrested me and confiscated my money, and my son was only a child at the time. How does it make sense that today he is accused of belonging to the same group? My son worked beside me and never carried a weapon. What happened was that a family dispute ended with someone reporting him, and a few days later SDF arrested him on accusations of belonging to ISIS.”

A court was supposed to be the place where the father’s previous account would be tested against the evidence held by the authorities that detained Hussein. But Hussein never made it to that court.

In January 2026, the military control map of northeastern Syria was changing rapidly. As the Syrian army advanced to retake areas previously controlled by SDF, the fate of prisons holding thousands of people suspected of links to ISIS became part of a broader security crisis.

On January 21, the United States began transferring detainees from those prisons to Iraq as part of Operation Inherent Resolve.

Hussein was one of them.

Within days, a case his lawyer had been pursuing in Syria became a legal proceeding in another country. The family did not know who had reviewed Hussein’s file before his transfer, what information had been sent with him, or where he was being held after arriving in Iraq. Most importantly, they did not know whether the accusation his father had been preparing to challenge in Syria had undergone any review before his son was handed over to Iraqi authorities.

Once in Iraq, the issue was no longer simply where he was being detained.

Iraq announced that those transferred would be investigated and tried under Iraqi law. For those convicted of certain terrorism offenses, the sentence can be death.

But Hussein was only one name among many.

The plane that carried him to Iraq was one of several used in an operation that transferred thousands of detainees. For many families, the flight marked the moment they lost the ability to track their sons’ cases.

For months, the reporters tracked the names of detainees transferred from northeastern Syria to Iraq beginning on January 22, after obtaining the complete list of those included in the transfer operation. They cross-checked the names against hundreds of official documents, including transfer records; detention and interrogation files from the SDF-run prisons; civilian and military records; Iraqi court decisions; visitation and inmate-account receipts; files found inside detention facilities after they were evacuated; and documents provided by detainees’ families and lawyers. They also interviewed 52 people — including relatives of detainees, attorneys and sources familiar with individual cases — to reconstruct the path of each person, from arrest in northeastern Syria to transfer to an Iraqi prison.

The transfer of thousands of Syrians to Iraq has raised legal questions not only about the conditions of their detention and prosecution, but also about the legal basis for handing them over. Syria’s constitutional declaration, issued on March 13, 2025, after the fall of the Assad regime, contains no provision regulating or prohibiting the extradition of Syrian citizens to foreign authorities. That left the issue without a clear constitutional framework as thousands of Syrians were transferred to another jurisdiction to face prosecution outside their country.

Syrian lawyer Anwar al-Bunni, director of the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research, said the problem extends beyond the transfer itself to the question of jurisdiction.

“These people are accused of crimes that are alleged to have taken place in Syria, so how will Iraqi courts be able to gather evidence and hear from witnesses who are in Syria?” he said. Al-Bunni added that what took place was “not simply a judicial procedure, but a political decision.”

As the names were cross-checked against the documents, the case no longer appeared to be simply one of a mass transfer of people suspected of belonging to ISIS. The records showed that some were minors when they were arrested; some had returned to Syria after years of living in Turkey; and others had been described differently within the detention system from the charges they would later face after being transferred to Iraq.

Those discrepancies do not, by themselves, establish that the detainees are innocent of any potential crimes. But they raise the question: What was enough to reclassify a detainee and place his name on a list for transfer to Iraq?

Al-Mutasim al-Kilani, a lawyer specializing in international criminal law and human rights, said the stakes are especially high when an administrative or security classification can result in someone being transferred into a judicial system where a conviction could carry the death penalty.

“The greater the likelihood that a classification will result in a person being transferred to a jurisdiction where he could face the death penalty, the greater the level of scrutiny required,” al-Kilani said. “A box checked in a database is not enough to justify such a consequence.”

According to al-Kilani, placing someone whose detention had been linked to another armed group or a different set of circumstances on a list of “ISIS detainees,” without individualized evidence, could raise questions about the accuracy of the classification itself, the legal basis for continued detention and transfer, and the presumption of innocence. He said the case should have been reviewed first by the detaining authority before any handover, and then by Iraqi authorities when they accepted the detainee or immediately upon his arrival.

The Road to Iraq

The transfer operation did not take long, but its consequences altered the legal trajectory of thousands of detainees. Amid a Syrian government offensive to retake the country’s northeast, the United States began air and ground transfers to Iraq on January 21, 2026, as part of Operation Inherent Resolve.

Within days, thousands of detainees — along with their files — were moved from prisons in northeastern Syria into Iraqi jurisdiction. Washington justified the move on security grounds, citing the risk that detainees could escape as fighting intensified. Iraqi officials, meanwhile, said the United States would cover the costs of their detention and prosecution.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the United States transferred 5,700 detainees accused of alleged ISIS affiliation from northeastern Syria to Iraq, where they face risks of enforced disappearance, unfair trials, torture and other ill-treatment, as well as violations of the right to life.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), meanwhile, documented the transfer of at least 4,743 Syrian citizens to Iraq between 2019 and the final period in which the detention facilities concerned remained under SDF control. The organization said the figure represented only the minimum number of cases it had been able to verify. It also said the absence of an official registry identifying those transferred, their places of detention and their legal status remains one of the main obstacles to determining their fate and following their cases.

The last time Iraq conducted terrorism trialswas in 2018 and 2019, after Iraqi government forces recaptured territory that had been under ISIS control.

Baghdad defended the 2026 transfers on national security grounds. On January 29, Iraqi government spokesman Bassem al-Awadi described the transfer of ISIS detainees from Syria to Iraq as a “preemptive step” to protect Iraqi national security, amid concerns that detainees could escape because of fighting and instability in Syria.

After the transfer operation was completed, Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command, said on February 13 that the United States “appreciates Iraq’s leadership and recognition that the transfer of detainees is essential to regional security,” referring to Baghdad’s role in receiving detainees transferred from Syria.

Lawyer al-Kilani draws a distinction between the decision to transfer detainees and a judgment on the legality of the operation as a whole. He cautions that the absence of an individualized judicial order does not automatically make every transfer unlawful.

“The absence of an individual judicial order does not automatically make every transfer illegal, but it makes it difficult to confidently describe the process as a fully fledged judicial surrender,” al-Kilani said. “Transferring thousands of people on the basis of a collective classification, without an individualized assessment of the legality and risks of the transfer, raises serious concerns that the process amounted to an arbitrary mass transfer.”

In a joint January 2020 report on prosecutions under anti-terrorism laws following the defeat of ISIS, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights examined serious shortcomings in Iraq’s administration of justice. The report documented concerns over due process and fair-trial guarantees in terrorism cases.

Other rights reporting from that period found that Iraqi authorities detained tens of thousands of men for prosecution in proceedings marked by serious rights violations. Many were sentenced to death after trials that, in some cases, lasted only minutes, with concerns including inadequate access to lawyers, reliance on anonymous informants and confessions allegedly obtained under torture.

How Were the Transfer Lists Compiled?

When military aircraft took off from northeastern Syria in January 2026, they carried 3,543 Syrians, according to figures released by Iraqi authorities, out of a total of 5,704 detainees transferred to Iraq. But their journey did not begin on the runway. It began years earlier, inside a detention system that expanded after the fall of ISIS’s last stronghold in Baghouz in 2019 — a system where files were assembled, accusations recorded and lists compiled that would later help determine who was transferred to Iraq.

By the end of the fighting, SDF were running one of the region’s largest detention systems. Thousands of Syrians, Iraqis and other foreign nationals were held in facilities including al-Sina’a prison, also known as Ghwayran, in Hasakah; Alaya prison; the Chinese Camp; and other detention centers across northeastern Syria.

Abdul Ghany said the American role could not be reduced to logistics alone.

“The U.S. role cannot be described as merely logistical,” he said. “The United States announced the start of the operation, funded the detention of those transferred and their trials, and declined to disclose whether the detainees received judicial review or access to lawyers.”

The detainee records reviewed by SIRAJ show that the prison system held people arrested during security operations against ISIS, as well as others detained following local accusations, on suspicion of dealing with armed groups, or during clashes in Deir ez-Zor and Hasakah after the territorial defeat of ISIS. The system also included minors, people who had returned to Syria from abroad, and detainees whose cases were already pending before the SDF-run courts. All were ultimately accused of affiliation with ISIS.

HRW said in a February 17, 2026, report that part of the problem can be traced to the nature of the detentions themselves. Sarah Sanbar, the organization’s Iraq researcher, said thousands of people had been held for years without adequate judicial review before being transferred to Iraq.

“Regardless of their affiliations or alleged actions, these detainees have been held for years without due process and are now detained in another country without adequate safeguards,” Sanbar said.

Those concerns echo what SIRAJ found in its review of more than 50 case files and testimonies.

In several cases, the story did not begin with an accusation involving ISIS at all.

al-Kilani said the transfers also raise questions about the role the United States played in the operation itself: Who selected the names? Who issued the orders? And who had effective control over the detainees — and the ability to stop their transfer?

“A state that puts a detainee on a vehicle or an aircraft cannot simply say it relied on another party’s list,” al-Kilani said. “Effective control creates an obligation to conduct meaningful verification.”

In one village in rural Deir ez-Zor, a boy who was no older than 14 was arrested during clashes between SDF and tribal armed groups in the summer of 2023. His family said it later learned where he was being held and hired a lawyer to follow his case. According to the family and documents reviewed by SIRAJ, the judgment against him was connected to his alleged participation in events involving the “Tribal Army.”

In early 2026, the family lost contact with him. ICRC later informed them that he was in Iraq.

In another case, SIRAJ obtained documents belonging to a detainee who had served in the military police of the Syrian National Army. His family said his lawyer reviewed his case file while he was being held at Alaya prison and that the accusation recorded there was not related to ISIS, but to his affiliation with an opposition armed group. The man was arrested on March 20, 2025. Months into his detention, he disappeared from the prison, and his family began hearing conflicting accounts that he had been transferred to Iraq.

A document showing membership in the military police of the Syrian National Army, which fought ISIS. The document belongs to a detainee who was later transferred to Iraq – SIRAJ

In northern Hasakah, a different case reveals a similar pattern. One detainee held a temporary protection card issued by Turkish authorities, along with records showing that he had lived in Turkey for years before returning to Syria in late 2025. His family retains documents recording his travel and education. They said he was arrested after entering SDF-controlled territory and that his name later appeared among those transferred to Iraq.

These cases do not establish that all of those transferred were civilians, nor do they prove that the accusations against them were unfounded. They also do not negate the presence of actual ISIS members and commanders among the thousands transferred. Iraqi authorities have said that some of the detainees are accused of committing grave crimes in Iraq, including genocide and the use of chemical weapons.

But SIRAJ’s review of these cases raises a different question.

If some detainees had such different backgrounds, who reclassified them before their names were added to the transfer lists? And were all of their cases individually reviewed, or did the operation rely on broader lists whose details were examined only after the detainees arrived in Iraq?

Syrian journalist Ibrahim Hajji al-Halabi, a spokesman for detainees’ families who has been following their cases, said the issue is not about presuming anyone innocent or guilty, but about ensuring that any prosecution is based on fair and transparent legal procedures.

“This is not about proving someone’s innocence or guilt,” al-Halabi said. “It is about ensuring that any trial is based on fair and transparent legal procedures. What the families are asking for is to know what happened to their sons and for them to have access to their basic legal rights. Real justice cannot be built on uncertainty. It requires respect for the right to a defense and guarantees of a fair trial.”

Given the serious risk of torture in Iraq, the transfers would appear to violate the international legal principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits transferring a person to a country where they face a risk of ill-treatment, according to HRW. The organization said that, given Iraq’s well-documented due process violations in counterterrorism proceedings, the U.S. role in detaining these individuals and carrying out their cross-border transfers could make it complicit in resulting abuses.

The Documents Tell a Different Story

After the announcement that more than 5,000 detainees had been transferred from northeastern Syria to Iraq, the official account appeared straightforward. Statements from Baghdad and Washington described an operation targeting ISIS members who had been held for years in the SDF-run prisons and portrayed the transfers as a necessary security measure to prevent their escape as the military landscape in northeastern Syria shifted.

But that account began to change with each new document added to SIRAJ’s investigation.

At first, the discrepancies were not obvious. The records appeared disconnected: prison receipts, identification cards, family registries, military service documents, Turkish temporary protection cards, court rulings and transfer records. Each file told the story of a different person, in a different place and under different circumstances.

But after months of collecting the records and reconstructing their chronology, something larger than a series of individual cases began to emerge: a pattern repeated quietly across multiple files.

None of the documents reviewed by SIRAJ indicate that an independent judicial review took place before the transfers. That finding is consistent with SNHR, which said it was unable to verify that individualized assessments or independent judicial decisions preceded the handovers.

The first discrepancies appeared in documents that had nothing to do with terrorism.

They emerged when SIRAJ compared where detainees had been held and how they had been treated within the SDF detention system. According to SIRAJ’s findings, people suspected of ISIS affiliation or held in terrorism-related cases were detained at al-Sina’a prison in Hasakah, where visits were tightly restricted and communication with families was prohibited.

Yet some names that later appeared on the lists of detainees transferred to Iraq had been held at Alaya prison. Official receipts obtained by SIRAJ show their families depositing money into their prison accounts, while other records document family visits, the appointment of lawyers and periodic case reviews.

Abdul Ghany, director of SNHR, said those transferred face serious risks, including torture during interrogation, enforced disappearance, prosecution under Iraq’s Anti-Terrorism Law on the basis of organizational affiliation, and the possibility of being sentenced to death.

Then came a document that prompted SIRAJ to reexamine everything that had come before.

It was not testimony from a family member. It was not a lawyer’s account.

It was an Iraqi court ruling

The decision was issued by the Central Criminal Court in Baghdad on April 28, 2026.

The ruling names Syrian detainee Yasser Ali Mohammad, one of those transferred from northeastern Syria to Iraq as part of the same operation. After reviewing the case, the court reached a single conclusion: the evidence was insufficient. It ordered his immediate release.

Trials That Could End in Death Sentences

Once they crossed the border, the cases of thousands of detainees were no longer handled within the detention system run by SDF. They became part of Iraq’s criminal justice system.

On February 8, 2026, Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council announced that the suspects — nationals of 42 countries — would be prosecuted under Iraqi law and that none would be handed over to another country until investigations into their alleged crimes were completed.

For the thousands of Syrians transferred from northeastern Syria, this was more than an administrative shift. It meant entering an entirely different legal system, where terrorism cases are prosecuted under Iraq’s Anti-Terrorism Law No. 13 of 2005, rather than under any procedures that had governed their cases in Syria.

A review of at least 50 case files obtained by SIRAJ shows that the people now facing Iraqi courts did not all follow the same path. In one case, the father of Hussein, who was 16 when he was arrested, retains complaints and documents that he says show the case began with a family dispute. In another, the family of a young man holds official records showing that he spent more than a decade in Turkey before returning to Syria in late 2025. He was arrested shortly after entering SDF-controlled territory.

Despite those sharply different circumstances, both cases ultimately arrived at the same destination: the Iraqi judicial system.

A 2020 joint report by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, or UNAMI, and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights documented concerns in Iraqi terrorism trials, including the speed of proceedings, difficulties accessing lawyers and, in some cases, reliance on confessions as a primary basis for conviction.

As the transferred cases entered Iraqi courts, another problem emerged — one involving not only the evidence itself, but where the alleged crimes took place. In cases involving acts alleged to have occurred entirely in Syria, Iraqi courts may be asked to adjudicate events whose witnesses, victims, evidence and crime scenes are all located in another country.

Lawyer al-Kilani said that even where a theoretical basis for jurisdiction exists, that alone does not resolve questions about the fairness of a trial. The defense, he said, must be able to examine original evidence, question witnesses, call witnesses on the defendant’s behalf and scrutinize events that took place in Syria.

“Theoretical jurisdiction is not enough; the court must actually be capable of establishing the truth,” al-Kilani said. “A trial without available witnesses, without access to the crime scene, and based on security files the defense cannot challenge risks becoming a trial of a classification rather than a trial of the alleged act.”

As these cases began moving through Iraq’s courts, Faiq Zidan, president of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, traveled to Damascus in mid-August at the head of a judicial delegation for talks with Syrian officials on shared judicial and security matters.

The visit came as the cases of Syrians transferred to Iraq raised a question extending beyond where they are being held: Which country should prosecute them, and how can alleged crimes committed in Syria be effectively investigated when the defendants are now before Iraqi courts?

As of February 2026, Iraq had 30 prisons holding about 67,000 inmates, including roughly 1,600 foreign nationals, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Justice. Those figures did not include prisons in the Kurdistan Region or people held by security forces and various armed groups elsewhere in the country.

Iraq makes extensive use of the death penalty, particularly in counterterrorism cases. An estimated 8,000 prisoners are under death sentences. On February 10, Iraq executed six people, its first mass execution since executions were suspended following the passage of the General Amnesty Law in January 2025.

SIRAJ contacted three former officials who, while SDF controlled northeastern Syria and administered its detention facilities, held responsibilities related to prisons and detainees, security case files, and coordination with the U.S.-led coalition over detention centers. SIRAJ asked them about the criteria used to classify detainees, how the lists of people transferred to Iraq were compiled and reviewed, and which parties took part in the transfer operation. None responded by the time of publication.

The Point of No Return

Within hours of the first groups of detainees arriving from northeastern Syria, Iraqi authorities announced that they had been referred to the Karkh First Investigative Court, which specializes in terrorism cases. Investigations began with the detainees treated as suspects in cases involving alleged affiliation with ISIS.

For many families, this was more than a geographic transfer. It marked their entry into a legal system fundamentally different from the one in which they had been following their relatives’ cases in Syria. Under the Iraqi system, they were no longer detainees awaiting a review of their files, but suspects facing investigations under the country’s Anti-Terrorism Law.

Abdul Ghany, director of SNHR, said suspicion of ISIS affiliation, however serious the allegation, is not by itself sufficient to convict someone or transfer that person into another jurisdiction without an individualized review and full procedural safeguards.

“Some groups of those transferred included dozens of children and adolescents,” Abdul Ghany said. “These cases require the application of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children should not be treated on the basis of collective suspicion or family affiliation, and authorities must take into account the possibility that they were subjected to recruitment or coercion.”

Iraq is among the countries that make extensive use of the death penalty in terrorism cases. Anti-Terrorism Law No. 13 of 2005 allows for death sentences for a range of offenses involving membership in a terrorist organization or participation in its activities. In recent years, rights groups and U.N. bodies have documented hundreds of death sentences in terrorism-related cases.

SIRAJ sent questions to Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council, Ministry of Justice and National Security Service seeking clarification on the legal basis for the transfers, how the detainees’ files were being handled, and the procedures used to review their legal status after their arrival in Iraq. All three declined to comment by the time of publication.

On August 23, 2026, Iraq’s Ministry of Justice announced that it had begun diplomatic and legal procedures to return about 6,000 foreign prisoners to their home countries to serve the remainder of their sentences. Murad al-Saadi, the ministry’s media director, said in press remarks that Baghdad was coordinating with diplomatic missions from 61 countries to activate agreements and negotiate memorandums of understanding that would allow the transfers. Syrians, he said, make up the largest nationality among those covered by the initiative.

But the new pathway does not apply to everyone. According to the ministry, prisoners sentenced to death are excluded. 

The announcement carries particular significance for the thousands of Syrians transferred from the SDF-run prisons to Iraq in 2026. After being taken across the border for investigation and prosecution in Iraqi courts, some Syrian prisoners may now face a journey in the opposite direction — back to Syria to serve their sentences.

Those sentenced to death, however, remain outside that path.

Inside the Karkh Court

One of the detainees transferred to Iraq described the first investigative hearings in a phone call with his family. He said detainees’ names were called one by one before each was taken to an interrogation room to appear for the first time before an investigative judge at the Karkh First Investigative Court — the court that Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said had been assigned to handle the cases of detainees transferred from northeastern Syria.

Most detainees do not know what charges were entered into their case files after they arrived in Iraq, according to families interviewed by SIRAJ, or whether those charges are the same as those recorded against them in the SDF-run prisons. Families said they were not informed of hearing dates and were not given interrogation records or details of the proceedings involving their relatives after the transfer.

Thirteen families said they learned that their relatives had arrived in Iraq only through a brief phone call or from ICRC. What happened inside the interrogation rooms, they said, remained largely unknown. In most of the cases documented by SIRAJ, families knew little beyond the fact that their relatives were being held at Karkh prison. They had no information about who was representing them, what evidence prosecutors were relying on, or what material judges were reviewing.

The lack of information extends beyond the families. Iraqi authorities have not publicly explained how the case files received from northeastern Syria were classified, or whether Iraqi investigators built new cases based on independently gathered evidence or relied, in whole or in part, on files that accompanied the detainees across the border.

Iraq still lacks legislation criminalizing the core international crimes, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Instead, alleged ISIS members are prosecuted under Iraq’s 2005 Anti-Terrorism Law, which provides for the death penalty for certain terrorism-related offenses, including membership in a terrorist organization.

From Prisons in Northeastern Syria to Iraq’s Terrorism Courts

The journey did not end at the doors of the Karkh court. Nor did it end at the gates of the prisons they had left behind in northeastern Syria.

In villages stretching across Deir ez-Zor, Hasakah and Raqqa, dozens of families remain caught in the uncertainty that began when their sons disappeared.

