By Ziad Omar and Ahmed Abdallah

Alhayat– Beyond the known suffering of Syrians who are living under fire or migrating through rough seas in rundown boats, another more brutal and dangerous world exists, that of a black market in organ trafficking leading to a worst fate.
This report investigates the involvement of medical doctors in organ trafficking networks targeting Syrian victims. The networks begin in Syria and move across the borders to Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey.
Others are also involved in the business, starting with fake security officials and ex-convicts and ending with pimps. This investigative report documents hitherto details on unknown cases involving organ traders who were arrested by the Syrian authorities.
In addition, the report reveals how hospitals and doctors continue to practice the business, benefiting a security breakdown since 2011. These gangs resort to a loophole in law number 3/2010 on combating human trafficking, as article three does not punish or incriminate the donor.

Complex networks
Among those revealed by the report are doctors, gunmen, women, a convicted pimp, and a fugitive wanted for “debauchery and organ trafficking”.
Members of these networks work in clinics and hospitals across most Syrian cities and regions. Some of them carry unlicensed guns, while others manage the e-marketing of human organs, as per in the following advert:

“For sale: Kidney of a 27 year-old male who needs the money to travel to Europe. Free of any viruses or genetic diseases. Currently residing in Turkey. For inquiries: send private message.”

Both reporters went undercover once posing as donors (sellers) and once as recipients (buyers). In both cases, they recorded conversations with the person behind the advert, who turned out to be a mediator for an organised network.
The mediator asked about their blood type to match recipients with donors. He also offered his services for other organs if needed, as there are “fresh goods everyday”.
The reporters then continued to track Syrians who sold their organs to networks of doctors and mediators.
Donors sell their organs voluntarily to raise money to travel to Europe, or forcibly, as in the case of Ahmed Abdul Karim, who was buried in his hometown of Morek, north of Hamah, next to other bodies whose organs were stolen during medical treatment. These thefts started since 2013, according to locals in nearby villages, as well as human rights and media reports that documented this growing phenomenon as the Syrian war grew fiercer.
On July 6, 2015, the head of Syria’s Doctors’ Syndicate Abdul Qader Hassan announced the dismissal and discipline of five doctors who were found involved in organ trafficking.
Our reporters followed up on the case of these doctors and through a senior judicial source, managed to obtain a copy of the syndicate’s decision to dismiss them.
The document, number 4/3/2011, was issued by the central disciplinary council of the Syrian Doctors’ syndicate.
“The Syndicate has banned the doctors from practicing medicine permanently, referring them to the relevant judiciary authorities after investigations revealed their involvement in a transnational network that takes pregnant women to Lebanon to give birth, before selling their babies for large sums of money for organ harvesting,” the statement read.
According to the statement, the sale took place in compliance with a doctor called Samir H., whom the recipient and donor had met at a conference earlier.
The court based its decision on an initial confession by one of the doctors, as well as his secretary and driver, following extensive investigations, which also included a testimony by one of the victims.
Other doctors led a 12-member network, from Damascus to Aleppo. Our reporters managed to obtain a copy of their case after they were arrested by the criminal security unit in the period between 2013 and 2015.
The network was described by a security source as the “most active”. One of its members would pose as a security officer in charge of an armed group. Some of them had been arrested once before while others were arrested three times in less than two years.
Ziad W. and Mohammed Ammar K. are wanted for organ trafficking. The latter is also wanted for attempted kidnapping for the purpose of debauchery and organ trafficking, according to the police report.
Both reporters found that Ziad and Mohammed Ammar were the doctors whose names were included in the e-records announced by the doctors’ Syndicates of Syria and Aleppo.
Abdul Qader Hassan confirmed that in July 2013, they were dismissed and deprived of their syndicate rights, including pensions, health insurance, personal protection, and medical licenses.
However, according to Hassan, the syndicate cannot take other measures against them, as they no longer live in regime-controlled areas in Aleppo.
Ahmed Sh., Naji F., Mohammed Ghazi S., Ahmed H., Nisreen F., Ahmed H. H., Ibrahim H., and Khaled A. are wanted on charges of organ trafficking, while Fadia D. has also been accused of mediation.
Omar H. is wanted for running a prostitution network with the purpose of organ trafficking.
Ahmed al-Sayyed, the attorney general in Damascus, told our reporters that Syrian courts had processed more than 20 cases related to organ trafficking in the past four years, once a rarity.
Sayyed believes the total number of organ trafficking instances had exceeded 20,000.

