The minutes of the meeting on May 29, 2024, show how much pressure Assad’s regime was under during its dying days from one of its closest allies. 

At one point in the talks, Russia’s deputy defense minister, General Yunus-bek Yevkurov, even threatened to cut off financing for oil operations if Syria didn’t pay up.

Russia had built up extensive interests in Syria’s oil sector under the Assad regime. In 2015, Russia intervened militarily in Syria, helping regain territory taken by the rebels. In return, Assad’s government had offered contracts to Russian companies to rebuild the energy sector.

“We do not want oil extraction and production to stop, because this will be a strong blow to the Syrian economy,” said Yevkurov, according to the meeting minutes obtained by OCCRP’s Syrian media partner SIRAJ.

Yevkurov did not respond to a request for comment on the meeting. 

Negotiations about the much larger debt owed to Russia have continued under Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former rebel commander who now serves as Syrian president. The Kremlin has reportedly sought to maintain military bases it established under Assad, while Damascus has asked for debt relief and other concessions.

That puts Syria in a delicate position as the new government attempts to rebuild the country, along with its relationships to the international community — including countries at odds with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. 

But Syria needs help from whoever can offer it. The country is devastated after 13 years of war, and the government has few options to pay for reconstruction, which will cost an estimated $216 billion, according to the World Bank. 

To make matters worse, Syria faces a total debt of about $27 billion, according to its central bank. As much as $22.3 billion of that debt is external, with at least $1.2 billion owed to Russia, according to a World Bank assessment of the country’s economy in 2025, referencing official data.

Military Chokehold

Russia also has a chokehold on Syria’s military, which gives the Kremlin even more leverage in negotiations. The Assad family, which ruled for half a century, built up a military primarily on Russian weaponry. This leaves the new government dependent on Russian arms to maintain the strength it needs to enforce security.

“For the past 50 years, all of Syria’s military capabilities have been of Russian origin,” said Osama al-Qadi, a senior economic policy advisor for Syria’s Ministry of Economy and Industry. “Therefore, it needs spare parts, new weapons to modernize its older Russian arsenal.” 

Under Assad, Syria also allowed the Russian military to establish bases directly on its territory.

Al-Qadi has not participated in the talks with Russia, but he said that, in addition to arms purchases, he believes the two sides have discussed Russia’s continued use of its naval base near the city of Tartus. Russia may also be allowed to maintain its Hmeimim Air Base near the coastal city of Latakia “on the condition that it remains under Syrian administration to prevent it from becoming a haven for remnants of the old regime.”

“In return, any debts or contracts signed by the regime with the Russians could be overlooked,” al-Qadi told SIRAJ.

He said he believed negotiations around such an agreement constituted “a significant part of the joint Syrian-Russian talks during President al-Sharaa’s visit to Russia” in January 2026.

When al-Sharaa took over the presidency a year earlier, one of the first things he did was ask for Russian loans taken out by the Assad regime to be cancelled, Reuters reported. By October, he said his government would honor deals the Assad regime had made with Russia.

The Syrian Foreign Affairs and Finance Ministries did not respond to questions about debt negotiations, while the Ministry of Energy said the matter was not with them.

A recent report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, noted that 

“Russia retains influence through debt leverage, military basing and security mediation.”

Tough Talk

The leaked minutes, obtained by SIRAJ and its Syrian partner Zaman Al Wasl, show Russian officials using similar leverage in talks with Assad-regime officials.

The May 2024 meeting at the presidential palace in Damascus was attended by a delegation led by Yevkurov, the Russian deputy defense minister, who met with Mansour Azzam, then Syria’s Minister for Presidency Affairs. 

“We have been paying the costs of the Russian soldiers and the Syrian workers,” Yevkurov said, at a monthly tally of $4.5 million. He also demanded that Syria pay an additional $1.16 million monthly for “re-equipping Russian support points that will protect the sites”. 

Yevkurov then said Russia would stop paying those costs from June 2024, and he demanded that Syria pick up the bill. 

Alluding that Syria was withholding payments, Yevkurov warned: “I do not like anyone cheating me… The dialogue with the minister of oil will be in another style.”

Yevkurov said the total debt for the specific services under discussion — which was only part of the much larger bill owed to Russia — amounted to $37.16 million. 

Yevkurov said Russian President Vladimir Putin did not know about that $37 million owed, which put him in a “predicament.” 