Little has changed in their daily lives. Mothers still keep photographs of their sons. Fathers hold on to documents collected in plastic folders. Brothers move between lawyers, government offices and humanitarian organizations, searching for any piece of information that might explain what happened.

During the reporting for this investigation, SIRAJ interviewed more than 23 families of detainees transferred from northeastern Syria to Iraq. Their accounts of the arrests differed, as did their relatives’ backgrounds and circumstances. But they shared one thing: none knew how the decision to transfer their relatives to Iraq had been made, or what evidence that decision was based on.

SIRAJ contacted U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to ask whether the detainees had been given access to lawyers, whether their cases had undergone judicial review before the transfers, and whether they had been given an opportunity to challenge their transfer to Iraq. CENTCOM declined to comment.

In Damascus, the issue has moved beyond the families’ homes and into public view. In April, dozens of detainees’ relatives gathered outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, calling on the Syrian government to intervene with Iraqi authorities, determine the whereabouts and status of those transferred, and work to bring them back to Syria.

The protesters carried photographs of their relatives and called for information about where they were being held, access to communication with their families, fair trials for those facing substantiated charges, and the return of those against whom there is insufficient evidence.

Days later, a delegation representing the families met with officials at Syria’s Foreign Ministry. The delegation included relatives of detainees, while ministry representatives and others following the issue also attended.

The families left the meeting without a timetable for what would happen next. But they left with one significant change: the fate of the detainees was now formally on the Syrian government’s agenda.

A Foreign Ministry representative said that, according to the outcome of the meeting, the Syrian government was following the case in coordination with the ministries of justice and interior and was in contact with Iraqi authorities. At the same time, he described the issue as “complex” and said it would require more time, declining to provide a timeline for resolving it.

For the families, that was not enough.

Hussein al-Rarat, one of the families’ representatives, said they are not calling for the wholesale release of all detainees. Rather, they want them returned to Syria, where they can appear before a court that their families can access and whose proceedings they can follow.

“We are not asking for the charges against anyone to be dropped,” al-Rarat said. “If someone committed a crime, they should be held accountable. But we are asking for a fair trial, and for detainees’ families to have the right to know what is happening.”

The same message runs through other families’ accounts.

Shaimaa al-Mohammad, the wife of one of the transferred detainees, said she had been waiting for her husband’s detention in an SDF-run prison to end when she suddenly learned that he had been transferred to Iraq.

“We were waiting for him to come home,” she said. “Then suddenly, we learned he was in Iraq. Since that day, we haven’t known what awaits us.”

• Creative direction and visual solutions: Radwan Awad.

The post “The Final Charge”: From U.S.-Funded Prisons to Iraqi Terrorism Courts, Syrians Face Possible Death Sentences appeared first on SIRAJ.

Although local sources disagreed at the time about the exact number of victims, all confirmed that a “massacre” had taken place, witnessed by residents of the village that lies just over a mile east of the buffer zone with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Those sources also confirmed that regime forces had thrown the dead bodies into a nearby valley.

From that point on, as the regime’s military campaigns intensified across the country, and as its forces and allies committed dozens of documented massacres, the massacre at Wadi Tuaim was set aside. Neither the victims nor their families were granted any measure of justice against the perpetrators who had killed their sons. But the fall of the Assad regime has finally given them the chance to raise their voices and demand the justice they have sought for 13 years, and to tell a story whose details they whispered among themselves for fear of the deposed regime’s retribution.

This investigation by SIRAJ reveals for the first time the names and faces of two officers of the former regime’s army accused of being responsible for the Wadi Tuaim massacre, in which 13 people have been confirmed killed, nine of them from a single family, including a child. Regime forces threw their bodies into the bottom of a valley estimated by experts to be between 650 and 1,000 feet deep.

The journalists working on this investigation, together with relatives of the victims, sought to reconstruct the events of the massacre. Witnesses and survivors took the investigative team to the edge of the steeply sloping valley and described for us, on camera, the details of what they call that “cursed” day in the history of Saida al-Golan.

Fieldwork, the journalists’ investigative methodology, and open-source research and analysis — facial recognition software, examination of social media posts and digital footprints, and satellite imagery going back more than a decade — helped to test, cross-reference and confirm the claims made in the field interviews. This ultimately led to contact with one officer accused of involvement in the massacre, who categorically confirmed that it had taken place and gave details of it.

Extended interviews with victims’ families, a survivor and eyewitnesses also revealed details of the massacre, the circumstances surrounding it and the identities of the officers involved, which had been absent from the record and lost from view for over a decade.

For six consecutive months, the SIRAJ team conducted lengthy interviews with victims’ families and survivors of the massacre, as well as with two witnesses to the killings. By cross-referencing every detail obtained from those encounters against information from official and public sources, we were able to establish the context that preceded the massacre, the conditions in which it took place and its precise date and location.

When the force from the 61st Brigade, headquartered in Daraa governorate, also in the south of the country, stormed Saida al-Golan, it was led by three officers holding the ranks of major-general, lieutenant-colonel and major. The raid coincided with a lunch banquet hosted by a member of the Harisi family, also known as Hijazi, to which a number of relatives and local residents had been invited.

Issa Harisi, a resident of Saida al-Golan, described to SIRAJ how the brigade’s soldiers surrounded the village: “The banquet was here that day. My brother and I were there, along with Muwaffaq and a man from the village of al-Ghadir. Before we knew it, the army had encircled us and were entering the houses one after another.”

The raiding force consisted of around 20 men of varying ranks. They surrounded the houses, and then began to storm them violently, leading away several young men from different families, handcuffed and blindfolded, to three military vehicles, two of them pickup trucks.

The residents’ pleas and the tears of the village women did nothing to deter the force from completing its task. A man from the Harisi family begged one of the officers taking part in the operation, only to be told that he should “forget” his family, before the officer climbed into the vehicles with the other soldiers, which then left the village.

“The officer came over to me here,” Issa Harisi recalled. “He said, forget that the Hijazis ever existed. Go and multiply in Zaatari,” a reference to the Zaatari camp in Jordan, where thousands of Syrians from the south took refuge during the regime’s military campaigns, particularly in Daraa and Quneitra governorates.

Three of Issa’s four sons — Imad, Ali and Mohammad — were killed that day.

Witnesses from the victims’ families and other villagers told SIRAJ how they watched military vehicles leave the village with their sons in detention, heading along the road toward Wadi Tuaim, some 1.2 miles from Saida al-Golan. The valley is one of the largest and deepest in Syria.

Traveling north, the military convoy stopped at a military position at the Saida al-Golan company outpost, also belonging to the 61st Brigade, then moved off again before stopping at the reservoir of the Raqqad Dam near the village.

At almost the same moment, another man named Fadi Sayyah was detained by regime forces 3 miles away for questioning. He did not know then that he would be the only survivor of a massacre.

Sayyah worked in a mobile phone shop. A Kia Rio taxi pulled up outside, and men in military uniform got out, asked him his name, pulled his shirt up over his face and led him to the car. There they handcuffed him and put a blindfold over his eyes.

“I was helping some soldiers defect from the regime’s army,” Sayyah said, recalling what happened 13 years ago. The men showed him photographs of soldiers he had helped to defect, but he denied any connection to the matter. “I said, ‘By God, I know nothing about it.’ I just wanted to clear myself.” The car took Sayyah to the Ain Dhakar Battalion of the 61st Brigade and stopped there briefly.

There, Sayyah heard the men talking to Warrant Officer Abu Ibrahim of Military Intelligence. “They asked him about the vehicles that had detained the young men in Saida, and he told them they had gone on ahead of them,” he said.

“The car stopped at the dam junction,” Sayyah continued. “My blindfold had slipped, and I was able to see. I saw two security pickups pass beside us with people lying face down in the back. Then a car known to belong to the lieutenant-colonel went past, heading toward the [Wadi Tuaim] valley.”

The vehicles Sayyah described carried the detainees along the dirt track leading to Wadi Tuaim near the village of Saida al-Golan. At the head of that force was Hafez Tomeh, the lieutenant-colonel Sayyah referred to and, under his command, Raed Saleem, another officer on the staff of the 61st Brigade with the rank of major, known among local residents as Maj. Salloum.

At that moment, Sayyah heard gunfire. Two shots, then one, then two more, as he recalled. He also heard a young man pleading: “For God’s sake, sir,” before his voice was gone. One of the soldiers said to Sayyah: “Did you hear him? We’ve thrown him into the valley.” Sayyah was brought to the site of the massacre to hear what was happening and was then released, apparently because the perpetrators wanted him to recount the terror he had experienced to the people of the area.

On the other side of the valley stood two local men, who found themselves by chance in a position from which they could watch the scene without being seen, and so became witnesses to the cold-blooded execution of 13 people, including one child.

Mahmoud Youssef al-Mohammad and Hussein al-Aqla al-Issawi described those moments of terror, and their accounts corroborated those of the victims’ families and of Sayyah.

The military vehicles carrying the detainees reached the edge of Wadi Tuaim at around 4 p.m., two hours after the raid and the detentions had begun.

The soldiers brought all the detainees out, still handcuffed and blindfolded, and lined them up at the edge of the valley. They then began shooting them, executing them one after another. The sound of gunfire carried across the area, and the two witnesses saw the victims thrown into the valley one by one.

“I saw the car park at the edge of the valley. They brought several people out, shot them and then threw them into the valley. I saw it with my own eyes,” said al-Mohammad, the first witness. Al-Issawi, the other, confirmed that he recognized the young men of the Harisi-Hijazi family the moment he saw them. “He would fire and then throw the person into the valley,” he added. “Sometimes he would shoot the person as he was falling into the valley.”

The regime soldiers noticed movement on the far side of the valley and opened fire toward the two witnesses, who crawled out of range and managed to escape without being identified.

The Harisi family lost nine of its sons that day, among them a 12-year-old boy. The regime cordoned off the area, and the bodies were left lying at the bottom of the valley for four months.

On July 18, 2013, factions affiliated with the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian opposition took control of the area, including Saida al-Golan and Wadi Tuaim, and residents were finally able to recover their sons’ bodies. According to witnesses, the operation took weeks because of the rugged terrain of the valley and the difficulty of getting machinery or vehicles down to the bottom. Some of the victims were difficult to identify. One woman recounted that she could barely recognize her husband’s body, because his features had been disfigured by decomposition.

In January 2014, activists posted two videos on YouTube showing people with blurred faces recovering bodies from Wadi Tuaim. Victims’ families confirmed their authenticity. According to one of them, the bodies were “bound and unidentified,” which matched the families’ accounts of their sons being handcuffed before being executed by the Syrian army.

These two videos helped establish an indicative timeline for the massacre and, subsequently, for the recovery of the bodies from the valley after regime forces withdrew from the area. The SIRAJ team received no response from the channel that uploaded them to YouTube, which would have allowed us to verify them independently or obtain the unblurred originals.

The investigative team met members of the victims’ families, in interviews that continued over many weeks, to document the time and place of the events and the identities and names of all the victims. Fathers, mothers and wives spoke of the tragedy they had lived with since the day of the massacre, of the long months they waited before they could bury their sons, and of the terror that gripped the village for years afterward.

Umm Hassan Harisi lost three of her sons in the massacre. The eldest, Hassan, was 25 and left behind a wife and two children. The youngest, Abdul-Ilah, was 12. “They told me he was crying out for me before they killed him,” she said. “He screamed ‘Mama,’ then they killed him.”

The investigative team documented the names and identities of the 13 victims killed in the massacre, whose bodies were recovered from the valley by their families. They are: Imad Issa Harisi (25), Mohammad Issa Harisi (22), Ali Issa Harisi (20), Hassan Moussa Harisi (25), Mohammad Moussa Harisi (15), the child Abdul-Ilah Moussa Harisi (12), Youssef Mohammad Harisi (23), Khaled Mohammad Harisi (20), Anwar Mohammad Harisi (21), Abdullah Eid al-Ziraie (27), Muwaffaq Mohammad Fankhour (52), Ismail Ahmad Uwair (25) and Firas al-Hamdani al-Barhoumi (23).

At the time of the massacre, Maj. Gen. Yasser Mualla Nofal commanded the 61st Brigade, which was then an independent formation within the Syrian army’s 1st Corps.

Nofal was killed weeks after the massacre, in April 2013. Numerous obituary posts on social media indicated that he had been killed by Syrian opposition forces.

The families of the massacre’s victims, however, mentioned only the names of the two officers who led their sons to their deaths, both of whom are still alive: Lt. Col. Hafez Tomeh and Maj. Raed Saleem “Salloum.”

From the moment Tomeh’s name was first mentioned, the investigative team searched for any trace of him in public sources, particularly military news and social media, without success.

The team approached officers and soldiers from the area who had defected from the regime’s army, along with retired officers and local sources. While the sources gave differing accounts of his real name and whereabouts, all of them confirmed that he was inside Syria. After months of searching, we reached a defector known as Abu Hussein, who had served alongside Tomeh in the 61st Brigade.

This officer proved to be the key to reaching Tomeh, who had kept himself out of sight. He provided us with information about the lieutenant-colonel’s military record, along with a description of his facial features and build, which helped us to construct a picture of his appearance and subsequently to begin a search for a photograph of him.

The investigative team reviewed civil and military documents that confirmed Tomeh’s identity as a native of Talkalakh in Homs governorate, and confirmed his military posting to the 61st Brigade. The photographs of Tomeh in the civil and military documents matched a photograph believed to be of him.

We showed the photograph of Tomeh to victims’ families, villagers and eyewitnesses, and to 15 former detainees, including people whom Tomeh had personally arrested. Thirteen of them identified his photograph with certainty, compared against a photograph of another man said to be him.

Tomeh’s photograph revived a painful memory for the wife of one of the victims. On the day of the massacre, she had begged Tomeh to release her husband, Muwaffaq Fankhour, who suffered from a mental illness. Tomeh had not listened to her pleas, and Fankhour ended up a lifeless body at the bottom of the valley.

The victim’s wife said that, during the arrests, “Hafez took me by the hand in front of my house here and told me he had nothing to do with it. I told him: You are the responsible one, and if you want to kill me, then kill me.”

“Yes, that’s him. He wore a uniform and had more hair,” another woman to whom we showed Tomeh’s photograph said. “He once drove a tank into my house,” she added, gesturing toward an open courtyard.

The search continued for weeks afterward. Acting on information from local sources in Homs governorate, we established that Tomeh was living on a farm in the Talkalakh area near the Lebanese border. The investigative team reached relatives of his, after which the journalists contacted him directly, and he agreed to be interviewed.

The interview with the investigative team took place in two parts.

On June 17, we were able to arrange a meeting with Tomeh. On the road from Damascus to Homs, the team received a call from someone close to Tomeh informing us that he had declined to speak to journalists. He then asked to meet late at night. In darkness, the journalists traveled with local notables to the agreed location, only for the lieutenant-colonel to refuse a face-to-face meeting once again, offering instead a brief telephone conversation from a number previously unknown to the team.

Speaking to SIRAJ, Tomeh did not deny that the massacre had taken place. He confirmed that there had been no fewer than 13 victims, as we had documented, and confirmed that they had been executed and their bodies thrown into the valley, as described by residents and eyewitnesses. He denied, however, any role of his own in the massacre, arguing that his continued presence in Syria was proof of his innocence, and saying that he had left military service in 2016 and had received no compensation.

On June 20, the team received a call from Tomeh from an unknown number, in which he asked to meet a single journalist accompanied by the officer Abu Hussein at a Homs church at midnight, without offering any explanation for the request. He then ceased responding to any further attempts at contact.

Tomeh’s denial of his role in the massacre has not erased his face and his uniform from the memories and testimony of victims’ families and eyewitnesses, who recalled how he had led young men from the village, along with one child, to their deaths at the bottom of Wadi Tuaim.

Upon checking the numbers Tomeh used to contact the journalists, we found that they were not registered in his name. He used phone numbers registered to other people, which complicated the task of reaching and speaking to him.

Alongside the name of Tomeh, the residents and witnesses we interviewed repeatedly mentioned a major in the 61st Brigade named Raed Saleem, known among local people as Maj. Salloum or, simply, Salloum. According to the testimony, he was extremely violent and brutal toward local residents, particularly at checkpoints, and he was among the foremost participants in the massacre.

Unlike Tomeh, Saleem, who comes from the village of Beit Ana in the Jableh countryside of Latakia, has a substantial presence on social media. The team’s open-source research turned up numerous posts naming the major as one of the regime soldiers involved in crimes against civilians, including the Wadi Tuaim massacre.

When we asked Tomeh about his fellow officer Saleem during the telephone call, he described him as “filthy, and a collaborator with Military Intelligence and the National Defence Forces in the area.”

The investigative team found a photograph of Saleem posted on Facebook on April 12, 2013, roughly two weeks after the massacre, showing that he was still serving in Daraa governorate, one of the areas where the 61st Brigade was deployed.

By comparing satellite imagery against distinctive markers in the photograph, the team was able to determine that it had been taken near the municipal building in Tasil, with the former al-Huda bookshop visible, along with, in the background, the minaret of the Omar bin al-Khattab Mosque, some 8 miles from the site of the massacre in Wadi Tuaim.

Searching social media, the team documented a Facebook account believed to belong to Saleem, under the name al-Uqab al-Uqab (Eagle Eagle). The account features a photograph of Saleem standing on top of a rock, aiming a Kalashnikov rifle down toward the floor of a valley surrounded by green hills.

The team received no reply after messaging the al-Uqab al-Uqab account, whose last activity dates to 2019. Our research established that no other accounts or phone numbers are linked to it.

According to an informed source, after the massacre Saleem was transferred to complete his military service in the al-Kiswah area in the countryside of Damascus.

The team contacted several local sources, who indicated that Saleem had left Syria several months before the fall of Assad to take part in a military training course for regime forces in the Sultanate of Oman. A source in the Counterterrorism Directorate of the Syrian Interior Ministry confirmed this, adding that he had left Syria four months before the fall of the regime and had not returned since.

Neither the Omani Embassy in Damascus nor the Omani Foreign Ministry had responded, at the time of this writing, to SIRAJ’s queries about Saleem’s presence in Oman, why he had been allowed to remain there after the fall of the regime if his presence is confirmed and what the Omani authorities’ position would be should their Syrian counterparts request his extradition.

While the victims’ families live with the bitterness of loss and continue to wait for a justice that might restore some dignity to them after the fall of the Assad regime, those accused of the massacre carry on with their lives as normal.

Among the local residents is Ruqayya al-Barhoumi, who lost her husband and her brother on the day of the massacre and lives in the hope that the killers will be held to account. Speaking to SIRAJ from her home in Saida al-Golan, she said she had waited years to be able to speak about her family’s tragedy without fear of the Assad regime’s retribution.

Abu Imad Harisi, who lost three of his four sons, placed all his hopes in his story prompting the Syrian government to arrest and prosecute the accused. “If I were the judge, I would sentence him to death, just as he killed them,” he said. “Throwing [the victims] into the valley is worth a thousand murders.”

In an interview with SIRAJ, the lawyer Anwar al-Bunni, head of the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research, said that “the Wadi Tuaim massacre falls within the category of war crimes, and may fall within crimes against humanity if it is established that it took place as part of a chain of orders from above.”

Al-Bunni noted that the Syrian penal code contains no provisions on war crimes or crimes against humanity, and that the laws currently applied are the homicide provisions of the penal code, under which cases such as this are treated as the murder of more than one person, something he regards as “a trivialization of the crime and of the victims, and an obstacle to any prospect of pursuing the orders and the chain of command leading to the crime.”

The investigative team contacted the Syrian Interior Ministry and shared its findings with it.

On that basis, and in particular in light of the information disclosed here for the first time, Brig. Gen. Nayef Abdul Majid, director of the ministry’s Counterterrorism Directorate, said that “Hafez Tomeh is on the Interior Ministry’s wanted list. The information and inquiries provided to us by the SIRAJ investigative unit have supported security efforts to determine his whereabouts. Acting on the information you provided, the authorities went to the location indicated, but he was not present there. Initial indications suggest he may have fled the country.”

Regarding Saleem, he confirmed that should his presence in Oman be confirmed, the Interior Ministry will submit a formal extradition request through official channels, including the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), “within the framework of the established mechanisms for pursuing fugitives outside the country.”

The Wadi Tuaim massacre is one of dozens committed by the forces of the deposed Syrian regime across the country that have gone for years without the documentation needed to expose those responsible and hold them to account. It is further testament to the reach of the regime’s bloody arm, from the furthest point in northern Syria to the furthest point in the south, and into a remote village in the Quneitra countryside.

Thirteen years after the massacre, and in the absence of accountability for the criminals who killed their sons, despair is seeping into some of the victims’ families and pushing them toward revenge. Asked what she would say if she came face to face with her family’s killers, Ruqayya, who lost her husband and brother, said: “If it were up to me, I would do to them what they did to my brother and my husband. I was pregnant when they killed them, and because of all of it my child was born disabled and is still suffering to this day.”

• A group of field journalists, researchers and whistleblowers working with SIRAJ took part in preparing this investigation. Contributors include: Sanad al-Hindawi, Omar al-Bam, Osama al-Qaeed.
• Photographs of the victims were published with the consent of the victims’ families or relatives.
• Creative direction and visual solutions: Radwan Awad.