Dr. Hussain Nofal, head of the recently-founded general authority for forensic medicine, estimates the number of Syrian cases of organ trafficking at over 18,000 in the past four years.
By early 2013, he says, organs from 15,600 people (out of 62,000 wounded who received treatment in neighbouring countries) had been harvested.
Dr. Nofal based his numbers on a comprehensive study conducted on those who were killed in war zones and border areas. The study includes pictures, videos, and other documents that should be released by the courts later.
If you think children are not affected by organ theft, then you have not heard the story of Yasmin Shahada, 9.
The doctors tried to steal her kidney in a hospital that her family cannot locate until now. She was only identified after three bullets were removed from her body following and injury during clashes in Latakia’s northern countryside in 2013.
Our reporters met with the girl and her father in the neighbourhood of al-Daatour, near the city of Latakia.
According to the father, he was informed on August 4, 2013 that his daughter was dead, so he requested an official death certificate (number 1367) from authorities in the nearby town of Salanfa. However, 17 days later, a Turkish doctor called him and said the girl was alive after surviving an attempt to harvest her organs.
The father expressed gratitude and they agreed to meet at the Kassab border crossing. As the doctor delivered the girl, he told her father about the details of how members of the organ trafficking network agreed to sell her kidney through the hospital.
The deal was made in the presence of the girl before the Turkish doctor saved her and smuggled her to Syria.
During six months of extensive investigations, Both reporters documented 12 cases of organ trafficking through direct interviews with victims in Syria, Istanbul, and Beirut, including seven cases of voluntary donation for economic reasons, three cases of forced organ harvesting during medical treatment after war injuries, one case of survival from a harvesting attempt, and one case of fraud based on a medical excuse.
All cases have been documented through audio-visual recordings. They include victims who are still alive, as well as family members in Syria and neighbouring countries. Yet, there are no accurate official statistics, even though all Syrian officials interviewed in this report have admitted the presence of organised networks that exploit the Syrians’ poor conditions to sell their organs.
Our reporters, using hidden cameras, posed as escorts of patient in Damascus to document the doctors’ involvement.
At 11 am on July, 7, 2015, Thura Ahmed, 16, is accompanied by her parents to undergo a corneal transplant surgery (Keratoplasty) in her left eye at a Damascus hospital.
The girl and her family seemed at ease with the surgery, as the doctor had reassured them about its success rate, how it will be transplanted and the healing period. He said the new cornea would be officially imported from the US for $1,500.
According to the doctor, the surgery has a 95 percent success rate. He said the cornea will arrive with a certificate detailing the donor’s medical information, including the harvest date and the donor being free of any genetic or microbial diseases.
In addition, the doctor said the entire transplant surgery would be recorded on camera as a legal procedure that takes place in all transplant operations.
Two days later, the cornea arrived from the US. “How could it arrive here so quickly?”
The doctor called and said the cornea had arrived, according to the girl’s father. Within 20 minutes, the surgery took place in a hospital near the clinic, but the girl’s condition kept deteriorating.
We showed Thura’s case file to Dr. Mohamed Raslan, head of the state-owned eye bank, which includes the official records of all doctors who import corneas.
According to Article One/B of the legislative decree number 61/2010, the health minister can allow ophthalmologists to import corneas in exceptional cases for limited periods of time and for the public interest.
We compared Thura’s information with official requests made by doctors to import corneas, but we could not find the name of the doctor who performed Thura’s surgery.
We tried to search for Thura’s name in the patients’ database, but we still could not find any record of her.
This means that the cornea was either smuggled into Syria or came from local sources.
While the report was being published, Thura’s family was in the process of submitting a complaint to the doctors’ Syndicate.
In Egypt, home to nearly 132,000 Syrian refugees, 29-year-old Mohamed Zaher (alias) was subjected to a new kind of experience.
An organised group managed to set him up and buy his kidney for a certain amount of money, exploiting his need and ignorance of the country and its laws.
Originally from Homs, Zaher works in auto-repairs. He currently lives in Istanbul, where he moved recently.
Zaher left Cairo after he sold his kidney for $3,000 to someone whose real name he did not even know. All they had was a 15-minute face-to-face conversation to agree on the terms of the deal, including price, time, and place.
We met with him in a house he shares with other Syrians in Istanbul.
Zaher is consumed by regret. Every time he is reminded of the deal, he remembers the tragedy that is yet to end. He does not wish a similar fate upon anyone.
The young man hesitated before he agreed to speak out. No one knows about it, not even his wife, whom he married using the money he made from selling his kidney.
“This is the biggest crime I have ever committed in my life,” he said, “and I will never forgive myself.”
Zaher had just returned from a medical examination, as he went to see a doctor after feeling pain in his remaining kidney.
When the doctor found out he had sold his kidney, he told him: “You will inevitably die if your remaining kidney fails.”
How did Zaher come to decide to sell his kidney? And why? What are the details of the procedure that took place at a Cairo hospital at midnight?
We discussed the case with the Egyptian health ministry. Assistant health minister Saber Ghonaim said that if the hospital was proven to have allowed the Syrian young man’s surgery, the doctor and medical team who performed the surgery would be prosecuted, and possibly suspended.
Ghonaim also said the young man should file an official complaint. However, this is not possible as he is currently not in Egypt.
In addition, the Syrian donor has refrained from any official measures to avoid unnecessary legal consequences.