“The new Russian Minister of Defense will raise the topic of this debt… or he will inform President Putin about it,” he said. “Surely then the president will ask, how did this happen… I cannot say to the president that I fell short and I do not know how to justify this debt.” 

Azzam was conciliatory as he tried to alleviate Russian concerns, saying: “I believe that we will be able in a very short span to solve all these problems.”

OCCRP could not contact Azzam directly. The Syrian consulate in Moscow, where Azzam is reportedly located, did not respond to a request for comment.

Oil for Protection

Nine years before Azzam and Yevkurov spoke in Damascus, Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war, giving the Assad regime a much-needed advantage.

By that time, the regime was financially depleted and incapable of securing its own energy infrastructure. In return for military support, Damascus reportedly began offering “all possible incentives” to Russian companies to rebuild the energy sector. 

According to the European Union sanctions list, the Russian company Evro Polis LLC “signed a number of contracts with the Syrian regime, through the state-owned General Petroleum Corp.” The company received 25 percent “from the production of oil and gas in fields captured by the Wagner Group,” a Russian paramilitary force fighting for Assad.

The EU called Evro Polis “a front for the Wagner Group,” which was run by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

Prigozhin turned against Putin in 2023, leading a group of Wagner fighters from the Ukrainian front towards Moscow in a short-lived rebellion. He called off the uprising, but died in a mysterious air crash two months later, in August 2023.

By the time of the meeting in Damascus, the minutes show that Russia was intending to transfer the oil contracts away from Evro Polis. Yevkurov asked why the company was still receiving fees for the Ebla and Hayan gas and oil facilities in central Syria.

“According to our information, Ebla and Hayan still pay amounts to the Evro Polis company and we request that you investigate this,” said Yevkurov, asking: “Why do they pay Evro Polis?”

He demanded the Syrian Ministry of Oil sign a contract with a different company, ERPOST-M, which reportedly opened an official branch in Damascus in 2024 to provide security services for facilities, including oil fields. 

By the end of that year, the Assad regime had fallen and Syrian-Russian relations had taken a dramatic turn. 

Syria’s negotiations with Russia have since been complicated by a host of other geopolitical considerations, according to analysts. Al-Sharaa’s government is concerned with preventing both internal rebellion, and Israeli incursions over the border. The new government also needs to balance its relationship with Russia vis-a-vis its diplomatic rapprochement with ِEurope and the U.S.

“The Syrians certainly take into account the fact that the Russians are — among the big countries — the only ones possibly willing to send troops to southern Syria to protect them from Israel,” said Jihad Yazigi, a Syria expert and visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 

Russia could also choose to prop up the new government’s adversaries, explained Soqrat al-Alou, a Syrian political economy researcher at the Arab Reform Initiative, a Paris-based think tank.

The Kremlin could “stir or contain unrest along the coast through networks linked to Alawite constituencies and remnants of former regime military,” he said.

But accommodating Russia’s desire to maintain a military presence in Syria could alienate countries Damascus wants to have good relations with.

Al-Alou noted that the U.S. appears to accept “a limited Russian presence” in Syria, as “its concerns lie elsewhere.”

“European actors, by contrast, appear more sensitive to the entrenchment of Russian influence,” he said.

Fact-checking was provided by the OCCRP Fact-Checking Desk.

Fact-checking was provided by the OCCRP Fact-Checking Desk.

The post Russia Threatened to Halt Syrian Oil Operations if Assad Regime Didn’t Pay Debt appeared first on SIRAJ.

According to Anas Al Kharboutli’s family, the journalist frequently complained about being under surveillance receiving threatening messages on his phone. His killing was no accident and he was no casualty.  His death is the result of a deliberate attempt to target a group of journalists, as revealed in the RSF documentary “Syria: the forbidden witnesses of the Assad regime,” released in December 2025.

This strategy of spying and targeting — one of the deadliest policies implemented by any regime since the turn of the century — claimed the lives of 181 journalists in Syria between the 2011 revolution and the regime’s fall in December 2024 and relied on a near-obsessive level of surveillance of all the people trying to tell Syria’s story from within. Drawing on first-hand accounts and supporting documents, the investigation conducted by SIRAJ in partnership with RSF reveals the inner workings of this ruthless surveillance machine.

“Security without borders”

From the first months of the popular uprising against Bashar al-Assad in 2011, journalists became a preferred target of the regime, alongside opponents and demonstrators. As conduits of news on the protest movement and witnesses to the massacres committed by the authorities against their own people, journalists were an especially troublesome presence. The regime’s survival depended in part on its ability to hunt them down.