The post Unmasking Two Butchers of Quneitra.. How officers in Assad’s army turned the deepest valley in southern Syria into a mass grave? appeared first on SIRAJ.

The small cavity soon widened, exposing the sewage pipes buried beneath the road. According to Khaled Hijazi, Said’s uncle, who owns a shop nearby, municipal workers responded by simply filling the hole with construction debris.

“When I tried to question what they were doing, they told me not to interfere,” he recalled. “One of them just said, ‘Mind your own business.’“

In the weeks that followed, sewage water began surfacing through other sinkholes that appeared unexpectedly across the same neighborhood, particularly after the heavy winter rains that swept across Syria earlier this year.

Among the most striking incidents was a massive sinkhole that opened in Ain Tarma’s main road during the Eid al-Fitr holiday in late March 2026.

Similar ground collapses have since been reported throughout Eastern Ghouta. The latest involved a 10-meter-deep sinkhole that opened in the middle of the main road in Zamalka, while numerous other collapses have been documented in Douma and several neighboring towns.

Through field reporting, along with the collection and verification of dozens of social media posts, photographs, and videos, the SIRAJ and Daraj investigative team documented at least 10 sinkholes and ground collapses across towns and cities in Eastern Ghouta between the beginning of 2026 and the publication of this investigation.

The Legacy of the Siege

What unites the communities now grappling with recurring ground collapses is a shared history: all endured years of siege by Bashar al-Assad’s forces and allied militias between 2013 and 2018, while coming under relentless bombardment. To survive, residents dug an extensive network of tunnels beneath their towns—creating underground routes that allowed them to move, seek shelter, and stay alive.

As Hamed al-Zein, who remained in his hometown of Hamouriyah until he was displaced to Idlib aboard the regime’s so-called “green buses“ in 2018, recalls:

“After the massive offensive against Eastern Ghouta between 2015 and 2018, people had no choice but to dig tunnels by hand—from inside their homes or from nearby basements—to protect themselves and their children. Entire apartment buildings were collapsing on civilians because of the shelling.”

Speaking to SIRAJ and Daraj, al-Zein said residents worked collectively to excavate what became known as “civilian tunnels.” These existed alongside tunnels dug by opposition factions to transport supplies and fighters, as well as specialized underground passages serving medical facilities.

One of the architects of that underground infrastructure was Samir Bouydani, a civil engineer who lived through the siege of Douma and helped dig three underground medical facilities. Bouydani says he was also the first to propose the idea of civilian tunnels in 2013.

“The armed groups’ commanders didn’t embrace the idea at the time,” he recalled.

His vision was ambitious: to create underground spaces where civilians could not only shelter but also live and even shop, as markets had become one of the regime’s most frequent targets.

Bouydani remembers one attack in 2015, when an airstrike on Douma’s marketplace killed 120 people.

During the siege, Eastern Ghouta was divided into two principal sectors. The northern sector—including Douma and Misraba—was controlled primarily by the Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam-JAI). The southern sector, encompassing towns such as Arbin, Kafr Batna, and Jisreen, was controlled by the Rahman Corps (Faylaq al-Rahman) and the al-Nusra Front, later known as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), while Harasta remained under the control of Ahrar al-Sham.

Having lived in Douma from 2013 until his forced displacement in April 2018, and while serving with the city’s municipal council, Bouydani worked alongside local opposition authorities to oversee the construction of several underground medical facilities.

Among them were tunnels beneath the Cave Hospital in Kafr Batna, another beneath al-Shifouniyah Hospital, and the largest of them all: the Damascus Countryside Specialized Hospital, known locally as “Point One.”

The latter underground complex included long passageways wide enough for ambulances, operating rooms that Bouydani describes as “state-of-the-art,” backup power generators, a water well, and a dedicated ventilation system.

To prevent its collapse, engineers covered the structure with approximately 1.5 meters (five feet) of earth and reinforced the surrounding area with additional soil. Access to the operating rooms was concealed through tunnel entrances hidden inside nearby residential buildings.

“It was so well equipped that the hospital continued operating for six to eight months after Assad’s forces captured Douma,” Bouydani said. “Later, soldiers looted the entire facility and stripped much of the steel reinforcement.”

Bouydani says he was not involved in constructing military tunnels, which were managed by separate engineering teams. His work focused on medical facilities, while also advising civilians who decided to excavate tunnels beneath their own neighborhoods to protect their families.

According to Bouydani, civilian tunnel construction accelerated in 2015. Residents dug directly beneath their homes—particularly in informally built neighborhoods—or connected the basements of adjacent buildings to create underground escape routes.

Asked where such engineering expertise came from, Bouydani answered with a laugh:  “Douma was different. We turned plastic into diesel, gas, and gasoline. We used solar heat to boil water. We had electricity for 22 hours a day using generators that ran on vegetable shortening.”

In a besieged enclave cut off from the outside world, he said, survival depended as much on ingenuity as on endurance.

Stolen Steel: The Final Blow

The airstrikes, barrel bombs, and artillery attacks carried out by Assad’s forces, backed by Russian air power and allied Iranian militias, have long since ended.

But for many residents of Eastern Ghouta, a new danger now lurks beneath their feet.

The ground is collapsing.

In the wake of these sinkholes, stagnant pools of sewage have begun spreading through neighborhoods due to ruptured sewer lines shattered as the collapsing tunnel network gives way underground.

Wael Salam, mayor of Ain Tarma, says the tunnel network began taking shape in 2015, constructed primarily by the Rahman Corps (Faylaq al-Rahman) and the JAI.

“They were enormous tunnels,” he said. “A vehicle could drive through them.”

According to Salam, many of the tunnels lie 10 to 12 meters (33 to 40 feet) below ground and extend for long distances.

“We’re not afraid of the tunnels themselves,” he said. “Had Assad’s forces not stripped out their steel reinforcement, they might even have become tourist attractions—or another means of transportation.”

Instead, he argues, the way the former regime dealt with the tunnels made their collapse almost inevitable.

“When the regime removed the reinforcing steel, the surrounding soil began to cave in. The collapse eventually reached the sewer network. The pipes lost their support, leaving them suspended with space beneath them.”

Once the pipes failed, sewage began pouring into the abandoned tunnels, accelerating erosion below ground.

That process, Salam says, has increased the risk not only of further tunnel collapses but also of damage to buildings above them.

It has also created a new environmental hazard.

“During periods of heavy rainfall, groundwater levels rise and mix with sewage,” he said, raising concerns about contamination of underground water sources.

Dr. Nidal Jouni, a professor of geology and seismology at the University of Damascus, says the removal of steel reinforcement has a direct impact on tunnel stability.

“If tunnels were not excavated according to proper engineering standards,” he said, “removing the steel significantly weakens their structural integrity, increasing the likelihood of collapse and causing the overlying ground to subside.”

Ahmad Saryoul, a resident of Douma who lived through both the siege and the subsequent takeover by Assad’s forces, says the regime troops deliberately destroyed the major tunnels connecting Eastern Ghouta to Damascus after recapturing the area.

Smaller tunnels, however—including those inside towns and villages that had been used to transport wounded civilians—were largely left untouched.

“The authorities left those for residents to deal with,” he said.

Most families, he added, are already struggling simply to repair their damaged homes.

“They’re asking the government and aid organizations to help rebuild their houses,” he said. “So how can they possibly afford to fill in underground tunnels—especially when their homes are sitting on top of tunnels that could collapse at any time?”

The danger often remains hidden until chance reveals it.

Abu Nimer, a shepherd from Eastern Ghouta, recalls losing one of his goats and spending hours searching for it.

As he walked along a nearby stream, he heard the animal bleating.

Following the sound through dense vegetation, he eventually found the goat trapped inside a water channel.

Only then did he realize that an abandoned tunnel lay concealed beneath the riverbed—another unseen remnant of the siege, still hidden beneath the landscape years after the war.

Tunnels Without Maps

When sinkholes linked to Eastern Ghouta’s underground tunnels appear, the most obvious solution seems straightforward: those who dug the tunnels should fill them in.

Today, however, that solution is largely impossible.

Many of those who excavated the tunnels are no longer alive. Others remain outside Syria. And even among those who have returned, many no longer know precisely where the tunnels lie. Years of military operations after Assad’s forces recaptured Eastern Ghouta in 2018, coupled with the deliberate sealing of many tunnel entrances, fundamentally altered the landscape.

A former commander in the JAI—who requested anonymity because he now works for Syria’s Ministry of Defense and is not authorized to speak to the media—said it was the former regime that ultimately erased many of the tunnels’ identifying features.

“The regime approached the tunnels strictly as a security issue, not as infrastructure that people would one day have to deal with,” he said.

“They were afraid opposition fighters might still be hiding inside them. They didn’t care if a building collapsed as a result.”

After spending more than eight years displaced in northern Syria, he said, returning to Eastern Ghouta revealed just how dramatically the terrain had changed.

“When we came back, we realized the landscape was completely different. The situation is extremely dangerous. At any moment, a building could collapse, and people could be killed or seriously injured.”

He added that many tunnels were dug haphazardly during the early years of the siege. Only later did local municipal bodies establish a formal licensing process intended to regulate excavation and improve safety.

“By then,” he said, “it was already too late.”

A Patchwork of Underground Networks

According to Imad al-Ajwa, mayor of Douma, one of the greatest challenges today is that no single entity ever built—or documented—the entire tunnel system.

“The tunnels were constructed by multiple parties,” he told SIRAJ and Daraj. “Some were dug by opposition factions, others by humanitarian organizations, and many by civilians.”

As a result, no comprehensive map exists.

To address the problem, Douma’s municipality has begun assembling what officials describe as the nucleus of a centralized database.

The effort combines whatever historical records remain—many dating back nearly eight years—with interviews involving residents and former tunnel builders who may still remember where underground passages were excavated.

At the same time, municipal teams are identifying the areas believed to face the greatest immediate risk to prioritize field inspections.

A similar effort is underway in Ain Tarma.

Mayor Wael Salam said municipal officials have been contacting former opposition fighters who have returned from Idlib in an effort to reconstruct the tunnel network from memory.

“So far we’ve been able to map roughly 60 percent of the tunnels,” he said.

He added that officials have repeatedly heard claims that Russian forces produced tunnel maps after the regime recaptured Eastern Ghouta.

“We’ve been told those maps were drawn by the Russians and kept in government offices,” Salam said. “But we’ve never received them. We don’t even know whether they actually exist. They may have ended up in one of the regime’s intelligence branches—or perhaps they never existed at all.”

Russia announced that Assad’s forces had regained full control of Eastern Ghouta on April 12, 2018, following the evacuation of the last opposition fighters from Douma, their final stronghold in the region, and the deployment of Russian military police.

The former JAI commander, however, doubts Russian forces ever produced a complete mapping of the tunnel network.

“They entered only the major strategic tunnels,” he said, citing one leading toward Harasta Suburb, another in Zamalka, and the large underground medical facility in Douma known as Point One.

The SIRAJ and Daraj investigative team contacted the Russian Embassy in Damascus by email seeking confirmation of whether such maps exist, but received no response by the time of publication.

Searching for What Has Been Lost

Samir Bouydani, who briefly served as mayor of Douma after the area’s liberation, said he contacted the engineer responsible for the JAI’s military tunnels during the siege.

According to Bouydani, the former engineer told him the faction had lost its tunnel maps during the displacement from Eastern Ghouta.

Bouydani said he later approached the Ministry of Defense, where officials likewise informed him that any remaining maps had disappeared during the displacement process.

He also criticized the way Assad’s forces handled the tunnels after retaking the area.

Using the underground medical complex known as Point One as an example, Bouydani said the facility originally had three entrances, but government forces sealed two of them.

Without maps—and after much of the steel reinforcement had been stripped—the remaining sections became extremely difficult to access safely.

A Complex Engineering Challenge

In response to questions from the SIRAJ and Daraj team, the Media and Communications Directorate of Syria’s Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management described the tunnel issue as “highly complex.”

The ministry said the region contains multiple categories of underground structures: large strategic tunnels, smaller passageways, vehicle tunnels, building-to-building connections, underground medical facilities, and numerous tunnels excavated independently by civilians—many of which were never documented.

Because of that complexity, officials say producing an accurate map of the underground network now requires coordination among four institutions:

• the Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management,
• the Ministry of Housing,
• the Syrian Engineers Association, and
• local municipal councils.

The investigation team was unable to obtain responses from representatives of the armed opposition factions that controlled Eastern Ghouta until 2018.

The former JAI commander acknowledged that even his faction possessed only partial documentation.

“Our maps covered only the areas under our control,” he said. “There was never a complete map of all the tunnels dug by the factions, institutions, and civilians. Given the conditions of war, no one can accurately account for the entire network.”

Technology: the Only Way Forward

According to Dr. Nidal Jouni, locating the remaining tunnels is still possible using modern engineering geophysical methods.

Technologies such as ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and seismic surveys, he said, can identify the location, direction, dimensions, and structural condition of underground voids.

“These techniques make it possible to map a tunnel’s extent and evaluate the risks it poses,” Jouni said.

He argues that authorities should undertake both short- and long-term geological and geophysical studies to determine the types of rock surrounding each tunnel, assess the likelihood of future collapse, and develop engineering measures capable of preventing further sinkholes before additional buildings—or lives—are lost.

A Mere Emergency Measures

For now, local authorities in Ain Tarma are relying on emergency repairs rather than permanent engineering solutions to address the growing number of sinkholes.

According to Mayor Salam, a comprehensive response remains beyond the municipality’s financial and technical capacity.

“When a sinkhole appears, we widen the opening slightly and fill it,” he said. “My priority is protecting the infrastructure—making sure the road doesn’t collapse again and safeguarding the sewer, telephone, and electricity lines. We reinforce the area with solid materials and asphalt, but I can’t fill an entire tunnel that runs beneath residential buildings.”

Meanwhile, the municipality is waiting for funding from the Damascus Countryside Governorate to implement a more substantial intervention.

The proposed plan focuses on five locations where tunnels intersect with the sewer network. At each site, crews would excavate down to the tunnel level, pump out accumulated wastewater, fill the cavity with engineered materials designed to prevent future collapses, and then rebuild the damaged sewer, water, electricity, and telecommunications infrastructure before resurfacing the road.

Officials in Douma face similar financial and technical constraints.

Imad al-Ajwa, the city’s mayor, said that only days before speaking with the SIRAJ and Daraj investigative team, new sinkholes appeared above former military tunnels behind Douma Municipal Stadium.

Those tunnels, he said, had once been reinforced with steel that was later stripped by Assad’s forces.

“Every time a collapse occurs, we provide a temporary engineering solution,” al-Ajwa said. “But we don’t have the funding to enter and stabilize the entire tunnel network. We also don’t have the specialized personnel—and I’m not going to risk my workers’ lives.”

He believes the region narrowly escaped a much larger disaster.

“Last year wasn’t a year of drought—it was actually a blessing,” he said. “If we had experienced heavy rainfall immediately after liberation, the situation could have been far worse.”

The Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management says it is operating under similar limitations.

According to the ministry’s Media and Communications Directorate, current efforts are based primarily on incident reports and emergency response, with teams intervening only after sinkholes or structural collapses are reported.

Officials pointed to a recent operation in Douma, where several tunnels were filled in cooperation with the municipal council and the Syrian Engineers Association.

But ministry officials stress that filling abandoned tunnels is far more complex than simply dumping soil into an underground void.

“Large tunnels cannot be filled arbitrarily,” the ministry said. “The process requires pumping specialized concrete and carefully protecting building foundations under the supervision of engineering teams. Filling a tunnel is nothing like filling an ordinary hole.”

Homes Above Hidden Voids

According to Aghiad Othman, deputy mayor of Douma, backfilling sinkholes with ordinary soil is ineffective because the ground is likely to subside again.

Instead, municipal engineering teams excavate each collapse site as necessary before stabilizing it.

“But we’re treating the sinkhole—not the entire tunnel,” Othman explained. “Even when we discover an underground passage, we notify the governorate because dealing with the full tunnel requires heavy equipment and specialized engineering methods.”

The greatest concern, he said, is when tunnels pass directly beneath building foundations.

Those cases require special structural intervention.

As a precaution, the municipality has begun issuing evacuation notices for buildings considered at immediate risk.

According to Othman, two residential buildings were evacuated only recently.

In Ain Tarma, Mayor Salam estimates that around 50 buildings are situated above underground tunnels.

Municipal authorities have placed legal restrictions on those properties, preventing their sale or transfer, and have urged residents to leave.

Many, however, have refused. They simply cannot afford to.

One of them is Abu Mohammad, an elderly resident who discovered a void beneath his apartment building while renovation work was underway.

Despite the warning signs, he chose to continue the work.

“I need to get my son married,” he said. “Our home is still better than paying rent.”

Then, with visible frustration, he added: “We’ve already started, and we’re going to finish. If the building collapses, may God have mercy on us.”

For Abu Mohammad, leaving is not an option unless an alternative home is provided.

“This is our house—we’re not abandoning it,” he said. “If it’s dangerous, then let the municipality give me another home. We’re waiting for them to close the tunnel. We can’t afford to pay for that ourselves. We’re barely surviving as it is.”

Some residents have attempted to solve the problem on their own by filling cavities beneath their homes.

Mayor Salam acknowledges that no one knows whether such efforts are actually effective.

“We don’t really know the correct engineering method. Is pouring concrete into the tunnel enough? We’ve never dealt with a problem like this before.”

He argues that Syria urgently needs specialized engineering units dedicated to tunnel stabilization and structural rehabilitation—not only for abandoned tunnels but also for buildings damaged during the war.

“There should be a dedicated restoration authority,” he said, “so that the people carrying out these repairs know they’re doing them correctly.”

As winter rains have exposed the hidden tunnel network beneath Eastern Ghouta, officials warn that the coming summer may bring a different threat: foul odors, rodents, and worsening public health conditions as damaged sewer systems continue leaking underground.

For now, residents can do little more than wait—uncertain how long it will take before permanent solutions replace temporary repairs.

• A version of this investigation was also published by Daraj Media
• Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awad

The post Collapse of “Siege Tunnels” in Eastern Ghouta: Widespread Cave-Ins and Lost Maps Endanger Civilians appeared first on SIRAJ.

Weeks earlier, Barakat had received an eviction notice after businessman Mohammad Khair al-Halabi, the owner of Planning Parcel No. 36, pledged to provide him with a replacement apartment within the city of Damascus. The commitment was based on Decision No. 695/M.T., which regulates the allocation of grant housing to eligible occupants through the Damascus Governorate under specific conditions before residents are displaced.

“I turned down the cash compensation,” Barakat told the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism – SIRAJ. “They offered me 25 million Syrian pounds, but I asked for a home in Damascus, just as the decision stipulates.”

He was later assigned an apartment in the Tabbaleh–Ain Tarma area. But upon inspection, he found its entire facade demolished, leaving it uninhabitable. Barakat recalled al-Halabi telling him at the time: “Fix it yourself. It’s only a few stones.”

After his home was demolished, he sought possession of the replacement apartment. Barakat, however, was asked to submit a family registry extract. He says he was then informed that two of his sons were wanted by Syria’s former Assad government for allegedly evading mandatory military service, and that the required security clearance for the apartment “could not be approved.”

“Al-Halabi told me, literally: ‘You’ve lost it, Abu Jihad. Besides, you’re classified as non-compliant.’”

As a result, the apartment allocation was canceled, and Barakat was placed on the governorate’s list of “non-compliant” applicants—a designation used by the Damascus Governorate for individuals who, according to its records, failed to complete the procedures for receiving compensation or alternative housing, or who declined the options offered within the legally prescribed timeframe.

Many of those affected reject that characterization. They insist they did not refuse alternative housing in principle, but rather objected to the conditions of delivery, the locations of the apartments, or their legal status and physical condition.

Some residents argue that the designation transformed what was fundamentally a dispute over housing rights and compensation into an administrative classification that effectively shut the door on any future efforts to pursue their claims.

Today, Barakat lives in a rented home in Damascus, paying about 2 million Syrian pounds (old currency)—roughly $150 a month. He says the cost far exceeds what he can reasonably afford as a construction laborer who depends on irregular daily wages.

A Permit That Reignited the Dispute

The roots of the current dispute in Diwaniyah al-Jawaniyah date back to mid-2022, when residents began receiving eviction and demolition notices. The notices came on the heels of amendments to Administrative Units Financial Law No. 37 of 2021, which imposed a deadline for holders of building permits who had not yet begun construction, requiring them to do so or risk having their permits revoked.

While some official documents list 32 occupied properties, others refer to 41 occupied units or 47 residential dwellings, indicating that dozens of families were ultimately displaced or became embroiled in disputes over eviction and compensation.

According to Mahmoud Hilal, Director of Urban Planning and Development at the Damascus Governorate, the owner of Planning Parcel No. 36 “reached settlements with and evacuated 42 families.” However, the Governorate officially recognized only 32 occupancies, arguing that only those cases met the criteria set out in the applicable urban planning directive.

Fourteen families interviewed for this investigation say the compensation they were offered fell far short of the market value of their homes or the realities of their financial circumstances.

Among them is Balqis al-Samakri, who received nine million Syrian pounds (old currency) in compensation for vacating her home. She described the payment as “charity.”

Another resident, Shahira Khadr Ghabn, said her entire house was demolished during the Assad era, even though only a small portion of the property fell within the boundaries of the disputed planning parcel.