Zaher’s story in Egypt is not one of its kind. Dozens of other Syrians abroad resorted to social media to sell their organs in order to make ends meet or fund a journey to Europe.
Adverts found on online markets reflect the size of the tragedy, with some people advertising their organs online to flee the tragic situation in Lebanon.
The idea began on social media pages related to migration and Syrians abroad. It has now become the norm. At least one or two new adverts are posted everyday by Syrians who want to sell their organs. There is even a Facebook page called “kidneys for sale”, where donors and brokers discuss their deals.
We tried contacting Facebook to discuss the legality of these pages, as well as the social network’s policy to report them. They replied saying that the pages did not violate Facebook’s standards, as they do not incite violence or post inappropriate pictures.
Organ sale online has even extended beyond kidneys, to liver, lung lobes and anything that could save the donors from their misery.
In March 2015, an UNRWA report revealed that poverty and destitution amongst Syrians had reached 82.5 percent in 2014, compared to 64.8 percent in 2013.
As a result, according to the report, “conflict-related transnational networks and criminal gangs emerged to engage in human trafficking.”

Online investigation
Our reporters infiltrated these networks, posing as brokers searching for organs. They posted an advert on a closed Facebook group for Syrians in Lebanon, asking for kidneys, without specifying a blood type.
Syrian citizen Ali A. offered his kidney for sale, and asked about the price we were willing to pay.
Reporters: $2,000 for one kidney.
Ali: For a poor person, this is a fortune. All I want is to cover my children’s expenses, at least for a couple of months.
The second offer came from Mohamed (alias), a 29 year-old Syrian living in a refugee camp in Rashaya, Lebanon. He is a father of three, including two disabled children who need medical care.
Reporters: How much would you sell one of your kidneys for?
Moahmed: I do not know much about this. If the price is good, I will go ahead with it. I need to go to Europe to treat my kids.
Reporters: How about $4,000?
Mohamed: Yes, I would leave Lebanon and travel immediately to Europe.
On the other hand, we contacted a Syrian refugee who advertised his kidney for sale. He seemed professional, as he mentioned the blood type (B+) in the advert. However, he asked the reporters about the blood type they were looking for, which meant he had access to several kidneys with various blood types.
Reporters: Do you still want to sell the kidney?
Seller: What blood type are you looking for?
Reporters: You said B+ in the advert.
Seller: How much?
Reporters: I do not know. How about $2,000?
Seller: *laughs* I want $10,000.

While markets for selling Syrians as spare parts host deals that occur both behind the scenes and in public, international organizations remain oblivious. Our reporters contacted more than four international organizations concerned with documenting these breaches to enquire about the phenomenon. The responses were either “we do not have any information on the phenomenon” or a complete refusal to respond to the enquiries.
For example, Human Rights Watch wrote back on Sept. 7, 2015 saying: “Unfortunately we have not looked into this matter. You can write to Amnesty international or look into the following journalistic material”. They were referring to a report published in the Oct. 12, 2013 edition of Der Spiegel highlighting the story of Raed, 19, who fled from battles in Aleppo to Lebanon, where he sold his left kidney for $7000. The surgery took place in a secret clinic in a residential complex through a Lebanon-based active network that acquires the organs through a middle man called Abu Hussein. The latter receives a commission of $700. The organs are later sent to GCC countries.

Afterwards, we wrote to Amnesty International, twice. The first time on Sept. 3, 2015 and again on Sept. 8, 2015 but we never received a response. As for the World Health Organization, the reporters received a response after enquiring about its role in monitoring the trafficking of Syrian people’s organs and ways to limit the activity across borders. The WHO response, received on Oct. 29, 2015, stated: “We do not look into the issue of organ trafficking. It is the responsibility of the Interpol. We only examine how countries can prepare organ donation programs and the systems, which may discourage or eradicate the illegal trafficking of organs”.
Doctors without Borders (MSF) did not respond to the reporters’ correspondence sent on Sept. 6, 2015. Their letter was not the only one MSF or other international humanitarian institutions did not reply to.
Dr. Morhaf al-Mialim, in charge of the Syrian Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, claimed that he had written to numerous international organizations since early 2012. Nonetheless, they did not write back. Mr. Nizar Skief, the head of the Syrian Lawyers Union supported this discourse. He said he wrote to the Arab Lawyers Union twice. In the first time he wanted to alert them to crimes committed by Arabs in Syria and in the second time he wanted to shed light on the implication of Arab smugglers in arranging illegal migrations to Europe. Both correspondences were part of his personal effort to look into the matter of trading in Syrians abroad. Nonetheless, his correspondences received no response for the Arab Lawyers Union, which was established in Cairo in 1944.

Non-Deterrent Punishments
While the Syrian law goes in line with UN conventions on toughening the punishment against human trafficking, the phenomenon has spread during the war. Among the most important agreements signed by Syria is the “United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols”.
Signed by Syria in 2009, the Convention seeks the manner with which to pursue the perpetrators of transnational crimes regardless of the political circumstances. The convention also stipulates the responsibility of the state in combating these crimes. However, Syria has reservations concerning paragraph 2, of article 35 of the convention pertaining to transferring these case to the International Court of Justice

Moreover, the Syrian laws were developed along similar lines. Legislative decree no 3 issued in 2010 deals with human trafficking. It increased the punishment in cases of international crimes or if they are committed against women or children. In the aforementioned cases, article 8 of civic degradation is applied. The later stipulates “whenever there is a reason to increase the punishment, it is increased from the third to the half”. As such, a sentence of 15 years would become 20-22 years and a half, and so on.
The head of the Syrian Lawyers’ Union said: “It is true that the law is a deterrent yet the crime continues”. He added that the “chaos ensuing from the Syrian crisis strengthened organized crime gangs at the expense of parties, who are responsible for pursuing them. Consequently, the phenomenon is likely to expand even further and affect neighbouring countries unless there is an international effort to monitor these crimes and combat them”. The head of the Doctors’ Union agreed with that view. He emphasized that the only way out is through international cooperation to monitor the phenomenon to pursue and capture these networks through international police.