“Al-Halabi refused to limit the demolition to the section inside the parcel,” she said. “The entire house was torn down.”

Ironically, the case returned to public attention after the fall of the Assad regime—not because the new authorities sought to resolve the legal disputes surrounding Planning Parcel No. 36, but for the opposite reason. The new government, through the Damascus Governorate, issued an additional construction permit allowing the project to expand vertically, despite ongoing objections from former residents and their continued demands for compensation.

Documents reviewed by SIRAJ show that nearly two years after Barakat’s home was demolished—and just months after the fall of the Assad regime—the Damascus Governorate granted Mohammad Khair al-Halabi, on July 16, 2025, a Construction Completion Permit No. 39.

The permit not only authorized completion of the existing project but also allowed the developer to add four additional stories to the building.

That raises a central question: On what legal basis was Permit No. 39 issued? Did the Governorate rely on the applicable planning and construction regulations, or was the permit granted under interpretations and administrative procedures that exceeded the limits of the law?

Beyond the Legal Limit?

According to documents reviewed by SIRAJ, the approved zoning plan for the site limits development on Planning Parcel No. 36 to one basement, a ground floor, and three additional stories.

However, Memorandum No. 2800/W of 2025, prepared by Diaa Khalifa, the Damascus Governorate legal supervisor, recommended approving four additional stories, citing Decision No. 7/M.D of 2020 as the legal basis.

The same recommendation was echoed in Memorandum No. 20653/W, dated March 18, 2025, issued by the Complaints and Grievances Committee, chaired by Fadi al-Razzouq and established by the Damascus Governorate on January 8, 2025.

The committee concluded that the additional floors should be approved because the owner of the parcel had provided alternative housing for occupants and because the measure would reduce the financial and administrative burden on the Damascus Governorate associated with evictions and compensation.

However, Decision No. 7/M.D—which became the primary legal foundation for Permit No. 39—has itself become the focus of substantial legal criticism.

Issued in 2020, the decision was intended to resolve the status of certain parcels within planned development zones and facilitate urban development projects that existing occupancies had stalled. Under specific conditions, it allows developers to receive additional planning incentives—including increased building heights or extra stories—in exchange for compensating occupants at the project site and completing construction in accordance with the approved zoning plan.

The committee concluded that the additional floors should be approved because the owner of the parcel had provided alternative housing for occupants and because the measure would reduce the financial and administrative burden on the Damascus Governorate associated with evictions and compensation.

However, Decision No. 7/M.D—which became the primary legal foundation for Permit No. 39—has itself become the focus of substantial legal criticism.

Issued in 2020, the decision was intended to resolve the status of certain parcels within planned development zones and facilitate urban development projects that existing occupancies had stalled. Under specific conditions, it allows developers to receive additional planning incentives—including increased building heights or extra stories—in exchange for compensating occupants at the project site and completing construction in accordance with the approved zoning plan.

According to the documents reviewed by SIRAJ, those conditions do not seem to apply to Planning Parcel No. 36. The property has held a valid building permit since 1989, and that authorization was subsequently renewed through Permit No. 225/1 in 2024.

Documents and video footage recorded by affected residents also show that the site was not vacant land or an undeveloped project, but an existing building.

The legal dispute extends beyond Decision No. 7/M.D to its relationship with Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982, which governs amendments to zoning plans, building envelopes, height restrictions, and permitted floor counts.

Under Article 5 of Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982, any amendment affecting zoning regulations must follow a formal process that includes:

Public announcement of amendments to the general and detailed zoning plans.
Display of the revised plans at the administrative authority—in this case, the Damascus Governorate
A 30-day public objection period.
Review by the Regional Technical Committee
A formal decision on submitted objections.

Only after those procedures have been completed can Decision No. 7/M.D be applied to authorize additional floors.

In urban planning terms, increasing a building’s height or adding stories constitutes an amendment to the property’s building envelope and planning parameters, rather than a routine administrative adjustment.

According to attorney Nabil Hussein, Decision No. 7/M.D “conflicts with Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982 and its amendments unless the procedures required by the decree—including public notice, publication of the amendments, and an opportunity to file objections—are fully implemented.”

An internal document obtained by SIRAJ appears to reinforce that interpretation.

In a letter dated March 9, 2025, the Directorate of Urban Planning and Development instructed the Complaints and Grievances Committee that the provisions of Legislative Decree No. 5 must be applied before approving any increase in building height, raising questions about the legal basis on which the permit was ultimately granted.

Nevertheless, only days later, the committee issued Memorandum No. 20653/W, recommending approval of the additional stories and directing the Directorate of Urban Planning and Development to complete the licensing process.

The legal controversy does not end there.

The Committee also appears to have overlooked Prime Ministery Circular No. 17/15/B, issued in 2023, which suspended approvals for amendments increasing the number of building stories. According to official records, that suspension remained in force until it was lifted in June 2026 by the General Secretariat of the Presidency.

Yet the documents reviewed by SIRAJ indicate that officials justified issuing the permit by arguing that Decision No. 7/M.D was “broader in scope” than the Prime Ministery Circular.

Responding to SIRAJ’s questions, Mahmoud Hilal, Director of Urban Planning and Development at the Damascus Governorate, argued that applying the Circular literally “would effectively halt reconstruction,” adding that “most building permits would be frozen” under such an interpretation.

He said the Circular had originally been issued to address urban planning violations and that the governorate sought to balance regulatory restrictions with the practical demands of post-war reconstruction.

Legal experts interviewed for this investigation maintain, however, that a Prime Ministery Circular carries greater legal authority than a local administrative decision and therefore takes precedence unless it is formally repealed by a subsequent circular—which, they note, did not occur until June 2026.

Belated Amendment

Documents reviewed by SIRAJ indicate that the technical committee later cited by the Damascus Governorate to justify amending the building envelope regulations (Manhaj al-Waja’eb) for Planning Parcel No. 36 was established under Decision No. 2768, issued on June 2, 2025—more than a month before Construction Permit No. 39 was granted on July 16, 2025.

According to the documents, the committee met and discussed amendments to the zoning plan before the issuance of Decision No. 61/M.T on February 1, 2026, which formally approved the amendment to the building envelope regulations pursuant to Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982 and its amendments.

In Syrian urban planning, “waja’eb” refers to the mandatory setback areas within a property where construction is prohibited. The building envelope regulations (Manhaj al-Waja’eb) define the technical parameters governing development, including the building footprint, permissible construction area, maximum height, and the number of stories allowed.

The sequence of events, however, raises significant legal questions.

Legislative Decree No. 5 of 1982 requires that objections to amendments of zoning plans be reviewed by a Regional Technical Committee consisting of seven members chaired by the governor.

Documents obtained by SIRAJ, however, show that the body which reviewed the file was not that committee. Instead, it was a 12-member committee, also chaired by the Governor, established before the zoning amendment and before the issuance of the decision that later relied on the same decree.

Decision No. 2768 of 2025 establishing the technical committee chaired by the Governor of Damascus

This raises a central legal question: If the Committee created under Decision No. 2768 was not the Regional Technical Committee required by Legislative Decree No. 5, on what legal basis was the building envelope amended? And how could Decision No. 61/M.T rely on the decree before the procedures it mandates had been completed?

 Minutes of the Technical Committee meeting discussing zoning amendments before the formal planning decision was issued

Attorney Ali al-Jundi said that while administrative authorities are entitled to amend zoning plans, such amendments must be carried out in accordance with the procedures established under Legislative Decree No. 5, including notifying the Ministry of Housing.

“The administrative authority has the right to amend the zoning plan as it sees fit,” al-Jundi said. “But the amendment cannot be used to legitimize an earlier legal violation.”

Attorney Nabil Hussein offered an even stronger legal assessment.

“Under established jurisprudence of the Council of State, any administrative decision issued without a valid legal basis is legally void,” he said. “A void decision cannot be cured or revived by subsequent actions.”

The documents also reveal a discrepancy between the Committee that reviewed the case and the Committee prescribed by law.

While Decision No. 2768 established a 12-member technical committee, including the Governor of Damascus, Legislative Decree No. 5 designates a seven-member Regional Technical Committee, also chaired by the governor, as the competent authority to approve amendments to zoning plans.

In an audio recording reviewed by SIRAJ, made during a meeting attended by Ibrahim Kouki, Director of the Damascus Governorate’s Media Directorate, Mahmoud Hilal, Director of Urban Planning and Development, acknowledged that the procedures and decisions adopted later were intended to correct an earlier mistake in the case file.

That acknowledgment appears to contradict the official narrative portraying the subsequent measures as part of a routine planning process. It raises further questions about whether the later amendments were required from the outset under existing law—or whether they were introduced to remedy legal deficiencies associated with the original issuance of Permit No. 39.

Compensation for displaced residents also appears to have been far more than a secondary administrative issue.

It formed one of the principal justifications for granting the project four additional stories.

Paragraph (d) of Decision No. 7/M.D allows developers to receive an additional floor in exchange for compensating eight occupants displaced by a project.

But according to documents and residents’ testimonies reviewed by SIRAJ, the treatment of occupants varied considerably. Some received financial compensation, others were allocated replacement housing, while several affected residents say they received no compensation at all, or that the compensation offered was inadequate or never fully processed.

A New Cause of Dispute

Alongside the legal and regulatory controversy surrounding Permit No. 39, the Damascus Governorate established a local committee whose stated purpose was to coordinate between residents, government agencies, and the developer, while helping resolve outstanding issues related to replacement housing, compensation, and unresolved claims.

Residents interviewed by SIRAJ, however, describe the committee very differently.

In a memorandum submitted to the Governor of Damascus in October 2025, several residents said the committee failed to hear from all affected families, limiting its review to only a small number of cases.

Some residents argue that, in practice, the Committee became a mechanism for managing the dispute rather than serving as an independent body to resolve it.

Jihad Barakat said the committee initially offered several displaced families replacement apartments in the Barzeh Housing Complex. The proposal was later withdrawn after one resident challenged the legal status of the properties, arguing that ownership was based on a court judgment rather than a final registered title deed.

According to Barakat, the objection resulted in the entire process being frozen for all remaining families without consultation or the presentation of alternative housing options.

Several residents also told SIRAJ that the Committee relied primarily on the neighborhood mukhtar (local administrative head) to assess individual cases, without involving independent legal or technical experts. Some viewed this as evidence that the Committee did not provide balanced representation for all parties affected by the project.

In response to SIRAJ’s questions, the Damascus Governorate said the remaining cases are legally classified as “non-compliant applicants” because the individuals failed to complete the required procedures within the legally prescribed deadline. The Governorate added that it would implement any court rulings issued in their favor in the future.

The Developer’s Response

The SIRAJ investigative team contacted Anas al-Halabi, son of businessman Mohammad Khair al-Halabi, the owner of Planning Parcel No. 36, by telephone, through WhatsApp, and later met him in person in Damascus.

During the meeting, Anas al-Halabi declined to allow the interview to be recorded or to provide written responses. He maintained, however, that he and his father had compensated approximately 50 families.

He said the eviction and compensation process was carried out lawfully and documented through notarized agreements. He presented only one example—a release and discharge agreement signed by Faisal Mohammad Sweid, whom the investigation team also interviewed.

When contacted by phone, Sweid confirmed that he voluntarily vacated his home in 2023 and signed the release without coercion. He said al-Halabi gave him the choice between receiving an apartment in Ain Tarma or accepting financial compensation, the amount of which he declined to disclose. Sweid said he chose the cash payment so he could rent a home within Damascus.

Responding to residents who insist they never received compensation, al-Halabi argued that some were making such claims in an attempt to obtain additional financial benefits to which they were not entitled.

“I have fulfilled my obligations before God and before the occupants,” he said.

He further argued that responsibility for carrying out the evictions rested with the Damascus Governorate under Article 46 of Urban Planning Law No. 9 of 1974.

Regarding his father’s commitment to provide alternative housing under Decision No. 695/M.T, Anas al-Halabi said the undertaking was consistent with the decision’s provisions, which state that when an occupant is deemed non-compliant, the Governorate may allocate one of its designated replacement apartments, provided the beneficiary pays its assessed value according to the applicable procedures.

Addressing claims that some of the donated apartments were uninhabitable, al-Halabi rejected the allegation.

“The Damascus Governorate does not accept a donated apartment without first inspecting it and verifying that it meets all technical and legal requirements,” he said.

He also denied allegations that security restrictions affecting individuals classified by the Governorate as non-compliant prevented them from taking possession of replacement housing, specifically in the case of Jihad Barakat.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “His sons had nothing to do with obtaining a security clearance. In fact, no security approval is required before the ownership transfer.”

Al-Halabi cited Article 2 of Decision No. 492/M.T of 2022, which provides that when legal obstacles temporarily prevent the transfer of title, beneficiaries may instead submit a notarized declaration confirming their acceptance of the donated apartment and their agreement to vacate the occupied property until ownership can be formally transferred.

Asked why his father had originally undertaken the evictions under Decision No. 695/M.T of 2018, rather than Decision No. 492/M.T of 2022, al-Halabi said the newer decision superseded the earlier one and became the governing regulation once it entered into force.

When questioned about the alleged legal and administrative irregularities surrounding Permit No. 39, including the requirement to comply with Legislative Decree No. 5, he declined to comment.

“I am not the competent authority to assess those issues,” he said. “That is for the administrative authorities to determine and process.”

He added that his father had executed a notarized undertaking to vacate the occupied properties based on Decision No. 695/M.T and Decision No. 7/M.D, which, he said, authorized the granting of additional floors in accordance with applicable law before the eviction process began.

Regarding the lawsuit currently pending before the Cybercrime Court, al-Halabi said:

“I concluded that the proper course was to seek a fair legal remedy.”

Asked whether he had attempted to resolve the dispute before turning to litigation, he replied: “We complied with the process established by the body appointed by the governorate after liberation to resolve the dispute,” referring to the Al-Adawi Neighborhood Committee.

Finally, when asked whether he remained willing to reach a settlement with residents over the compensation claims, al-Halabi said that any future court ruling would be binding on all parties.

Cybercrime Charges Instead of a Settlement?

As residents’ protests intensified and some began using social media to share their accounts of the evictions and compensation process, the dispute entered a new phase—one that shifted from administrative conflict to the courts.

A group of affected residents created a social media page called “The Displaced of Diwaniyah”, where they published documents, personal testimonies, and updates related to the redevelopment project.

Those online activities were later followed by a series of legal actions.

Businessman Mohammad Khair al-Halabi filed a complaint before Syria’s Cybercrime Court, based on Cybercrime Branch Report No. 842, dated November 17, 2025, alleging “online threats.”

The case, which remained pending at the time this investigation was published, names several residents as defendants.

Court records reviewed by the SIRAJ investigative team while accompanying some of the defendants during court proceedings in May 2026 show that the charges include online threats, defamation, and libel.

Several residents told SIRAJ that the proceedings deepened their sense of pressure and intimidation, particularly because they see themselves as individuals seeking compensation, alternative housing, or legal review of the construction permit.

Additional documents reviewed by SIRAJ also reveal that in November 2025, the Al-Adawi Neighborhood Committee submitted a proposal to the Damascus Governorate recommending that the State Litigation Department and the Directorate of Legal Affairs pursue lawsuits for online defamation and libel against anyone found to have insulted the governorate, the governor, or the neighborhood committee through social media.

Ultimately, while the Damascus Governorate maintains that Permit No. 39 was issued as part of an effort to complete a long-stalled development project, many residents affected by the decision argue that the central issue extends far beyond the approval of four additional stories.

They contend that the real dispute lies in how the decisions on eviction, compensation, and the granting of additional planning privileges were made—without adequately addressing the rights and claims of those who lost their homes.

Jihad Barakat summarizes his experience in a single sentence that reflects the erosion of his hopes:

“I don’t want anything more than the home I was promised.”

• This investigation was produced as part of the 2026 SIRAJ Fellowship Program for Syrian Journalists, with support from the French Media Development Agency (CFI).
• A version of this investigation was also published by Daraj Media
• Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awad

The post The Untold Story of Permit No. 39: How Old Homes Were Demolished—Then Four Additional Floors Were Approved in Damascus’ Al-Adawi Neighborhood appeared first on SIRAJ.

In doing so, the regime revived an older model of parallel security formations dating back to the early years of Ba’ath Party rule. This model later evolved through the pro-Assad SHabiha militias closely associated with the Assad family before becoming a more structured network of paramilitary forces following the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011.

Why Was the Seventh Battalion Created?

As the Syrian uprising gained momentum after it erupted in March 2011—particularly with the emergence of armed opposition factions—the Assad regime increasingly relied on more flexible, locally embedded forces capable of controlling daily life at the neighborhood and street level.

This strategy rested on a clear premise: maintaining control required more than deploying conventional military units. It also depended on building local patronage networks that combined intimate knowledge of the terrain with the ability to monitor and dominate it.

This investigation, produced jointly by the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ) and Daraj, examines the Seventh Battalion as a case study of the NDF—pro-government militias established during the Syrian revolution years to operate alongside the regular army. As defections weakened the military, the regime increasingly turned to irregular formations considered more politically reliable. The Seventh Battalion is presented not as an isolated example, but as a window into the broader ecosystem of militias that emerged during the conflict.

Digital records and internal documents reviewed by journalists from Daraj and SIRAJ suggest these forces or militias were built not only on political loyalty but also on local ties. Their appeal lay in offering immediate protection for communities, property, and familiar territory, unlike the regular army, whose soldiers were often deployed far from their hometowns.

An internal document titled “Establishment of the Seventh Battalion,” identifying the unit’s headquarters at the summit of Nabi Yunis (Arabic for Prophet Yunis)  in Syria’s coastal region, outlines its primary objectives: constructing defensive fortifications adapted to the mountain terrain, deploying forward ambush positions, conducting surveillance and reconnaissance, fostering competition among fighters, and emphasizing discipline in appearance and uniform standards. Notably, the founding document even specifies requirements for clean-shaven faces and neatly trimmed hair—suggesting an effort to build a militia with a distinctive identity, image, and authority.

The Battalion formed part of the NDF, a nationwide network of locally recruited militias created to support Syria’s military and security services. By 2013, the NDF had evolved into a more institutionalized organization, receiving weapons, salaries, and ammunition while operating within a formal command structure that blended military and intelligence oversight.

Another internal paper, titled “Overview of the Seventh Battalion,” offers less of a coherent operational history than an example of the regime’s characteristic ideological language. Its rhetoric closely resembles Ba’athist political education manuals, combining Arab nationalist themes with Islamic references to portray the state not merely as the source of political legitimacy but as the guarantor of Syria’s very survival.

The document begins with sweeping references to Syria’s territorial integrity, the country’s central national cause, defending the homeland, and confronting the external enemy represented by Israel. It then narrows abruptly to a much more localized focus: the battlefield becomes the summit of Nabi Yunis and its surrounding areas, and the battalion’s mission is framed simply as “defending our areas.”

In other words, the rhetoric starts as a defense of the nation but ultimately becomes a defense of a specific locality. The regime’s national discourse was thus translated in practice into localized, community-based warfare—a dynamic that reflected and reinforced the territorial and sectarian fragmentation characteristic of Syria’s civil war.

In 2015, reports circulated claiming that the Seventh Battalion had established a suicide unit whose stated mission was to “defend Islam, which had been distorted by terrorist groups, and defend the homeland through martyrdom operations.” The reported initiative illustrated an apparent contradiction: while seeking to reclaim religious legitimacy from jihadist organizations, the battalion simultaneously embraced one of their most notorious tactics.

Who Served in the Battalion?

As the Syrian military struggled to maintain control across the country, the regime increasingly relied on locally recruited fighters familiar with the terrain. These recruits received training that combined conventional combat skills with intelligence and security practices while remaining directly linked to the military establishment.

The documents also show that civilian government employees were temporarily released from their official duties to participate in combat operations. Military priorities took priority over civilian bureaucracy, reshaping the relationship between the state and society in favor of security institutions and armed authority. In one example, a battalion fighter is identified as a municipal employee in civilian life.

An internal administrative memorandum outlining the requirements for building the ideal fighter in the Seventh Battalion bears the slogan: “We believe in the principle: Give the fighter what he needs, and he will deliver victory.” Beyond its rhetoric, the document offers a glimpse into the battalion’s daily reality. Rather than describing military operations, it reveals a relationship built on dependence and exploitation.

The memo lists persistent shortages of basic supplies and equipment—including tea, sugar, wrenches, and even electricity. These deficiencies appear not as isolated logistical problems but as symptoms of how the unit itself was managed. Fighters were treated primarily as instruments of war, provided only the minimum necessary to survive in exchange for risking their lives in the name of defending the state. Rather than cultivating an independent professional soldier, the Battalion sustained a combatant whose continued participation depended on access to basic daily necessities.

In this system, those who controlled food, water, warmth, and other essentials also controlled the fighter’s ability to remain in service. What appears on paper as logistical support functioned as a subtle mechanism of control, fostering loyalty through dependency. Fighters’ ability to fight was shaped by what the system provided—and by what it demanded in return.

The language of the Battalion’s supply requests also points to deeper administrative dysfunction. The documents reflect chronic austerity, constant appeals for basic resources, and an inability to meet even fundamental needs, to the point where day-to-day survival itself became a persistent challenge.

Viewed in this light, the Battalion’s support system extended beyond food and shelter. It also offered recognition and belonging—but only on the condition of continued service. Acceptance within the organization was tied to the bare minimum required for survival, reinforcing a structure that was difficult to leave because it was intertwined with the defense of one’s immediate community and geographic area.