In one of its latest reports on Syria by the United Nations entitled “Squandering Humanity” the issue of trafficking Syrians was highlighted. It spoke about people who are murdered in their country, drown in the sea as they attempt to run for their lives, or who die in hospitals in the pursuit of healing. Those who manage to survive all of that offer themselves and their organs for sale perchance their children can survive.
Editor’s Notes:
The following researchers contributed to this investigation: Hussam al-Agha, Qassem Mohamed, and Mohamed al-Qazzaz.
• This investigation was completed with support of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism(ARIJ) www.arij.net and coached by Hammoud al-Mahmoud

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By Nisreen Aladdin and Mukhtar al-Ibrahim

Damascus, Syria, (Al-Hayat) – Damascus: Reported

This investigation began during a bus ride from Damascus to it’s suburbs on Nov. 12, 2015. The reporter accidentally stumbled on the problem of unregistered children in Syria. Born during the ongoing war, these children were separated from their fathers who were kidnapped, killed or forced entirely to leave the country. As a result, they have been unavailable and incapable of registering their children as their own.
Travelling on a small white bus that was transporting civilians across military checkpoints, the vehicle was stopped by a government soldier for inspection. Pacing up and down the aisles, he requested and received identification papers. On the bus was a young woman looking nervously at the soldier, as she cradled a young baby in her arms. She stared at him, as if waiting for him to ask who the child belonged to.
But the child was not noticed. The soldier quickly left the bus and waved it on. As the bus moved on, the baby woke up and began crying, despite the mother’s attempts to calm it.
“What is her name?”
“She doesn’t have one registered yet,” the mother responded “And every so often I change my mind!”
This is the first time that the mother – called Rania – visited Damascus in five years, even though she lived only fourteen kilometres south of the capital. She had to travel to Damascus to try and register her child in the judicial courts. Rania married at the age of fifteen – a year and a half ago at time of meeting – to a man called Khalil Jumah who was displaced from another region in Syria. A local sheik married them in a ceremony with two witnesses present, as is customary outside the urbanized areas of Syria.
However , they did not receive the certification needed to register with the civil authorities.
Tragedy struck soon afterwards when their town was bombed in mid-2014. Rania was forced to flee to another town..
“Two months after that, my husband was killed. And later, my daughter was born without a marriage certificate.”
A week after our first meeting, Rania found herself confronting legal complications that would require a lawyer. This was because the Civil Registry had refused to register her daughter because the marriage contract was not available..
Her lawyer requested that she provide two witnesses from her hometown or paperwork to authenticate the marriage. This was very difficult because both witnesses had either fled the country or died in the war, while Rania only knew that her husband’s hometown is under the control of rebels.. This added an extra wrinkle, as it was unlikely government officials would recognize an official’s ruling from such an area.
Her lawyer requested 100,000 Syrian pounds (nearly $ 400) to mount the lawsuit on her behalf, but Rania could not afford the cost, especially not after the death of her husband and both her parents as well as the loss of all her property.
The Syrian civil code stipulates in Legislative Decree No. 26 of 2007, Chapter IV Article 28, paragraph c: (in case of children born to unregistered marriages, they cannot be registered until the marriage itself is registered).

For up to a full year, Rania was still at the judicial courts trying to register her daughter, until her debts caught up to her. Now she survives on the charity and kindness of others.
Rana’s case is one of many such stories emerging from the war in Syria, six years after the initial conflict began. This investigation was able to prove 29 different cases like Rania’s, after interviewing families in centres for displaced families in both Damascus and its countryside and in rural villages of the Quneitra Governate.
All cases investigated were of mothers suffering difficulties in registering the births of their children, for reasons related to Syria’s personal status laws, which requires the meeting of many conditions, an impossible mission in times of war, displacement and migration.
Among the conditions are the official registration of marriages that are needed to have one’s children recognized, that there is a documented marriage certificate for the husband with all his personal information, including date of birth, national number, parentage, etc… as expected of the wife, along with the wife’s guardian and the two adult male witnesses. Permission for marriage for the husband must also be granted from the military recruitment board, due to Syria’s national conscription laws. In addition, the address of the official certifying the marriage must be provided, along with the details for both the pre-marital dowry and the post-divorce support payments and the day of the wedding itself.
The situation is complicated in areas that fall outside the official authority, where identification issued by the opposition and the courts and local councils do not get any international recognition, let alone that of the Syrian government in Damascus.
This is what leads to the accumulation of cases brought before the courts, for mothers like Rania trying to prove their children’s parentage in the absence of their husbands. According to the first Sharia judge in Damascus, who documents the personal status lawsuits records, the marriage and paternity claims rose more than tenfold in Syria, when comparing from the two years of pre-war to 2015.
This was further proven in interviews with around sixty family rights lawyers working in Damascus and around Quneitra, who collectively said that paternity claims have grown to be 80% of all their filed cases in the past five years, compared to less than 9% before the war.
Exacerbating the situation is the harsh approach by the Ministry of Justice towards marriage and paternity claims and paperwork expectations. According to judge Mahmoud Al-Maarawi, many women are also unable to afford the legal costs and fees which begin at $ 100.
Yousif Ayed Amaara, the president for the UN’s Family Reconciliation Office, is afraid for the murky future that awaits many of Syria’s young children, who he described as “victims of both the laws and the war”. He went on to say that these cases are constantly increasing, adding that “From 2007 to 2009 we had one such case, but now we are facing tens of new instances each month”.
I Want My Rights
A report issued by the Syrian Center for Policy Research entitled “Facing Fragmentation” states that Syrian families are being dispersed at a dangerous rate, with six million Syrians displaced within Syria itself and another four million having fled outside the country.
The 25-year-old Rola – better known as Um Salah – is one of the millions who have been displaced many times over in the country. She lives in a shelter for refugees in Latakia, where she arrived six months ago with her two children without any identification papers. Her husband disappeared three years ago after leaving home to go buy bread.
Um Salah did not have the family papers, and has been unable to enter her son at school. She has also been unable to receive aid, because her children are not registered in official records. However, children born of adultery were able to register, a fact that still resonates with her after her lawyer informed her.

“I am not a prostitute, and I will not be and I will never be. But am I not harming my children? I brought them into this life and I have not provided them with their basic rights”.
Her father married her to a man who came to their village in 2011. She gave birth to their firstborn child Salah, without registering their marriage because of the volatility of the situation at the time. After less than a year of their marriage, they began a series of displacements because of the escalation of violence. She then gave birth to her second son Mohammad in 2012, and then lost her husband in 2013.
Rola’s husband is one of 65,000 people who have disappeared between March 2011 and August 2015, according to a report issued by Amnesty International. Meanwhile, the number of abductees in Syria have reached 20,000 between 2011 and the publication of this investigation according to Minister of State for the Syrian National Reconciliation Ali Haidar.
Rola stayed in the area close to the place of her husband’s disappearance, hoping he would come back and find her with their children. She was left with nothing but her wedding ring after she was forced to sell her jewelry to spend on her family before going on to the charity of others. She moved to Aleppo in 2014 and then to Latakia in 2015 in search of safety, after her son Salah was injured in his foot.
It came as a shock to her when she was asked for her children’s identification papers, and she forced to say they had been lost. She was subsequently given a room to share with another family, and upon requesting a separate room for her children she was asked to provide proof the children were hers or be at the risk dismissal from the shelter.
“I do not have any papers to prove my marriage and my children. According to government records I am still single.”
In surveying sixty lawyers in and around Damascus and Quneitra regarding the rise in parental suits during the war, answers varied between 80%, 100% and 700%. The survey also showed that by and large the largest obstacle was the absence of the husband.

Gone and never returned
Dunia listens carefully to every word her lawyer says.
The road to proving her marriage began again after the first attempt – a three month ordeal which culminated her leaving her previous lawyer as he attempted to take advantage of her circumstances and propositioned her.
Dunia married at the age of nineteen to a young man from the north of Syria who had come to work in Damascus and knows her husband’s surname, and his hometown. He had left her on Sept. 7, 2012 to go to work in Saqba, kissing her goodbye at five months pregnant. Three years have passed since he left, and since then, Dunia has rejected a proposal from a neighbor.
When she attempted to register her two year old daughter, she was surprised to learn that she needed to appoint a lawyer to overseer the procedure. Her landlord offered to pay her legal fees and after five sessions with the lawyer in his office, he asked for her to come without her landlord. When she arrived, she was propositioned and told that he would continue the legal suit for free and give her the money her landlord paid in exchange for a sexual relationship.
“I hit him with an ashtray and then I ran away and cried, all the while he was shouting at me, saying that he would send me to jail.”