The Seventh Battalion can therefore be understood as a microcosm of what might be described as a failed armed welfare state. The Assad regime demanded loyalty, commitment, and combat readiness from its recruits, yet lacked the capacity to provide stable living conditions in return. What fighters received was not an entitlement but a conditional benefit linked to remaining in service.

In this context, the Battalion members emerge as more than military personnel. They became individuals bound to a closed economic and social system whose power rested on their own vulnerability. What appeared to be a simple exchange concealed a deeper structural imbalance: the resources provided were insufficient to sustain a dignified life but adequate to discourage defection. This dynamic also helps explain the wartime proliferation of checkpoint economies, extortion, and pro-regime militia racketeering, which functioned as informal incentives within a broader patronage system.

The documents further reveal chronic delays in salary payments. In 2014, fighters reportedly earned monthly wages of 20,000 to 25,000 Syrian pounds, supplemented by bonuses of 3,000 pounds. Even at the time, these were meager sums. With the Syrian pound trading then at roughly 170 pounds to the U.S. dollar, total monthly compensation amounted to little more than $20, underscoring the limited economic value of military service despite the risks involved.

What Were the Battalion’s Responsibilities?

The Seventh Battalion did not operate in isolation. Internal contact lists indicate that its members maintained regular communication with NDF commanders in other regions, as well as with members of the Desert Hawks militia and a group referred to simply as “the Friends.” The latter designation appears to refer to operatives affiliated with Lebanon’s Hezbollah or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), identified only by aliases such as Hajj Zuhair and Hajj Alaa, without full names. The Battalion also coordinated with commanders of regular Syrian Army regiments, reflecting the close integration of its fighters with official military units—a relationship also evident in inventory records documenting the battalion’s weapons and equipment.

Internal Fractures and Attempts at Recovery

One internal document labeled “Discussion” captures what appears to be a rare moment of institutional self-assessment, revealing growing cracks within the Battalion. It was written at a time when the Syrian regime, like the regular army, was increasingly struggling to sustain its allied militias. The very structures created to compensate for military weakness were themselves beginning to show signs of exhaustion and declining effectiveness in defending the areas under their control.

Rather than serving as a routine administrative record, the document reads like the minutes of an internal crisis meeting. It catalogs a wide range of organizational problems: declining trust, deteriorating fighter morale, unmet logistical needs, arbitrary personnel transfers, lack of compensation, damage to the battalion’s reputation, marginalization of commanders, tolerance of underperforming personnel, and neglect of wounded fighters and the families of those killed in action. Together, these complaints suggest not merely operational shortcomings but a deeper institutional crisis affecting the militia itself.

Even the document’s title—“Discussion”—is somewhat misleading. Rather than reflecting an open exchange of views, it appears aimed at containing organizational breakdown and preserving discipline. Repeated references to sidelined commanders, transfers made without consultation, and the protection of ineffective personnel indicate an effort to reassert a chain of command that was increasingly eroding from within.

The timing reinforces this interpretation. The document was produced during a period when the Assad regime was losing territory and becoming increasingly dependent first on Iranian and later Russian military intervention. The battalion’s internal dysfunction mirrored the broader deterioration of the regime’s war effort.

Perhaps most revealing is the contrast between the Battalion’s public rhetoric and its internal reality. While official documents celebrated steadfastness, discipline, and victory, this memorandum paints a very different picture: collapsing trust, exhausted fighters, and an inability to meet even basic operational requirements. Military advances, when they occurred, did not translate into stability but instead produced further disorder, withdrawals, shortages of weapons, and a lack of accountability.

Even the document’s language appears fragmented and disjointed, suggesting that the institution struggled not only to manage the crisis but also to construct a coherent narrative about it.

These internal discussions become more meaningful when placed within their broader historical context. Beginning in 2012, as defections weakened the Syrian Army and its ability to hold territory declined, the Assad regime expanded auxiliary militias to compensate not only for manpower shortages but also for eroding confidence in the regular military. Yet this expansion did not produce a more resilient security structure. Instead, it created new vulnerabilities, as the militias established to fill institutional gaps gradually developed crises of their own.

By 2014 and 2015, as regime forces lost significant territory and military setbacks mounted, these weaknesses became increasingly apparent. The regular army was under strain, allied militias were experiencing fatigue, and command structures struggled to maintain the stability they publicly claimed to represent. The growing reliance on Iranian support, followed by Russia’s military intervention, further underscored that these paramilitary formations were no longer capable of sustaining the war effort independently—or, in many cases, sustaining themselves.

The reporting team attempted to contact three individuals identified in the documents as members of the Seventh Battalion but received no response. Open-source research also confirmed that Battalion members were killed during the conflict, with photographs of some circulated online and memorial pages created in their names on Facebook.

The journalists also submitted questions to the Ministry of Interior in Latakia regarding the government’s postwar handling of NDF personnel, including whether reconciliation measures offered to former Syrian Army members also applied to militia volunteers or whether separate procedures existed. No response had been received by the time this investigation was published.

Following the fall of the Assad regime, however, the Ministry of Interior announced in October 2025 that it had arrested Colonel Qusai Wajih Ibrahim, identified as the commander of the Seventh Battalion, in Latakia. According to the Ministry, he was accused of leading military operations targeting the region in 2012 and of participating in attacks against the General Security Directorate prior to the outbreak of the 2025 coastal violence.

• A version of this investigation was also published by Daraj Media
• Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awad

The post “The Mountain Battalion”: The Story of a Military Unit That Fought for the Assad Regime Before Falling Apart Under Psychological Strain appeared first on SIRAJ.

Fahd successfully completed his work inside the house, removing the unexploded ordnance he found. However, one of the villagers asked him to inspect the land surrounding the property as well. Unbeknownst to him, the adjacent area concealed a large minefield. Minutes later, an explosion rang out.

According to the account of a witness who was at the scene, as relayed by Walid al-Ghajr’s father, Fahd entered the area believing it to be safe after completing his inspection of the house, before a landmine exploded and killed him. He adds: “There was a minefield that nobody knew existed. The mine exploded in front of him and he was killed instantly. No one was able to reach him directly, and Civil Defence personnel had to retrieve his body using ropes because of the density of mines surrounding him.”

Fahd was no ordinary civilian. After obtaining his secondary school certificate in 2009, he enlisted in the army as a “non-commissioned officer” specialising in engineering. During his military service, he was seriously injured whilst on a mission to defuse an explosive device, leaving him with a permanent injury to his shoulder.

Following the start of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, al-Ghajr defected from the regime’s forces in 2012, completed his university studies, and then worked as a teacher in schools in his hometown of al-Tah and in displacement camps. In 2017, he was wounded again by an airstrike, which left him with a permanent disability in his left leg.

Despite his multiple injuries, Fahd returned after the fall of the Assad regime to take part in clearing mines and other remnants of war, travelling between Damascus, Afrin and Idlib to help secure areas to which residents had begun returning. Yet his end came from the very danger he had dedicated years of his life to tackling.

The man who survived war injuries and aerial bombardment, and who worked to clear mines across different parts of Syria, was killed in a landmine explosion while carrying out his work.

His father says: “My son survived the regime, he survived the bombardment, and he survived many injuries during the war, but a single landmine after liberation took him from us forever.”

While his children and their mother rely on aid and borrowing from local shops, his father, who is over seventy-five years old, says he was forced to sell his 25 dunums (approximately 2.5 hectares, or 6.2 acres) of olive groves in order to support his children and grandchildren after years of war.

“Fahd left behind four children without a breadwinner,” says the father. “He used to go out every day to save families from the danger of landmines, but today his children are waiting for someone to save them from poverty and hardship.”

The most dangerous job in Syria! 

The clearance of landmines and other remnants of war has become one of the most dangerous tasks in Syria. At the same time, the country is experiencing one of the largest waves of return among displaced people since the outbreak of the revolution, which the Assad regime turned into a war against the Syrian people.

According to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), around 1.6 million people returned to their home areas between the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 and the spring of 2026. This figure includes hundreds of thousands of refugees who had fled to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, as well as large numbers of internally displaced people.

Like Fahd al-Ghajr, volunteers and mine clearance workers are paying with their lives for inadequate training, a lack of equipment, insufficient funding and the absence of relevant maps, whilst Syrians are returning in increasing numbers to areas still contaminated with war ordnance.

To document the working conditions of mine clearance and explosive-remnants-of-war teams in Syria, and how a lack of equipment is costing the lives of volunteers engaged in demining operations, the investigative team adopted a multi-source methodology. Over three months of monitoring and reporting, the journalists compiled a database of 27 documented mine explosion incidents that resulted in the death or injury of demining personnel in Syria during 2025 and 2026. The incidents were identified through official and human rights sources, with each case linked to open-source material, video footage and visual content published online, particularly on social media.

To strengthen the reliability of the available evidence, the team collected first-hand testimonies from local residents and cross-checked them against the digital data it had gathered. Interviews were conducted with 12 experts and demining personnel, including members of the Syrian Ministry of Defence and the Syrian Civil Defence, as well as demining volunteers and relatives of victims.

The methodology subsequently included analysing dozens of published photographs and videos documenting mine clearance operations and the destruction of munitions, comparing them with the International Mine Action Standards (IMAS), whilst verifying the visual material by cross-referencing the locations, dates and information contained therein with independent sources.

The team also reviewed reports and documents issued by the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), as well as specialist human rights and international organisations.

The aim was to assess the impact of the absence of minefield maps and the shortage of equipment and supplies on the safety of those working to clear mines and other remnants of war across the country.

Whilst the lack of maps is one of the most significant risks to mine clearance workers, analysis of the visual material and interviews with workers reveals that the problem extends beyond a lack of information to the absence of a significant proportion of protective equipment and supplies, which are considered essential under international standards for mine action (IMAS).

After reviewing 104 photos and video footage collected by researchers documenting mine clearance and munitions disposal operations in various parts of Syria, the investigation team observed that the majority of workers were using “standard military clothing or partial protective gear instead of internationally approved specialist protective equipment, which costs thousands of US dollars”.

The analysis found that 71 visual items (68% of the material reviewed) showed personnel operating without full face protection. In addition, 53% of personnel appeared without protective vests specifically designed for mine clearance operations.

In many cases, specialised vehicles for transporting and destroying explosives were absent, whilst some footage showed munitions being transported or detonated using limited field resources compared to the equipment stipulated in the International Mine Action Standards (IMAS), reflecting a clear gap between the scale of the risks faced by workers and the resources available to them on the ground.

The findings revealed that between 2025 and 2026, 57 workers and volunteers were killed whilst carrying out clearance operations or handling unexploded ordnance; the majority of the victims were members of engineering units affiliated with the Syrian Ministry of Defence, whilst 26 out of 27 incidents were linked to direct field clearance operations, reflecting the scale of the risks faced by personnel in this field.

International standards for mine clearance require the use of a comprehensive system of personal protective equipment, including protective armour designed to withstand the effects of explosions and shrapnel, face and eye protection, as well as specialised detection equipment and safe mechanisms for excavation, transport and detonation. However, these requirements appear far removed from the reality on the ground in which several Syrian teams are currently operating.

According to estimations made by the investigation team, based on the prices of specialised mine clearance equipment, the minimum cost of equipping a single worker with an acceptable level of protection is approximately US$15,496. This sum includes a light protective suit priced at approximately US$9,500 and a specialised Vallon VMH3CS mine detector costing around US$5,996. These estimates do not include the costs of shipping, training and maintenance, nor equipment for safe excavation, transport and detonation. The International Mine Action Standards (IMAS) stipulate that personal protective equipment must provide protection against the effects of an explosion equivalent to 240 grams of TNT, depending on the nature of the work and the distance from the source of danger.

Demining expert Mohammed Adnan al-Farhoud believes that the lack of equipment not only increases the risk of injury to personnel, but also slows clearance operations, delays the return of residents to their areas, and raises the human and economic cost of the landmine problem, one of the most complex challenges facing post-war Syria.

Suhaib Mohammed Zarour, who was injured while taking part in mine clearance operations with the Military Operations Directorate following the liberation of Aleppo, says that the shortage of equipment was one of the factors that increased the dangers of the work.

“When I was injured, we did not have sufficient equipment, and I did not have an advanced detection device that I could fully rely on,” he says. “Even today, the equipment available still falls short of actual needs.”

The issue is not limited to detection operations alone, but extends to the transport and destruction of munitions.

Casualties on a rescue mission

Neither Suhaib’s injury nor the death of Fahd al-Ghajr were the first incidents in which someone was injured or lost their life whilst attempting to clear mines in Syria following the fall of the Assad regime.

In the town of Ain Issa, in the north of Raqqa governorate, two soldiers, Ibrahim Khalil al-Hassan and Musa Khalaf al-Salim, were killed whilst taking part in the clearance of mines laid by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Khalil Hamoud al-Ali, who runs a local demining team and whose team included the two young men, said: “The mine was a strip connected to two mines. The team defused the first mine and thought the area was safe, but the second mine exploded as soon as they moved forward, and they were killed instantly.”

Over more than 14 years of war, vast swathes of Syria have become contaminated with landmines and other remnants of war. Whilst attention is usually focused on civilian casualties, demining workers also pay a heavy price as they attempt to secure these areas. 

Maysara al-Hassan, commander of engineering operations for the 80th Division, says that the former front-line areas in the southern Idlib countryside, northern Hama countryside and western Latakia countryside alone saw an estimated 15,000 mine-related deaths and injuries between 2020 and 2024. The figure highlights the scale of the danger that continues to threaten both civilians and mine clearance teams.

According to Human Rights Watch, landmines have killed and injured more than 600 people, including children, since December 2024, whilst they continue to pose one of the most significant obstacles to safe return, reconstruction and the resumption of agricultural activity in many parts of Syria.

A large proportion of these returns are concentrated in the governorates of Rural Damascus, Homs, Aleppo and Idlib, which are among the areas most heavily affected by landmines, unexploded ordnance and the remnants of military operations. As the pace of return accelerates, the risks facing returnees are increasing, with many finding themselves facing homes, fields and roads that have not yet undergone full clearance or demining operations.

According to data from the Directorate of Social Affairs and Labour in Idlib, some 719,000 people are still living in more than 750 camps in north-western Syria, whilst the government aims to return some 35,000 families to their home regions by 2026. However, the return is not only linked to the rehabilitation of homes and infrastructure; it also faces another, less visible yet more deadly threat: landmines and unexploded ordnance that remain scattered across the vast areas of the cities, towns and fields. 

Fadl Abdul Ghani, Executive Director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), believes that the documented figures represent only the minimum extent of the actual losses, explaining that many incidents occur in remote areas or are not fully documented.

He says: “The demining operations themselves have become a source of fatalities, with dozens of casualties occurring during clearance work. This highlights the gap between on-the-ground needs and available resources, and necessitates the establishment of a national coordination structure and the provision of systematic training and appropriate equipment for the teams carrying out the work.”

Data from local and international organisations indicate that landmines and unexploded ordnance continue to pose one of the greatest threats to civilians and humanitarian workers, particularly in areas that have witnessed rapid military withdrawals or frequent changes in control during years of conflict.

The Civil Defence describes the remnants of war resulting from the former regime’s bombardment as a long-term, ongoing threat affecting civilians’ lives, as they remain explosive for years and impact residential and agricultural areas as well as children’s play areas.

A field visit to one of the mine clearance and war debris removal sites in the Khan Sheikhoun area of the Idlib countryside, documenting the transport, processing and detonation of unexploded ordnance. May 2026 – SIRAJ

Mines Without Maps

Maps of mine contamination in Syria reveal the extent of the danger across a vast area of the country, where minefields and unexploded ordnance are scattered across dozens of sites in the governorates of Idlib, Aleppo, Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, Hama, Rural Damascus and Daraa. This widespread distribution reflects the scale of the explosive legacy left behind by years of war, and makes mine clearance an essential prerequisite for the return of residents, reconstruction and the restoration of normal life in the affected areas.

Three workers in this field say that the nature of the work has changed significantly since the fall of the regime. Instead of dealing with known minefields or specific military zones, teams are now faced with vast swathes of undocumented contaminated areas, ranging from homes and agricultural fields to schools, public facilities and roads.

The risks are not limited to conventional mines, but also include improvised explosive devices, unexploded ordnance and the remnants of combat left behind by years of war. All too often, workers find themselves confronted with various types of explosives laid by multiple parties – ranging from forces of the former regime to ISIS, the Syrian Democratic Forces and other factions – without any maps or records specifying their locations or nature.

According to the report by Mine Action Review for 2025, there is still no comprehensive national database or accurate map of mine contamination in Syria, as mines were laid by multiple parties during the years of conflict, including forces of the former Syrian regime, ISIS, the SDF and other armed factions. Furthermore, cluster munitions dropped by warplanes continue to pose an additional threat, the exact distribution of which is difficult to determine.

A report published by the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR)  on 4 April 2026 indicates that the true extent of mine contamination remains unknown, as no comprehensive national survey has been carried out to date, meaning that those working on mine clearance often operate without prior knowledge of where the dangers lie.

In one of the videos reviewed by the investigation team, which was shared by Syrians on social media, an explosives expert appeared explaining how the team operates. Although he lost one of his legs in a previous explosion, he emphasised during the recording that locating these sites often relies on accounts from local residents and reports from the community, given the absence of official field maps.

Malik Salama, a former officer and volunteer in mine clearance, says: “One of the biggest challenges facing demining efforts in Syria today is the lack of official maps of minefields. After years of conflict, no accurate records have been provided specifying the locations or types of mines, which makes surveying and clearance operations more dangerous and exposes civilians and engineering teams to constant risk.”

“When we receive a report of an area where a mine has exploded, we treat the entire area as contaminated and dangerous, because in most cases we do not have reliable maps. And even when we do find maps, they cannot be fully relied upon, as many areas have been under the control of several successive parties, each of which laid mines without documenting them,” says demining expert Mohammed al-Farhoud.

Al-Farhoud defected from the Syrian regime’s forces at the start of the revolution; he had been carrying out his compulsory military service in Aleppo, specialising in the protection of embassies and diplomatic missions. Over the course of the revolution, he became one of the leading specialists in mine laying and clearance. He was injured whilst defusing a mine before later continuing his work with the Syrian Ministry of Defence’s mine clearance teams.

He adds: “If you have a clear map, you can move quickly and work along a specific route; but when you have no map at all, every step becomes a calculated one. You might be able to cover a hundred metres in an hour if the information is available, but without maps, you might need the same amount of time just to cover a few metres.”

Mine detection operations rely on two main methods. The first is technical surveying using metal detectors, which are capable of detecting metallic objects in general, but are not always specialised or advanced equipment designed specifically for mine detection. The second method is non-technical surveying, which relies on interviews with local residents and reports they provide regarding the presence of suspicious objects or remnants of war.

The investigation team contacted the Syrian Ministry of Defence to request a comment on the absence of maps and the number of casualties among engineering teams, but had not received a reply by the time of publication. The team also sought to verify the existence of military maps or records documenting the locations of mines laid by forces of the former Syrian regime or other parties during the years of conflict; however, officials and mine clearance workers confirmed that there is no centralised database or unified national register that can be consulted to identify areas contaminated by mines and remnants of war.

Given this reality, every mine clearance operation is akin to entering unknown territory, where workers do not know in advance what awaits them beneath the ground.

Whilst vast areas of the country remain contaminated with landmines and explosive remnants of war, experts and international organisations warn that the slow pace of clearance operations will lead to further civilian casualties among those returning to their home areas. Richard Weir, senior researcher in the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, says in a report published by the organisation on 8 April 2025: “For the first time in more than a decade, there is an opportunity to systematically address the proliferation of explosive ordnance in Syria through the clearance of landmines and explosive remnants of war. Without urgent nationwide demining efforts, more civilians returning home to reclaim their basic rights, lives, livelihoods and land will be injured or killed.”

How are landmines cleared?

In the absence of accurate maps and given the vast extent of contamination by landmines and unexploded ordnance, mine clearance teams in Syria rely on a combination of field experience and strict safety procedures to identify and deal with hazardous sites. Whilst some missions begin with a report from a local resident or the results of field surveys, every clearance operation unfolds as a series of meticulous steps aimed at preventing further casualties among both civilians and personnel.

In the town of Killi, in the north of Idlib Governorate, near the Syrian-Turkish border, the organisation “HALO Trust” has been working for more than five years with a group of experts, volunteers and local residents to clear unexploded ordnance from homes, farmlands and residential neighbourhoods to which residents are gradually returning.

The organisation relies on two main teams for its work. The first is the non-technical survey team, which is responsible for surveying and documenting sites containing explosive remnants of war and identifying their types. Its members take photographs, carry out field measurements and record data relating to the munitions discovered. Members of this team are strictly prohibited from handling explosives directly or detonating them; their role is limited to documentation and risk assessment.

The second team is the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team, which responds to confirmed reports of the presence of landmines or unexploded ordnance and is tasked with removing or destroying them in accordance with strict standard operating procedures that must be followed prior to any field intervention.

Lama Haj Qaddour (age 32) works as part of this team; she has been leading operations to clear munitions, landmines and improvised explosive devices for around five years in the area stretching from Idlib and south of Saraqib to the M4 international highway.