Justice Adds Insult To Injury
Mahmoud Al-Maarawi claims that the Syrian crisis has imposed an incredible strain on the country’s judiciary, and that it has become essential to establish a competent judicial commission to maintain the rights of unregistered children and wives.
“Unfortunately, we are seeing a tightening of regulations from the Ministry of Justice, which is requesting a birth certificate from exclusively government hospitals, even though many women still deliver their babies with midwives or doctors in private clinics or even in their own homes. At the same time there are simply not enough judges with the courage to make rulings on these cases as the Ministry hands out more instructions”.
The Loss of Identification
It does not escape an observer that violence in Syria effected government buildings after 2011, where documents, files and records of births, bonds, divorces and marriages are believed lost. Afterwards, regional militias and opposition groups created their own records and civil registries as part of normalizing control over their territories.
A survey conducted by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Syria in 2015 found that a lack or loss of personal documents, constituted a major challenge. According to the report, the personal status law in its current form is unable to help women to certify their marriages and their children, according to 81% of the respondents.
According to lawyers we met as they worked with their clients, the best-case paternity suits that take between three and five months are those when women presented the consent of their husbands or the husbands were able to appear before the courts with documentation to prove their paternity. Other “best case scenarios” are when the women have paperwork certifying the marriage and witnesses, as well as the possibility of communicating with either the husband or the witnesses or where the judge is convinced in the validity of the marriage, regardless of certification or proof.
If none of these instances are the case, the women are likely to lose cases or continue on for two years before losing, ultimately ending in a dismissal of the case and the lack of registration of children in most cases.
The Bosnian and Tunisian Experiences As a Solution?

A 1998 law in Tunis related to children with unknown parentage gave Tunisian mothers the possibility to identify their children as their own, without a father present. This would be predicated on proving the children were their own (through shared DNA, witnesses, etc…) but would provide the children born out of wedlock all the legal rights available to those born in a recognized marriage.
But this cannot be applied directly in Syria due to the personal status law in the country, which is derived from Islamic Sharia, and is incompatible with Tunisian laws.
Meanwhile in Bosnia, the country suffered a long war in the 90’s. Families were dispersed and many were raped. This caused many parentage problems that culminated in the adoption of an old Yugoslav law which did not put concern on whether the children were legitimate or not. This allowed single mothers to register their children even if the father is unknown and receive full rights. This was a solution to a problem women and children suffered during the Bosnian war along with its systematic rape and forced pregnancy without a father.
A Typical Marriage Contract
Activists and lawyers are calling for a basic, pre-approved written marriage contract that would only need the particulars of each marriage agreement filled in. This would be accepted without fault by the judges, and would contain the evidence supporting the couple and the witnesses present, notarize the wife’s signature as consent, provide fingerprints of her husband and outline what guarantees are available to the women in case of their husband’s death, disappearance or migration. This would be temporary until the government takes control over the entirety of the country and the Sharia courts would be reinstated nationally.
The lawyers who were consulted in this investigation regarding the personal status law said that it did not help Syrian women to prove the validity of their marriages, especially not when their husbands had disappeared or if they had lost their marital documents.
They suggested to found a civil records commission specializing in dealing with children born during the war with records of their mothers until the identification of their fathers takes place when the war ends. This is to preserve the rights of the children, so as not to be constrained or considered stateless and to take the same treatment as with abandoned children. This would be in the hope of reaching a solution for those unrecognized, especially the cases of these mothers who are stuck between divorce or widowhood as well as their fatherless children.

This investigation was completed with the support of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) – www.arij.net and coached by Hamoud Almahmoud. Nicolas Awwad translated the investigation into English.

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