Last September, a team from SIRAJ accompanied the organisation “Halo Trust” on a field mission to locate unexploded ordnance reported by a local resident near the town of Saraqib. During the journey, the scars of war were evident in the area, which had previously been a frontline between opposition forces and the ousted Assad regime, reflecting the scale of the burden placed on the survey and clearance teams working there.

Al-Haj Qaddour explains that disposing of any unexploded ordnance requires meticulous procedures and specialised training, which the team members have undergone over many years, giving them practical experience in dealing with these hazards. She adds that before commencing any operation to clear mines, bombs or other munitions, the team follows a series of strict safety protocols to ensure the task is carried out with the least possible risk.

This includes preparing the work environment and establishing what is known as a ‘safety perimeter’ – an area marked out around the target to be destroyed – whilst ensuring the area is completely evacuated of residents before the operation begins.

After the detonation, the team carries out a field inspection to ensure the munition has been completely destroyed and that no dangerous fragments remain at the site.

According to Al-Haj Qaddour: “This is of the utmost importance because large fragments may only be partially destroyed,” explaining that dealing with the shrapnel resulting from the detonation is no less important than disposing of the munitions themselves, given that some small fragments “are capable of killing a person”.

Although Lama works according to a structured methodology for the disposal of explosive devices, munitions and landmines, there remains a fundamental problem facing Syria as a whole: the absence of official records identifying the locations of landmines and remnants of war.

Who is responsible for these ‘fields of death’?

The landmine crisis in Syria cannot be understood in isolation from the parties that laid them during the years of conflict. Unlike many conventional conflicts, where minefields are associated with a single regular army or known defensive lines, the pattern of mine contamination in Syria has been shaped by years of control over the same areas by multiple forces, leading to the accumulation of successive layers of mines and unexploded ordnance in the very same locations.

Testimonies from demining experts interviewed by the investigation team indicate that large swathes of the country have seen successive military factions take control, with each laying its own mines without a unified database or mechanism to ensure the documentation of their locations or the subsequent handover of maps.

Expert Mohammed Adnan al-Farhoud explains that some of the areas in which he works today reveal the extent of the chaos left behind by years of war. He says: “At some sites, we found maps of mines laid by the Syrian regime, but then ISIS took control of the area and laid new lines, after which other groups came and laid additional mines. Therefore, even when we find a map, we cannot consider it complete or rely on it absolutely.”

Syria Is Not Party to International Mine Ban Treaties

More than 160 countries around the world have acceded to the Ottawa Convention, widely regarded as the leading international legal framework for banning the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of anti-personnel mines. However, Syria remains outside the convention. Nor is it a party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use of cluster munitions and obliges signatory states to clear their remnants and assist their victims.

The impact of non-accession is not limited to symbolic or political aspects alone; it also has practical implications for the mechanisms governing mine action within the country. These two conventions impose a range of obligations on States Parties, including clearing mines from contaminated areas within specified timeframes, establishing national risk education programmes, providing medical, psychological and social support to victims, and sharing technical information and maps relating to areas contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance.

Abdul Ghani says that the current situation places a particular responsibility on the new Syrian government in this regard, adding: “Accession to the Ottawa Convention and the Convention on Cluster Munitions must be part of the process of rebuilding state institutions after the war. It is not just a matter of banning the future use of these weapons, but also of recognising the rights of victims, drawing up a national demining plan, and ensuring that this tragedy is not repeated.”

Inadequate equipment… and avoidable risks

During a field visit to the Idlib countryside on 9 April 2025, the investigation team documented the destruction of explosive remnants of war carried out by engineering units affiliated with the Syrian Ministry of Defence.

The field inspection revealed that ordinary civilian and military lorries were being used to transport munitions, whilst a number of personnel involved in the operation were wearing standard military uniforms and light footwear, without any specialist protective gear.

The investigation also documented the use of relatively rudimentary field detonation methods, involving the wiring of explosives and manual ignition, in the absence of the specialised detonation equipment used in modern mine clearance programmes.

According to data from UNMAS, only a limited proportion of the funding required for mine clearance programmes has been provided in recent years, which has had a direct impact on the ability of operating agencies to purchase advanced equipment, train staff and secure the necessary protective equipment.

A battle without funding

Despite the widespread contamination by landmines and remnants of war in Syria, organisations working in this field face an additional challenge: a lack of funding to carry out survey and clearance operations in accordance with international standards, and to scale up their response to match the extent of contamination across Syria’s various governorates.

According to UNMAS, the mine action sector in Syria is suffering from a severe funding shortfall. The 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan estimates that $67.2 million is required to fund survey and clearance activities, risk education and victim assistance, with the aim of reaching approximately 15.4 million people affected or at risk. The programme has warned that the lack of funding is limiting the ability of operating agencies to scale up their operations and respond to the extensive contamination across the country. 

Those working in the field emphasise that limited funding directly affects the ability of implementing agencies to expand survey and clearance operations and to provide equipment and training in line with international standards.

The problem is not limited to the cost of equipment alone, as mine clearance operations require long-term investment, including the establishment of national databases, the conduct of extensive field surveys, the training of specialist teams, and the provision of medical and rehabilitative care for the injured. Both non-technical and technical survey operations also require significant human resources, and it may take years to obtain an accurate picture of the actual extent of contamination.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the clearance of explosive remnants of war may take several years.

In an attempt to address part of this gap, the Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management, through the National Centre for Mine Action and War Remnants, partnered with UNMAS and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).  Together, they launched a project, funded by the Japanese government, to clear mines and unexploded ordnance and rehabilitate agricultural infrastructure in affected areas.

The project aims “to support clearance operations, focusing on affected agricultural areas near former front lines, with the aim of enhancing civilian safety, supporting agricultural recovery and improving livelihoods in the governorates of Idlib, Aleppo and Hama, however, the scale of contamination across Syria far exceeds the capacity of current projects and requires long-term investment and programmes at the national level”.

Amid growing international attention to demining efforts in Syria, Michael Ohnmacht, Chargé d’Affaires of the European Union Delegation to Syria, said during a field visit to the Damascus countryside: “We have witnessed the scale of the destruction. Yet hope still lives on through the courageous work of mine clearance and raising awareness of the dangers. The European Union will continue to work with Syrian partners to make the land safer.”

In an effort to reduce the risks faced by demining workers, the National Centre for Mine Action, under the Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management, announced in late 2025 that it would test a drone equipped with ‘magnetometer’ technology, capable of detecting mines and unexploded ordnance at depths of up to six metres below ground. The Civil Defence stated: “This technology can significantly reduce the risks faced by conventional survey teams by minimising the need to approach areas suspected of being contaminated directly.”

Despite these initiatives, data from the Syrian Civil Defence indicates that around 900 sites contaminated with mines and unexploded ordnance have been identified, whilst other estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of mines and remnants of war are scattered across the country, making the scale of the challenge far greater than the resources currently available.

When volunteers take on the task

Local communities have been forced to rely on volunteers to secure agricultural land and residential areas in preparation for their return. In the town of al-Bara, located in the Jabal al-Zawiya region, some 30 kilometres south of Idlib, residents recount how their area has been turned into a minefield after years of war. Three of the town’s leading figures explain that the former Syrian army forced most of its residents – numbering around 300 families – to flee between 2018 and 2019, before turning the town and its surroundings into a military zone and planting mines in the land adjacent to the front lines with what were then opposition-held areas.

A few days after the fall of the Assad regime, residents began returning to inspect their homes and farmland, only to find widespread destruction: damaged houses, burnt fields, and landmines planted in farmland and on nearby roads.

Ibrahim Mohammed, a local resident, says that a number of civilians were killed when landmines exploded whilst they were attempting to return to or work on their land. Following repeated incidents, a team of volunteers arrived in the town and spent around a week carrying out mine clearance operations, during which they managed to remove nearly 50 landmines, including around 20 that had been planted on his farmland.

During their search operations, the team of volunteers discovered various types of anti-personnel and anti-vehicle landmines that had been planted around the town and on its agricultural land. According to one team member, the mines discovered included anti-personnel mines of the OZM-72, PMN-1, YM-1 and POM-2S types, as well as PMN mines, and anti-vehicle mines of the YM-2 and YM-3 types. The variety and density of these mines reflect the extent of the contamination left behind by years of conflict in the region, and the ongoing risks this poses to both returning residents and those working on mine clearance.

Today, more than a year after Fahd al-Ghajr’s death, his wife and four children continue to live in a makeshift home made of corrugated iron sheets amidst olive groves. The man who spent years clearing mines from other people’s homes was unable to clear the mine that ended his own life.

• Creative coordination and visual solutions: Radwan Awad. 
• A version of this investigation was published on the Daraj website.

The post Explosive terrain… The unspoken cost of demining in Syria appeared first on SIRAJ.

To this day, his grandfather, Walid Al-Suwaidan Al-Sarhan, sits beside the very well that swallowed him. In silence, he runs his hands over the soil, struggling to comprehend how the family’s long-awaited return home after years of displacement turned into an open-ended tragedy.

Since 2017, the Al-Sarhans had lived in forced displacement after fleeing their village of Mazraat Al-Sarhan, in the Tal Al-Daman district between south of Aleppo and northern rural Idlib. Following the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, they finally returned home, hoping to rebuild the life they had lost. They began repairing their house, worn down by years of bombardment and neglect, believing that their suffering was finally coming to an end.

But on March 2, 2026, Walid accompanied his uncle, who had taken the family’s sheep to graze in the fields surrounding the village. The young boy, deeply attached to his uncle, followed him with small steps across farmland the family had not seen since their displacement years earlier.

“We adults didn’t even know there was a well in that field,” his grandfather told the investigation team. “It had been dug during the war.”

In a matter of seconds, Walid disappeared.

The child stepped onto a thin metal sheet covered with small stones. The makeshift cover gave way beneath his weight, sending him plunging into a narrow well just 40 centimetres wide and nearly 80 metres deep.

“His uncle told us the boy vanished in the blink of an eye,” his grandfather recalled. “He was simply gone.”

For hours, rescue teams tried every possible method to reach the child. Every additional metre underground increased the risk of the well collapsing and consumed precious time the rescuers simply did not have.

Gradually, what began as a rescue operation turned into an impossible mission. Despite attempts to dig a parallel shaft, large rocks lodged 20 to 30 metres below the surface blocked any access to the child.

Ibrahim Al-Hassan, head of the Search and Rescue Department of the Syrian Civil Defence (White Helmets), described the incident as one of the most complex rescue operations his teams had handled in recent months.

“A large rock fell into the well after the child and became lodged at a depth of around 30 metres,” he recalled. “It prevented us from reaching him despite using cameras and various search techniques.”

Today, Walid’s grandfather asks for only one thing: no other child suffers the same fate.

Looking toward his grandson’s grave, he says quietly: “An open well is a death trap for children.”

Deep beneath dozens of metres of earth and rock, the child still rests where he fell months ago. The well that claimed his life became his final resting place.

The grandfather says the owners of the well offered the family blood money (diya) after Walid’s death, but they refused.

“Our only request,” he said, “was that they leave a path leading to Walid’s grave, so we can visit him and mourn him whenever we miss him.”

Open Wells Left Behind by War

Walid’s death was not an isolated tragedy.

As SIRAJ investigated child falls into wells across northern Syria to assess the scale of a largely overlooked threat to children, particularly in agricultural areas, it became clear that what happened in Mazraat Al-Sarhan is being repeated in other parts of the country.

The investigation was based on extensive field reporting across the governorates of Aleppo, Idlib, and Hama. Journalists visited the sites where children had fallen into wells, interviewed victims’ families, survivors, and members of the Syrian Civil Defence, and reviewed legal documents, photographs, and rescue videos, verifying them through both field reporting and digital analysis.

The team also obtained official statistics covering well-related accidents over the past three years. It documented testimonies from 56 farmers describing how wells and underground cisterns had been looted during the war and left open and unsecured.

In Arabic, the words bi’r (well) and jubb (plural: jubab) are closely related but differ in usage. A bi’r refers generally to any excavation dug to access groundwater, while a jubb typically describes a deep, dark, often abandoned well lacking protective infrastructure. Historically, the term has also been used to describe a pit where objects—or even people were concealed.

Across northern Syria, hundreds of abandoned, damaged and unsecured wells and underground cisterns have become an escalating danger to children. Years of war, displacement, and the looting of infrastructure have left many of these sites uncovered and unprotected, while rescue and Civil Defence teams continue to operate with limited resources.

“The capabilities currently available are still insufficient to deal with this type of complex rescue operation,” said a relative of a child who fell into a well in the village of Tal Awar, south of Idlib.

“The Civil Defence does not have enough equipment for these operations. We need advanced cameras capable of reaching great depths, oxygen supply systems that can operate down to 100 metres, and more rescue ropes, the most essential tool used during these missions.”

A Split-Second Fall

On the morning of March 2, 2026, while Walid’s family in Mazraat Al-Sarhan waited for a miracle that would never come, another tragedy was unfolding more than 100 kilometres away in the eastern countryside of Hama.

In the village of Halban, the family of Dam’a Al-Baroush had barely begun to feel safe again after returning to their home following more than two and a half years of displacement from the Salamiyah area. Their long-awaited homecoming soon turned into the beginning of another nightmare.

Just one week after returning, Dam’a, who had not yet reached her second birthday, was playing near the family home while her parents were busy with work on the roof. In a single moment, they caught a final glimpse of their daughter before she disappeared into a nearby well.

On March 2, 2026, the very same day Walid fell into the abandoned shaft, Dam’a lost her life after falling into a well approximately 110 metres deep, more than 70 metres of which were filled with water, according to her father, Miqdad Al-Baroush.

Al-Baroush recalled the first moments after the accident: “Her mother and I were on the roof when we suddenly saw Dam’a fall. We couldn’t comprehend what had happened. We jumped off the roof ourselves trying to reach her, but everything happened within seconds.”

Rescue teams arrived in about twenty minutes and launched a complex recovery operation inside the deep well.

According to the girl’s father, Syrian Civil Defence teams used every available method—including ropes, steel cables and vertical rescue techniques—in an effort to reach and save Dam’a. But the well’s extreme depth and the presence of water made the mission exceptionally difficult.

After nearly six hours, rescuers managed to recover the child. She had not survived.

The tragedy devastated not only her family but the entire village. Following Dam’a’s death, residents began sealing and securing open wells throughout the area to prevent similar accidents.

Her father concluded: “Any open well is a real danger to children. No one imagines that a single moment can be enough to lose your child forever.”

From Isolated Accidents to a Pattern

Since the fall of the Assad regime, Aleppo, Idlib and Hama have witnessed a series of similar incidents that have forced Syrian Civil Defence teams to carry out highly complex rescue operations, some lasting many hours.

The danger posed by unsecured wells extends beyond children.

Just weeks after Walid’s death, Civil Defence teams responded to another incident in the village of Tal Halawa, southeast of Idlib, where 18-year-old Ahmad Hassan Al-Mutair fell into a narrow well approximately 100 metres deep.

According to the Civil Defence, the young man remained missing for more than 24 hours before his family located the site where he had fallen and alerted rescuers. When rescue teams lowered a camera into the well, they found no signs of life. The operation continued for approximately 18 consecutive hours, after which rescuers, assisted by local residents, recovered his body from a depth of around 56 metres.

These incidents suggest that falls into wells and underground cisterns are no longer isolated accidents but an increasingly recurring danger across several parts of Syria, particularly in agricultural areas where uncovered or poorly secured wells are widespread.

The investigation team obtained exclusive statistics from Syria’s Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management, which consolidated and reviewed records previously held by local institutions operating in opposition-controlled areas before the ministry’s establishment. The records cover child falls into wells over the past three years in northern Syria.

The data show that Aleppo, Idlib and Hama recorded the highest number of rescue responses related to these incidents, highlighting the scale of the problem in areas where open and unsecured wells remain widespread.

Ibrahim Al-Hassan, who supervised several of the rescue operations, said the repeated accidents are directly linked to the absence of even the most basic safety measures around open wells and deep excavations.

“Many excavation sites are left without covers, warning signs or protective barriers to keep children away,” he said. “As a result, they become permanent hazards.”

He added that preventing many of these tragedies does not necessarily require sophisticated equipment or significant financial resources. “Simple measures can save lives—placing warning signs during and after drilling, sealing well openings with metal covers or concrete slabs, or even installing barriers and large stones to prevent people from falling inside.”

Open Death Traps

As incidents continue to recur, a broader question emerges: How did hundreds of wells across northern Syria become exposed death traps? And who bears responsibility for leaving them in this condition for years?

In many agricultural areas across the countryside of Hama and Idlib, the proliferation of open wells and underground cisterns is linked to looting and the absence of basic safety measures.

Although Syria’s Water Legislation Law No. 31 of 2005 regulates the drilling and operation of wells and establishes licensing procedures, it contains no clear provisions requiring well owners—particularly on private land—to secure well openings or implement safety measures to prevent accidents and unauthorized access.

Behind the repeated tragedies, however, testimonies collected by SIRAJ reveal another factor that has significantly contributed to the problem: the systematic looting of hundreds of agricultural wells during the war, leaving them dry, abandoned and dangerously exposed.

According to testimonies and documents obtained for this investigation, following their capture of large parts of the Idlib and Hama countryside between 2019 and 2020, forces loyal to the former Syrian regime and affiliated militias dismantled and looted the equipment of hundreds of groundwater and surface wells in farming communities that depended on irrigation as their primary source of livelihood.

SIRAJ documented 56 consistent testimonies from farmers who returned to their hometowns in northern Hama after the fall of the Assad regime. They said they found their wells completely stripped after years of forced displacement.

During that period, units of the Fourth Division, commanded by Maher al-Assad, alongside the National Defence Forces (NDF), locally led by Simon Al-Wakil and Nail Al-Abdullah, maintained a long-term military presence across large parts of northern and western Hama after residents had been forcibly displaced.

In the Qalaat al-Madiq district alone, the journalists documented the looting of 638 groundwater and surface wells.

Groundwater wells are deep boreholes drilled to access underground aquifers, while surface wells are shallower excavations used to collect near-surface water to supply irrigation. According to this investigation, pumps, electrical cables, generators and metal infrastructure were removed from these wells before they were abandoned, often left open or heavily damaged in the middle of agricultural fields.

A similar pattern emerged in the town of Al-Habit in southern Idlib.

According to the head of the town’s Agricultural Association, Al-Habit contains approximately 350 groundwater wells. After returning home following years of displacement, residents found that most of the wells had either dried up, been destroyed or left open after their equipment had been looted. By then, nearly 95 percent of the town had been destroyed.

The investigation also documented the presence of former Iranian-backed militia positions in the surrounding area, including sites near the town of Ma’arrat Hurmah, where the team obtained photographs showing military compounds displaying militia flags and religious materials.

From Lifeline to Death Trap

Across the countryside of Idlib and Hama, thousands of farmers were forced to abandon their land and irrigation wells during successive waves of displacement. Many of those wells have since become abandoned, looted pits posing a danger to nearby communities.

Abdulsalam Al-Ahmad, from the Mhardeh area in northern Hama, shared one such story.

In 2006, his family drilled a 289-metre-deep agricultural well that supplied irrigation for their pistachio orchards. When regime forces advanced into the area in 2019, the family was forced to flee, leaving behind both the well and its equipment.

After the Assad regime’s fall, Al-Ahmad returned to discover that the well had been extensively looted.

“Almost nothing was left,” he said. “Even the floor tiles had been stolen.”

He purchased a new pump in an attempt to restore the well, only to discover that it had been deliberately filled with rocks, scrap metal and other debris to a depth of nearly 100 metres, making rehabilitation technically difficult and prohibitively expensive.

Faced with those conditions, Al-Ahmad abandoned the old well and drilled a new one to irrigate his land. The damaged well, however, remains open, like dozens, if not hundreds, of others that have fallen out of use after being looted or destroyed.

Testimonies from local residents, together with data collected duringthe investigation, indicate that many of the wells posing a threat to children and rural communities today were once productive agricultural wells that sustained local livelihoods before the war. Over time, however, many became deep, abandoned shafts after their owners lost the ability to restore or operate them. In the absence of any systematic efforts to seal or secure them, these wells have become permanent hazards across northern Syria’s agricultural landscape.

Seconds Between Life and Death

Not every child who fell into a well met the same fate.

In some cases, rescue teams managed to pull children from the depths before it was too late.

In the village of Tal Awar, south of Idlib, the family of Askar Al-Diab, aged seven, had been drilling a new groundwater well in June 2024, hoping to secure drinking water and irrigate their farmland.

Instead, the well they had dug in search of life nearly became a deadly trap for their own child.

On the evening of June 8, 2024, while the family was gathered outside their home, they suddenly heard Askar scream before disappearing into the open shaft.

The boy’s uncle told SIRAJ that the first moments were marked by shock before frantic calls for help began, amid fears that the child had already plunged to the bottom.

According to both the family and the Syrian Civil Defence, timing proved decisive.

The nearest Civil Defence station was only minutes away, allowing search-and-rescue teams to reach the scene almost immediately.

Rescuers later discovered that Askar had not fallen all the way to the bottom. Instead, he had become trapped approximately five metres below the surface, clinging to the steel cables and ropes connected to the water pump inside the well—an extraordinary stroke of luck that kept him alive.

Reaching him, however, was far from straightforward.

Rescue teams employed both vertical and horizontal excavation techniques alongside specialized rope-rescue equipment during a complex operation that lasted nearly four hours, while fearing that unstable soil could collapse or the child could slip deeper into the shaft.

In many such incidents, the difference between life and death amounts to only a few metres—or just a few minutes separating the arrival of rescue teams from a fatal delay.

Ultimately, rescuers succeeded in pulling Askar out alive before transferring him to Al-Rahma Hospital in the city of Darkoush, where the investigation team verified his admission to the emergency department and subsequent resuscitation and medical treatment.

Footage from the rescue operation of seven-year-old Askar Al-Diab after he fell into an artesian well in Tal Awar village, western Idlib, on June 8, 2024. Source: Syrian Civil Defence

Different Endings to the Same Story

In March 2026, Syrian Civil Defence teams operating as part of the Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management carried out another rescue operation after a young girl fell into a well in northern Aleppo.

Using specialized cameras and rope systems to inspect the shaft and attempt access, rescuers eventually recovered the child—but she had already died before reaching the surface.

Only days later, a nearly identical incident unfolded in northern Aleppo—but with a different ending.

In the town of Shamarikh, a three-year-old boy fell into a well 18 metres deep. Civil Defence teams launched a delicate rescue operation using rope systems and vertical rescue equipment. Assisted by a local volunteer who descended into the well, rescuers secured the child and brought him to the surface before administering first aid and transferring him to a hospital in Azaz.

Rescue of a three-year-old child after falling into an 18-metre-deep well in Shamarikh, northern Aleppo. Source: Syrian Civil Defence

These recurring incidents highlight the extraordinary challenges faced by rescue teams operating inside narrow, deep wells, where, according to multiple rescuers interviewed by SIRAJ, every passing minute can determine whether a victim survives.

The depth of the well, its narrow diameter, unstable soil conditions, the presence of water, rocks or internal collapses all combine to make rescue operations exceptionally complex, particularly given the limited technical equipment and resources currently available.

Ibrahim Al-Hassan, head of the Search and Rescue Department at the Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management’s Civil Defence, says the greatest obstacle often begins with the wells themselves.

“The biggest challenge we face is the narrow diameter of many wells,” he explained. “Their openings are often too small for a rescuer to enter and reach the victim, forcing us to rely on rope rescue systems and other specialized techniques.”

Poor ventilation presents another major danger.

“A lack of oxygen inside the well can cause victims to suffocate,” Al-Hassan said. “The extreme depth is another critical factor. Once a child falls more than fifty metres, rescue becomes extraordinarily difficult.”

While some incidents end with dramatic rescues after desperate races against time, others conclude far more tragically: bodies trapped deep underground, families returning home after years of displacement only to lose their children within moments, and entire villages living with the daily fear that a deadly shaft may lie only a few steps from their homes.

Al-Hassan urged residents of rural communities to focus on prevention above all else.

“The most important recommendation is to keep children away from areas where wells are being drilled, remain open or have been abandoned, and to ensure these wells are properly sealed using whatever simple means are available.”

Interview with Ibrahim Al-Hassan, Head of the Search and Rescue Department, Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management, April 2026 – SIRAJ

The testimonies collected from families, rescuers and official data obtained by SIRAJ indicate that these incidents are no longer isolated accidents. Rather, they are the cumulative consequence of years of war, weak oversight, and the abandonment of hundreds of wells and underground cisterns after their equipment was looted during the years when the former Syrian regime and its affiliated militias controlled large areas of northern Syria.

Despite the efforts of Civil Defence teams working with limited resources and technical capacity, rescuers insist that many of these deaths could have been prevented through simple precautions: a secure metal cover, a concrete slab, or even a large stone placed over the opening of an abandoned well.

Geologist and researcher Thabet Al-Kassha agrees that preventing falls does not require sophisticated solutions, but rather the consistent application of basic safety measures once wells are completed or taken out of service.

He says the most important steps include securing every well opening with a firmly fixed metal cover, whether the well is active or abandoned, and installing a metal casing extending at least 50 centimetres above ground level, reducing the risk of accidental falls.

Al-Kassha also noted that the diameter of a well plays a crucial role in rescue operations. Wells wider than 35 centimetres provide rescuers with greater room to operate, while narrower shafts significantly hinder access and increase the risk to victims, particularly young children.

As official records continue to document new incidents, children across northern Syria continue to play near uncovered wells—unaware that a single step may be enough to put their lives at risk.

Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awwad

The post Syria’s Abandoned Wells Turn into Death Traps for Children appeared first on SIRAJ.

However, the document signed by Tlass—widely regarded as one of President Hafez al-Assad’s closest and most trusted ministers—and endorsed by a Field Court ruling, was in fact an execution order. It authorized the public hanging of two civilians in Damascus’ Marjeh Square, Syria’s capital, for ordinary criminal offenses that could have been prosecuted in virtually any country under civilian law.

More than four decades later, following the collapse of the Assad dynasty, reporters from the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ) and the newspaper Zaman al-Wasl obtained a digital copy of the document. It sheds new light on the brutality of Syria’s notorious Military Field Courts, which were established after the Baath Arab Socialist Party came to power and remained one of the regime’s most feared instruments for most of the Assads era.

The two civilians targeted by the execution order were convicted of stealing and selling subsidized food supplies. Yet rather than being tried before a civilian criminal court, they were sentenced to death by a Military Field Court. 

The tribunal had originally been created during the state of war with Israel following the Baath Party’s seizure of power in the March 1963 coup. Later, however, Hafez al-Assad expanded its jurisdiction, allowing it to prosecute civilians accused of ordinary criminal offenses.

In practice, legal experts say, these were courts in name only. They did not conduct genuine trials, offered no right to defense, and provided none of the guarantees associated with a fair judicial process. Instead, they became an effective instrument for eliminating Syrians deemed disloyal to Assad’s rule. They operated as a parallel judicial system, bypassing ordinary courts to dispose of political opponents through expedited proceedings cloaked in legal legitimacy, while instilling fear throughout Syrian society, according to Nawras Al-Abdullah, a legal researcher at the Syrian Dialogue Center.

“The Field Court was originally created to deal with serious wartime crimes and enforce strict military discipline,” Al-Abdullah said. “But from the outset, it reflected the Baath regime’s broader mindset, which prioritized the elimination of political opponents above all else.”

The use of these courts did not end with Hafez al-Assad. They continued to operate under Bashar al-Assad, particularly during the Syrian uprising. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), the Assad regime executed 7,872 people, including 114 children and 26 women, out of at least 14,843 death sentences issued by Military Field Courts between March 2011 and August 2023.

Field Courts formed part of Syria’s system of exceptional courts. Their proceedings were secretive and often lasted only minutes. They ignored even the procedural safeguards of military courts, denied defendants the right to legal representation, and issued unappealable judgments. Verdicts were based not on evidence presented in court, but primarily on security reports and confessions allegedly extracted under torture.

Baathist Ideology and Brutal Sentences

Although the offense attributed to the two defendants amounted to an ordinary criminal violation—one that would normally fall under consumer protection laws or the criminal code—the regime referred their case to a Military Field Court, which sentenced them to death by hanging.

The execution order approved by Mustafa Tlass begins with the handwritten instruction “Execute.” Classified “Top Secret,” it was issued by the Army General Command, specifically the Military Administration Branch – Military Discipline Division, and references Field Court Decision No. 59, dated June 19, 1983.

The document is filled with terminology characteristic of Baathist ideology under Hafez al-Assad. It accuses the two civilians of “committing criminal acts contrary to the implementation of the state’s socialist system” and of “stealing and distributing food supplies belonging to the Arab people in Syria.”

It also sets out, in meticulous detail, how the executions were to be carried out. The commander of the Southern Military Region was assigned responsibility for overseeing the executions and all logistical arrangements, while also serving as chairman of the supervisory committee. The executions were scheduled to take place in Marjeh Square, central Damascus, at 5:00 a.m. on July 18, 1983.

To ensure the executions proceeded as ordered, the document instructed officials to erect two gallows in Marjeh Square by 4:00 a.m. and to assign a military police unit to carry out the hangings under the supervision of the head of the Military Police Branch.

A non-commissioned officer was designated to blindfold the two prisoners immediately before the executions, while military police personnel responsible for guarding them were to be selected by the head of the Military Police Branch.

According to the order, responsibility for transporting the condemned men to and from the execution site also rested with the Military Police Branch.

The executions were to be witnessed by the Military Field Court’s prosecutor, one of the judges who issued the sentence, and the court clerk. Upon arrival at the execution site, the supervising officer was instructed to read the death sentence aloud before the prisoners were blindfolded and the executions carried out.

Afterward, the supervisory committee was required to prepare an official execution report, signed by all committee members. The Military Public Prosecutor’s Office would retain one copy, while another would be attached to the case file.

The document further assigns the Syrian Army Medical Services Administration the responsibility for burying the bodies. The same institution would later be implicated in the burial of thousands of detainees in mass graves during the Syrian conflict. Meanwhile, the Military Judiciary Administration was tasked with arranging the required religious rites before and after the executions.

Following the executions, the supervising officer was instructed to notify the General Command of the Army and Armed Forces immediately by telegram, followed within six hours by a written report accompanied by the signed execution record for inclusion in the official case file.

The order also stipulated that the executions be carried out under strict secrecy, with local authorities responsible for enforcing the directive.

At the end of the document appears the signature of an official identified as Jamil, along with distribution copies sent to the Field Court at the Air Force Command, the Ministries of Health and Interior, the Military Police Branch for coordination with the Interior Ministry, and the regional military commander.

The document concludes with the signature of Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass and the official seal of the General Command of the Army and Armed Forces – Organization and Administration Branch.

A Seven-Minute Trial

Samir Turko is among the few Syrian civilians known to have survived after being brought before a Field Court shortly after Hafez al-Assad expanded its jurisdiction.

On November 26, 1981, Turko, who is still alive today, was arrested by the State Security Directorate in Damascus because his maternal uncle was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan.

He was initially held at the Internal Security Branch before being transferred to the State Security Branch for interrogation. Over the next three years, he was moved through multiple security branches in Damascus and the southern city of Daraa. After years of detention and interrogation, he was finally brought before a Field Court.

What followed, he told SIRAJ, bore little resemblance to a judicial proceeding.

“There were 22 of us chained together,” Turko recalled. “The hearing was purely symbolic. It lasted no more than seven minutes before Judge Suleiman al-Khatib.”

According to Turko, the judge opened by asking only one question: “Are you Samir Turko?”

When Turko answered yes, the judge immediately launched into accusations.

“He called me a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and an American agent,” Turko said. “I replied, ‘I am a patriot. I love my country.'”

The response appeared to anger Judge al-Khatib, who signaled to security officers inside the courtroom. They immediately beat Turko so severely that his face began bleeding.

The judge then questioned him about his uncle, threatening to arrest every member of his family before concluding with the words:

“I swear I’ll have you executed.”

Turko said the courtroom itself looked nothing like a court of law. There was no defense lawyer, no public hearing, no examination of evidence, and virtually no questioning. Defendants were never informed of the verdicts issued against them. Instead, prisoners tried to decipher their fate from the judges’ gestures.

According to Turko, Judge al-Khatib would snap his pen after interrogating a defendant—a signal that he had decided on a death sentence. Another judge communicated his decision through hand gestures: pointing with his left hand meant execution; pointing with his right meant the prisoner had escaped execution, though often only to receive a life sentence.

“What remains etched in my memory is that they wanted to execute as many people as possible,” Turko said. “They wanted to eliminate anyone they considered an opponent. They forced people not only to confess to whatever they wanted, but also to implicate family members, friends, and anyone they knew.”

Turko was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment. He was transferred first to the notorious Tadmur (Palmyra) Military Prison and later to Saydnaya Military Prison, where he remained until his release in 2010.

During his years in detention, Turko endured repeated torture. The worst came after his arrival at Tadmur, where guards repeatedly beat the soles of his feet until they became severely infected.

“My foot became gangrenous and worms emerged from the wound,” he said.

According to Turko, the prison guards’ solution was to allow him to cauterize the wound with fire. More than four decades later, he continues to suffer permanent damage, including the loss of much of the tissue on the sole of his foot.

Legal researcher Nawras Al-Abdullah said the logic of Syria’s Field Courts rested on speed, repression, and the swift elimination of perceived threats to the Assad regime.

“Their purpose was to dispose of cases within minutes,” he said. “This pattern has been consistently documented by survivors from different periods, as well as by Syrian and international human rights organizations.”

Al-Abdullah added that Hafez al-Assad deliberately expanded the courts’ jurisdiction as the regime confronted growing opposition in the late 1970s.

“As the regime perceived an increasing threat from Islamists and other political groups, Legislative Decree No. 32 of 1980 extended the jurisdiction of the Field Courts to cover internal disturbances,” he said. “In practice, this transformed them into a tool for suppressing both civilians and members of the military.”

The Evolution of the Regime’s Most Feared Court

Syria’s Military Field Court was established on August 17, 1968, under Legislative Decree No. 109/3, based on Recommendation No. 2 issued by the Provisional Regional Command of the Arab Socialist Baath Party on February 25, 1966, which at the time held legislative authority.

The court remained in operation for more than five decades until September 3, 2023, when Bashar al-Assad issued a legislative decree formally abolishing it.

When it was first created, the court’s jurisdiction was limited to offenses within the authority of military courts, as referred to by the Minister of Defense. Its jurisdiction applied retroactively to the aftermath of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, reflecting its original purpose: to prosecute military personnel deemed responsible for wartime losses or offenses committed during military operations or armed confrontation with the enemy.

Its mandate, however, steadily expanded.

In February 1970, as Hafez al-Assad was rising to power, Legislative Decree No. 61/6 broadened the court’s jurisdiction to include crimes committed “in the presence of the enemy” whenever referred by the Minister of Defense, in addition to its existing authority over offenses committed during wartime or military operations.

A decade later, on July 1, 1980, Hafez al-Assad issued Legislative Decree No. 32/7, dramatically expanding the court’s powers to cover crimes committed “during internal disturbances.” The amendment enabled the Field Court to prosecute members of the Muslim Brotherhood during the violent confrontation between the regime and Islamist groups in the early 1980s, culminating in the 1982 Hama massacre. Decades later, the same legal framework was used to prosecute participants in the Syrian uprising that began in March 2011.

The amendment introduced broadly worded provisions that effectively opened the door for the prosecution of civilians. From that point onward, the Field Court could hear virtually any case already falling within the jurisdiction of military courts if the alleged offense occurred during wartime, military operations, or internal unrest, provided the Minister of Defense chose to refer the case.

According to Fawwaz al-Khouja, a lawyer and member of the Damascus Bar Association, these legislative changes were not intended solely to increase penalties or expand the use of the death sentence. They also created opportunities for corruption and political patronage.

Al-Khouja recalled one case in which a defendant charged with murder and rape before a criminal court had relatives who managed to reach Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass. Tlass allegedly ordered the case transferred to the Military Field Court, where the defendant received a sentence equivalent only to the time already served in detention.

According to Al-Khouja, many criminal cases were transferred to the Field Court through political influence or bribery. In some instances, serious offenders sought referral to obtain lighter sentences; in others, relatively minor offenses were transferred so that defendants could receive significantly harsher punishments.

“The defining characteristic of the Field Court,” Al-Khouja said, “was that it was not bound by the penalties prescribed in law. It could sentence someone to death for an offense punishable by only one year in prison, or impose only a short prison term for a crime that ordinarily carried the death penalty.”

The Mystery of the Number 22

To this day, no one knows why the number 22 became synonymous with the chains used to transport detainees to Field Courts.

For decades, beginning under Hafez al-Assad and continuing throughout the rule of his son Bashar, Syria’s security services insisted on shackling 22 prisoners together in a single chain before taking them to the Military Field Court.

Former detainee Fouad Naal, now head of the Association of Freed Saydnaya Prisoners, recalls that his own transfer was delayed simply because his group consisted of only 21 prisoners. Security officials postponed their appearance before the court until another detainee arrived, bringing the total to the required twenty-two.

Naal was arrested on April 13, 2004, in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He was transferred between Branch 227 (the Regional Security Branch), Saydnaya Military Prison, and later Adra Prison, where he remained until the collapse of the Assad regime.

According to Naal, after the invasion of Iraq, Syria’s Grand Mufti Ahmad Kaftaro, acting under the direction of the Assad regime, issued a religious ruling urging Syrians to wage jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq. Buses carrying volunteers began departing for Iraq under the supervision of Syrian intelligence.

Naal says he soon noticed that many of those buses were being targeted near the Iraqi border and that everyone aboard was killed.

He believes the operations were coordinated by Syrian intelligence.

“It was effectively a liquidation operation targeting anyone who embraced the idea of jihad,” Naal said.

In response, Naal publicly issued a religious opinion opposing Kaftaro’s fatwa. He began visiting the Damascus International Fairgrounds, where buses carrying prospective fighters assembled, and he urged young men not to travel through channels organized by Syrian intelligence.

“I told them: if you want to fight, don’t go through the Syrian regime. It’s a plan to eliminate you,” he recalled. “We tried every possible way to persuade them to turn back, and we succeeded in convincing some of them.”

The campaign soon made him a target.

After going into hiding inside Syria, Naal was arrested in 2004 together with his wife and their four-month-old daughter at the Harasta bus station during a joint operation involving four security agencies: the Regional Security Branch, Palestine Branch, the Raids Branch, and Military Intelligence.

He remained imprisoned until December 8, 2024, when the Assad regime fell.

According to Naal, immediately after their arrest, security officers separated his infant daughter from her mother.

To secure his daughter’s release, Saeed Samour—who would later become Syria’s Interior Minister—allegedly demanded that Naal confess to every accusation brought against him.

While being interrogated at the Palestine Branch, Naal was informed that he faced 33 criminal charges.

None, he says, related to the religious opinion he had issued or to incitement against the state.

“I was interrogated by Saeed Samour, who headed the Regional Security Branch at the time, by Assef Shawkat, Assad’s brother-in-law, and by Manhal Al-Suwaid. During one interrogation session, Hassan Khlouf, head of the Palestine Branch, was also present.”

Instead, investigators accused him of plotting to assassinate senior officials including Bashar al-Assad himself and planning to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Damascus.

Naal says Assef Shawkat later offered to release his wife if he agreed to confess to an additional accusation.

A list containing several names was placed before him, and he was instructed to admit that he had planned to assassinate every person on it, including Shawkat himself.

Fearing for his infant daughter, Naal says he agreed.

In 2005, he was brought before the Military Field Court, where Major General Mohammad Kanj sentenced him to what prisoners referred to as “Field Court life imprisonment,” which means incarceration until death.

Later, Syria’s State Security Court imposed two additional life sentences and two death sentences.

Prisoners were transported to the court under brutal conditions. Chained together, they were loaded into what Naal described as a refrigerated meat truck.

When they arrived, the rear doors were opened and guards violently pulled them from the vehicle, causing prisoners to fall on top of one another before being dragged into the courtroom, still bearing visible signs of torture inflicted during interrogation.

Within roughly 30 minutes, at the end of the court’s Sunday session, every defendant had been sentenced.

Naal says no evidence was presented, no witnesses testified, and no meaningful charges were examined.

Judge Mohammad Kanj sat alongside a military officer holding the rank of major general and another man wearing a leather jacket and dark sunglasses. Naal later learned that the latter was an officer from the National Security Bureau.

The judge asked only two questions:

“What is your name?”

“Do you confirm the confession you gave?”

After Naal answered yes, the judge motioned with his right hand, signaling that he should leave.

By then, Naal had learned the meaning of the judges’ gestures.

A motion with the left hand meant immediate execution by firing squad.

A simple gesture was enough to determine whether a prisoner would live or die.

“The Field Courts executed thousands of people in the name of justice,” Naal said. “In reality, they functioned as instruments of systematic sectarian and political extermination.”

Documents reviewed by SIRAJ show that thousands of detainees were referred to the Military Field Courts during 1982 and 1983. Most were accused either of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood or in the so-called ‘Suspicious Right-Wing Organization’—a movement led by former Syrian military officers opposing Hafez al-Assad’s purge of senior commanders and reportedly backed by Iraq. Many of those referred came from Suwayda Province. Another significant category consisted of individuals accused of belonging to the Lebanese Kataeb Party.

The documents do not indicate what ultimately happened to these detainees. However, available evidence suggests that many were executed over subsequent years. The exact number of people put to death by Military Field Courts under either Hafez or Bashar al-Assad remains unknown.

Against that backdrop, Mustafa Tlass’s signature on execution orders for civilians appears less an exception than a routine element of the machinery of death.

Tlass and Hafez al-Assad shared one of the closest political relationships within Syria’s ruling establishment. The two met while studying at the Military Academy in Homs during the 1950s, later working together inside the Baath Party. Tlass played a significant role in Assad’s rise to power and was rewarded with the post of Minister of Defense in 1972, a position he retained until 2004, remaining in office for four years after Bashar al-Assad inherited the presidency.

In a 2005 interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel, Tlass admitted that he could no longer remember how many death warrants he had personally signed.

He said that during parts of the 1980s, as many as 150 public hangings were carried out each week in Damascus alone.

Smiling, he concluded: “We used weapons to seize power, and we wanted to keep it. Anyone who wants power will have to take it from us by force.”

A version of this investigation was also published by Daraj Media

Creative Production and Visual Design: Radwan Awad

The post Exclusive: Assad’s Military Field Courts Executed Two Civilians Over Alleged “Opposition to Socialism” appeared first on SIRAJ.

Alongside the poverty that left public hospitals as the mother’s only option for treatment, another obstacle emerged: the need for official documents that the child does not possess, through no fault of her own, but because she and her younger brother were born from Najwa’s marriage to a man whose true identity was never known before he later disappeared.

Najwa (a pseudonym) says, “The girl’s condition was critical. The mass was pressing on one of her eyes, and she urgently needed surgery. But the hospitals refused to admit her. After several disputes and arguments with the [hospital] administration, it admitted her exceptionally, as an act of help, under the name of one of her relatives.”

Najwa’s daughter after undergoing surgery to remove a tumor from her face – SIRAJ

After several days of delay due to overcrowding at the hospital, the operation was finally performed. The child is now recovering, though the results of the surgery revealed that she requires chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

What worries Najwa most is that this temporary solution will not always work. She says she desperately needs a permanent legal resolution for her children’s situation.

In 2014, Najwa, then a 16-year-old girl living in extreme poverty with her mother in the town of Al-Bab in the Aleppo countryside, married a Libyan man affiliated with ISIS.

The marriage was conducted through a “Sheikh’s contract,” an informal religious marriage not officially registered in court, as was common in areas under the group’s control at the time.

In 2018, her husband decided to travel to Turkey. Since then, she has lost all contact with him.

Najwa became the family’s sole provider, struggling not only with poverty but also fighting to obtain civil registration documents for her two children that would officially recognize their existence as human beings and secure for them the most basic rights, primarily education and healthcare, under Syrian law.

Bigger Than ISIS

The issue of Syrian women marrying foreigners during the years of the Syrian revolution is often portrayed as being mainly linked to women who married ISIS fighters during the group’s control over eastern Syria between 2014 and 2017. However, the problem and its consequences, especially the price paid today by Syrian wives and their children, extend beyond marriages to ISIS fighters alone, as illustrated by the story of Um Saad.

Um Saad, who is in her forties now and living in Idlib, married a man from Uzbekistan during the uprising. But in 2019, just one year after their marriage, he disappeared.

All she knows about him is that he worked as a “Sharia official” within an armed faction in the area. Given the sensitivity of his situation, the marriage took place through a religious ceremony conducted by the faction’s sheikh.

At the time, the husband concealed his true identity for fear of “spies,” a move that later prevented Um Saad from legally registering the marriage in court.

This reality, she says, deprived her and her son, whose father disappeared when he was only two months old, from receiving aid or assistance, especially programs designated for widows and divorced women. Her marriage and her child remain unrecognized by Syrian authorities because the marriage was never officially documented in a recognized court. Most critically, her son possesses no civil registration records whatsoever.

The ideological factor, namely extremism or radicalization, does not appear to have been the primary driver behind Syrian women marrying foreign fighters.

Civil activist Fayhaa Al-Shawash from the Idlib countryside explains:
“The phenomenon of Syrian women marrying foreign fighters spread because of poverty, the loss of breadwinners, and the growing number of widows in war-affected areas. There was also fear that unmarried daughters over the age of eighteen would be labeled as ‘spinsters,’ so many families viewed foreign fighters as an opportunity to provide someone who could take care of them.”

Many women, according to several interviews conducted in rural Idlib for this investigation, were encouraged to marry foreigners because of their modest demands and because they often expressed willingness to sponsor orphans and take care of the children of divorced women.

These same circumstances pushed Um Omar to marry a man from the Republic of Dagestan.

She had previously divorced a Syrian husband, forcing her to return to her family home, where she lived in cramped conditions alongside her displaced brothers’ families during the war.

She explains that she suffered from severe hardship and helplessness, which is why she accepted marriage to the Dagestani man after being introduced to him through a relative who recommended her to a man seeking to marry a widow or divorced woman and help raise her children.

Um Omar describes the single year she lived with her Dagestani husband as “very good.” She says he treated her three children kindly and never hesitated to bring joy into their lives. Later, she became pregnant.

But during that period, her husband traveled to Turkey and was unable to return to Syria.

“My husband hopes the nationality issue will eventually be resolved so our son can obtain Syrian citizenship and a passport, allowing us to travel to him,” she says.

“He constantly asks me: Why am I not Syrian? Why am I Dagestani? He also suffers from bullying because of his father’s nationality.”

Because she possesses her husband’s identity documents and knows his real name and lineage, Um Omar was eventually able to register her marriage through a court affiliated with the Salvation Government, which administered Idlib before the fall of the former Syrian regime in December 2024.

Still, the process took her two full years.

She ultimately obtained a family statement renewed every three months, confirming her son’s lineage. That document allowed her to enroll her son in school, but it remains insufficient for obtaining a national ID card or passport.

Beyond these wartime cases, there are also children of Syrian women who have remained stateless since before the revolution itself.

Feminist activist Sawsan Zakzak, a board member of the Syrian Women’s League, explains that this issue often stems from marriages between Syrian women and Gulf nationals during tourism seasons.

Such marriages were frequently conducted through unofficial “sheikh contracts,” meaning they were never formally registered either in the husband’s country or at his country’s embassy in Syria, leaving children born from those unions without nationality.

In other cases, the marriage may have been officially recognized in Syria but not accepted in the husband’s country.

Saudi Arabia, for example, requires prior government approval for Saudi men to marry non-Saudi women.

Zakzak adds: “Political tensions between the Syrian state and other countries also contributed to this phenomenon, as was the case with Iraq during certain periods.”

“During Ba’ath Party rule in Baghdad, large numbers of Iraqi opposition figures sought refuge in Syria and married Syrian women, but they could not officially register those marriages in the civil records of the husband’s country, especially given the absence of embassies between the two states.”

Stateless: No Education, No Work

Facing the hardships of daily life, Um Saad had hoped she might at least be able to grant her son Syrian nationality so he could live a normal life like other children.

“I am the sole person responsible for my son because his father is absent,” she says. “He was born here, raised here, and lived off the goodness of this country. He knows nothing about foreign fighters. He only knows that he is Syrian. His father is missing, and in any case, he would never be able to grant him citizenship because he is classified as a terrorist in his own country.”

But Um Saad soon discovered that granting her child Syrian nationality was not an option either.

Syrian law does not grant mothers the right to pass citizenship to their children. This right is reserved exclusively for fathers, which causes a problem for hundreds of Syrian women, not only those who married “foreign fighters” during the revolution, but also women married to non-Syrians before and after the conflict.

Syrian nationality is governed by Legislative Decree No. 276 of 1969.

Article 3(a) of the law limits automatic acquisition of Syrian nationality by birth to anyone “born inside or outside the country to a Syrian Arab father.”

Meanwhile, Article 3(b) states that a person “born in the country to a Syrian Arab mother whose legal paternity has not been established” may obtain Syrian nationality. The same applies, under Article 3(c), to children born to unknown parents.

According to lawyer Rahada Abdoush, this discriminatory provision in Syrian law against women is unjustified because it contradicts constitutional principles that have consistently affirmed that “citizens are equal before the law in rights and duties,” while also emphasizing that “the family is the fundamental unit of society and is protected by the state.”

These principles, she adds, were reiterated in the Constitutional Declaration issued on March 13, 2025, whose Article 10 states: “Citizens are equal before the law in rights and duties, without discrimination based on race, religion, gender, or lineage.”

Abdoush explains that: “The former regime used to justify denying women this right by citing the issue of non-naturalized Kurds, and Palestinian refugees and the need to preserve their right of return, in addition to reasons related to national security.”

However, according to the lawyer, who specializes in women’s and children’s rights, these arguments are no longer valid.

“The situation changed after the issuance of the decree granting Kurds the right to obtain Syrian nationality. The concept of national security itself has also changed, and most Palestinians around the world now hold other nationalities.”

The suffering of stateless children becomes especially visible once they reach school age.

Najwa says schools agreed this year to enroll her two children “reluctantly,” on the condition that she provide official civil registration documents next year if they are to continue their education.

This means their educational future remains uncertain if she fails to obtain those documents.

The difficulties facing children of Syrian mothers and non-Syrian fathers living in Syria continue even after they complete their education, notes activist Sawsan Zakzak.

They are subject to the same restrictive labor regulations applied to foreigners.

Most of those children are also barred from practicing professions regulated by Syria’s professional syndicates law, since careers such as law or medicine require membership in their respective syndicates.

Membership itself is governed by the principle of “reciprocal treatment” between states. Even those who meet that requirement are denied access to the syndicates’ social benefits because they are considered non-Syrians.

Zakzak adds: “They are not allowed to own property except under the Law on Arab and Foreign Ownership, which pushes families to register property under the Syrian mother’s name. If the mother dies, the children must dispose, within one year, of any inherited shares exceeding what is permitted under the foreign ownership law.”

In addition to these restrictions, residency remains another major problem.

Researcher Rasha Al-Tabashi, founder of the campaign “My Nationality Is My Right,” explains that children of Syrian mothers do not receive permanent residency. Instead, they are treated under Law No. 2 of 2014 regulating the entry and residency of Arabs and foreigners in Syria.

The law defines five categories of residency permits: special, ordinary, temporary, tourist, and work residency.

Under Article 19(2), children of Syrian mothers are granted only an “ordinary residency” permit valid for three years.

Beyond depriving them of any sense of long-term stability, Al-Tabashi argues that these residency permits also impose financial burdens.

Each ordinary residency permit costs 150,000 (old) Syrian pounds (roughly 12 US dollars), with no exemptions or exceptions for vulnerable groups such as stateless children or the sons and daughters of Syrian women.

Transcending Borders and Regimes

In 2018, Syrian activists launched the campaign “Who Is Your Husband?” in Idlib province, western Aleppo countryside, and northern Hama countryside. The campaign aimed to shed light on the phenomenon of Syrian women marrying foreign fighters and to raise awareness among women about the risks such marriages posed to them and their children.

The campaign included billboards, leaflets, wall writings, graffiti art, discussion sessions, and both individual and group meetings at women’s and children’s support centers, alongside a parallel social media campaign.

Although some young women who were more aware of the risks married men whose origins and nationalities were known, many underage girls and women living in displacement camps were married off without understanding the consequences or with families deliberately overlooking those dangers because of the harsh conditions they faced, according to Idlib-based activist Fayhaa Al-Shawash.

There are no precise statistics regarding the number of children born to Syrian mothers who remain stateless.

However, a 2023 needs assessment of women in areas outside Assad regime control conducted by “Al-Warsha” in partnership with the “My Nationality Is My Right” campaign documented around 600 cases involving more than 1,200 children, according to campaign founder Rasha Al-Tabashi.

Most of those children lack official documents.

The assessment also revealed cases in which some children within the same family were officially registered while others were not, largely because of multiple marriages.

Furthermore, Al-Tabashi explains that the campaign’s work revealed that the nationality issue is not limited to children born to wives of foreign fighters.

Displaced Syrian women who married in Jordan or Lebanon through unofficial “sheikh contracts” also face similar legal complications.

Nor has the fall of Assad and the political transition in Syria so far eased the problem. If anything, it may have made things worse.

Before the collapse of the Assad regime, Najwa, for example, had not fully grasped the consequences of having an unregistered marriage to a man of unknown identity.

Today, everything has changed from trying to enroll her children in school to securing her daughter’s right to medical treatment.

While Um Omar and Um Saad lost contact with their husbands, there are likely hundreds of women who still live with their “foreign fighter” spouses without knowing what future awaits them.

Many of those husbands, once fighters within opposition factions, are now permanently injured from war wounds.

At the same time, these women do not know what future awaits their children, since many fathers are unable to pass on their nationality because they are classified as terrorists in their home countries, as in the case of Um Maryam, a 27-year-old woman.

Um Maryam, who lives in Idlib city and is originally from the province’s countryside, was previously married to a Syrian man.

Five years ago, she married a man from Uzbekistan and has since given birth to a daughter. She is currently pregnant with another child.

Her husband, she says, suffered three injuries during separate battles.

Although he remains formally a fighter, his mobility is severely limited, and he needs treatment that is difficult to secure due to the family’s limited income.

He is also unable to find other work because he lacks Syrian nationality, and employers refuse to hire him.

According to her husband, he once owned homes in his country but abandoned everything to come and help Syrians.

In Um Maryam’s opinion, these men should be helped rather than persecuted or marginalized.

“If something happens to my husband,” she says, “I want to have at least a family booklet proving my marriage and my children’s lineage, because the current family statement paper proves nothing and guarantees nothing.”

Waiting for Permanent Solutions, the Crisis Deepens

The pressures faced by women because of their stateless children have driven many of them to invent “solutions” that, while temporarily easing the problem, may create even greater disasters in the future, warns Omaya Shaker Al-Mousa, head of legal affairs at Mazaya Women’s Organization.

One such “solution” involves registering children under the name of the mother’s father or brother. In legal terms, her son effectively becomes her “brother” or her “nephew,” resulting in serious distortions of family lineage.

Al-Mousa stresses the need to “develop permanent solutions instead of resorting to temporary fixes that will create catastrophic consequences in the long run.”

Among those who resorted to such a solution is Layla, a 28-year-old woman living in rural Aleppo.

For the past seven years, she has spent long hours at a physical therapy center treating her nine-year-old daughter, who was born under bombardment and suffered oxygen deprivation that affected her ability to walk and speak.

Layla (a pseudonym) married through a “sheikh’s contract” in 2014, when she was only 17, to a 23-year-old Saudi man.

She gave birth to a daughter and a son, both of whom suffer from health problems. In addition to the girl’s disabilities, the boy suffers from a perforated eardrum caused by shelling, as well as malabsorption issues.

“My children’s health conditions were the reason I discovered the problem of marrying a non-Syrian man,” she says.

Hospitals refused to admit the children for treatment because they lacked official documents. When she approached the court to obtain civil registration records for them, she says officials told her it was impossible because “ISIS members have no papers.”

Initially, her husband fought with Jabhat al-Nusra (later became known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) before defecting to ISIS. He was later captured by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and eventually died of tuberculosis in prison.

As her circumstances worsened, Layla says her only option was to register the children under her father’s name.

She fully understands that her children’s lives are now legally built on falsified identities. They carry her family name, while her father is officially registered as their father rather than their grandfather.

But she says she had no other solution that would allow her to treat the children or enroll her son in school.

Beyond these forms of falsification, the wives of foreign fighters have also begun pressuring Syria’s new government directly.

They have organized themselves through a WhatsApp group that currently includes more than 500 women.

Um Omar, one of the group’s founders, explains that they are working on every possible level to make their voices heard through meetings and media appearances, especially because some of the children are now fourteen years old and have reached the age at which they should receive national identity cards.

Every day, Um Omar communicates with the group members as they work to document cases and demonstrate the scale of the problem.

She insists their issue does not concern one or two women, but hundreds. “They are Syrian women who lived through extremely difficult wartime conditions, and it is unjust to burden them with new suffering.”

One member of the group, Shaimaa, says: “Our children should obtain our nationality, the nationality of our land. Our children are here. We spent ten years enduring oppression and suffering, and in the blink of an eye, ten years of our lives disappeared. But today, after liberation, our children have the right to live stable and happy lives.”

Shaimaa married a fighter from Tajikistan when she was only 17 years old.

She lives in rural Idlib and says she endured severe wartime hardship and poverty before finding stability with her husband, with whom she now has four children.

Her two sisters also married “foreign fighters.”

All of them, she says, dream of educating their children and allowing them to live normal lives. But every dream remains suspended until the issue of nationality is resolved, a reality that motivated them to support the women’s group and organize their collective efforts.

“After the decree granting citizenship to the Kurds was issued, we hoped we would also be included,” Shaimaa adds, “and that a decree would finally grant Syrian women the right to pass their nationality on to their families.”

Earlier this year, President Ahmed Al-Sharaa issued Presidential Decree No. 13 of 2026, granting Syrian citizenship to all Kurdish origin who had previously been denied nationality based on the 1962 census conducted in Al-Hasakah province.

Sharia Supports Syrian Mothers’Right to Nationality

For more than two decades, civil society efforts advocating for Syrian women’s right to pass their nationality to their children have never ceased.

The first movement to launch this campaign was the Syrian Women’s League in 2002.

Activist Sawsan Zakzak explains that the League’s campaign, titled “My Nationality Is a Right for My Family and Me,” was part of a broader regional initiative carrying the same name.

The campaign began by conducting two studies.

The first was a legal study demonstrating the discrimination embedded in Syrian nationality law against women.

The second was a field study involving interviews with women directly affected by this discrimination, as well as conversations with their children to document the impact of legal inequality on families where the mother is Syrian, and the father is not.

Following these studies, the campaign began working toward amending the nationality law, Zakzak says.

Ten members of the Syrian parliament formally submitted a proposal to amend the law, including the legal justifications for the change. However, according to Zakzak, the Speaker “put it in a drawer” and never presented it before parliament.

Zakzak explains: “Our campaign relied on two main references. First, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which affirms that every child has the right to a nationality. Second, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which includes a clause affirming women’s right to pass their nationality to their children.”

“We encountered difficulties because Syria had entered a reservation to Paragraph 2 of Article 9 concerning nationality.”

According to Dr. Mohammad Habash, professor of Islamic jurisprudence at Abu Dhabi University and a former member of the Syrian parliament who publicly supported the “My Nationality Is a Right for My Family and Me” campaign at the time, several parliamentarians succeeded in bringing the proposed amendment to discussion. Still, parliament never approved referring it to the legal committee.

The main justifications offered by representatives of the former authorities, he explains, centered on rejecting the naturalization of children born to Palestinian fathers and Syrian mothers, arguing that this would result in the loss of Palestinian nationality and, consequently, the Palestinian cause itself.

In response to objections based on Islamic law, Habash says supporters of reform presented Quranic evidence affirming the mother’s right in this matter.

“The Quran explicitly attributes children to their mothers in two places,” he explains.

“In Surat Al-Baqarah, God says: ‘Mothers shall breastfeed their children,’ and again in Surat Al-Mumtahanah: ‘Nor shall they kill their children or fabricate falsehoods.’”

According to Habash, attributing children to their mothers is entirely normal within the Quranic tradition and also appears frequently in the Prophetic Sunnah.

“I do not believe there is any religious obstacle preventing justice for Syrian women and for children who deserve this right,” he says.

Habash considers it deeply disappointing that no Arab country has managed to make a real breakthrough on this issue over the past twenty years.

After Algeria granted women in 2005 the unrestricted right to pass nationality to their non-Algerian husbands and children, Tunisia also introduced reforms. However, their scope remained limited because Tunisian mothers can grant nationality to their children only under certain conditions.

“I believe it is unfortunate that Arab states have failed to make meaningful progress in this direction,” Habash says. “But today we will once again raise the same demands we raised in the past, and Syria should lead the way on this issue.”

Following the fall of the Assad regime, the work of the “My Nationality Is My Right” campaign entered a new phase.

Its activities are no longer limited to Idlib and its countryside or rural Aleppo, but have expanded into Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs.

The campaign has formed a team of Syrian women directly affected by the nationality issue to serve as ambassadors advocating for their cause.

Rasha Al-Tabashi and her team are also attempting to establish something resembling a lobbying group with newly elected members of parliament, given that any legal reform in Syria ultimately requires parliamentary approval.

Al-Tabashi and her colleagues have already contacted several newly elected MPs who are expected to join parliamentary sessions once the new parliament convenes.

The initiative hopes to prepare the political ground for passing an amended nationality law with majority support.

Among those now publicly supporting the campaign is Nour Al-Jandali, a parliament member representing Homs.

Al-Jandali recently participated alongside fellow MPs in a workshop organized by the Hawiyati Organization and UN Women.

“I will support amending the law as quickly as possible, with clear wording that leaves no room for interpretation,” she says.

“At the same time, it is important to address fears associated with this law and work toward procedural safeguards without denying the right itself.”

Al-Jandali argues that it is unacceptable for society and the law to grant men the right to pass nationality to their children while denying women the same right.

“By doing so,” she says, “they treat mothers as second-class citizens. This is an injustice and a structural flaw in the construction of a true citizenship-based state.”

Dr. Fadi Al-Halabi, a neurosurgeon and newly elected MP for Damascus, echoes this position.

Beyond granting children of Syrian mothers full rights in education, healthcare, property ownership, and public services, he argues, the reform would also “contribute to social stability.”

Meanwhile, as the Syrian Women’s League continues its advocacy efforts, Zakzak emphasizes that the League’s campaign predates both the Syrian uprising and the issue of foreign fighters.

She therefore fears “that the issue of granting Syrian nationality to children of Syrian mothers will become tied to the fate of foreign fighters.”

She stresses: “Our demand concerns the children only. As for the fighters themselves, that is a matter for the state to decide whether to permit or deny their status.”

Zakzak notes that most countries do not automatically grant nationality to spouses upon marriage, but instead impose conditions and restrictions.

As for Um Omar and the many Syrian mothers who share her struggle, what they ultimately seek, she says, is simply “the right to life” for their children.

This investigation is part of the 2026 Journalism Fellowship Program for Syrian journalists at SIRAJ, supported by the French Media Development Agency (CFI).

An Arabic version of this investigation was also published on Daraj Media.

Creative coordination and visual solutions: Radwan Awad.

The post “Why Am I Not Syrian?”: The Silent Tragedy of Children of Syrian Women with Foreign Fathers appeared first on SIRAJ.