When contacted by RSF, a former member of the Department of Foreign Media Affairs at the Ministry of Information described the regime’s astonishment at being caught off guard by the spread of the uprising. The authorities then ordered that foreign journalists be systematically accompanied “to places selected in advance,” where “civilians” — who were intelligence agents in reality — would explain to them that the demonstrations were part of a “Western plot designed to support terrorism.”

The threat was deemed so serious that the Central Crisis Management Cell — a committee created at the start of the revolution to coordinate the regime’s response — was given a direct role in monitoring the media. This body, which brought together the heads of the main intelligence services, senior military officials and the Ministers of the Interior and Defence, was notably tasked with producing detailed reports on the activities of media outlets and journalists.

As this investigation shows, the entire state apparatus was involved in implementing this strategy. Having inherited a far-reaching culture of Soviet-style surveillance and influence, Syria became “security without borders,” as one source who worked at the Ministry of Information for more than 10 years ironically put it. Interviewed by SIRAJ, former Deputy Minister of Information Taleb Qadi Amin (2003–2008) confirmed that journalists who contacted the authorities to obtain a visa were in fact dealing with “a system riddled with surveillance that began at the borders.”

The system often relied on technical surveillance. Contacted by SIRAJ, a former military intelligence officer responsible for interceptions described a scene in March 2011 in which his entire team listened live, over loudspeakers, to calls made by Reuters journalist Suleiman al-Khalidi, “as if we were attending a conference.” When the reporter said to his contact, “I am at the door,” he was arrested immediately.

A blacklist of foreign journalists

SIRAJ, which carried out a methodical search of several institutional sites used for political and security-related matters after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in December 2024, found dozens of documents attesting to this constant surveillance in the archives of Syria’s Air Force Intelligence, the country’s most powerful security agency. Similar documents were also found in the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) and the archives of Branch 291, a military counter-espionage unit notably tasked with monitoring infiltration risks and collaboration with foreign actors, as well as in those of .

By pouring over these archives, SIRAJ discovered that an intelligence operation targeting its very reporters had been approved in October 2024, only weeks before the fall of the regime. Nicknamed “the Spider,” GID director Hossam Louka, a man sanctioned by the European Union, ordered “posts abroad” to obtain “the detailed identities of the agents operating this suspicious platform under the guise of journalists.”

Among the recovered documents was a “blacklist” of foreign journalists. Dated 4 March 2013, it was initially drawn up by the Ministry of Information and was found in a General Intelligence Directorate note addressed to its director. The list included the names of 148 journalists who had “entered Syria illegally” over the previous two years. Ruth Sherlock, correspondent for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, was described as having published a “very negative” report after spending several months in Idlib, a city in north-western Syria. The list also included the names of US journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Rémi Ochlik. Both were killed on 22 February 2012 in a planned and premeditated bombardment, according to accounts gathered by RSF and SIRAJ in a joint investigation into their murder.

Being placed on this blacklist could spell disaster for the journalists on it. The document was sent to several intelligence branches for “action,” and as the former military intelligence officer in charge of communications surveillance confirmed, the people placed on it very often ended up “either killed or arrested.”

Generally speaking, Syrian journalists who were simply doing their job were branded as terrorists by the authorities. As for correspondents appearing in Western media outlets, “they were considered potential agents,” he said. All of them were therefore legitimate military targets in the eyes of the regime.

Arnaud Froger

• Source: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) 

The post Assad’s war on journalists: inside Syria’s surveillance machine appeared first on SIRAJ.

In August 2015, the freighters were hit with U.S. sanctions that targeted resources used by the regime to wage violence against civilians in Syria’s civil war.

Then, in 2023, the three ships were sold to an obscure offshore company.

Incorporated in January 2019, the Seychelles-based AlHouda Holding has no functioning website, and until now, no information about the individuals directly involved in the firm has been disclosed to the public.

But the Syrian General Authority for Maritime Transport sold two of the ships — the Finikia and the Souria — to the company in April 2023  for the nominal price of just $1 apiece, according to sales contracts obtained by SIRAJ.

AlHouda acquired the third ship, the Laodicea, around the same time but OCCRP was unable to verify the sales price.

Sold for a Dollar

Sales contracts obtained by SIRAJ show the ships were sold by the Syrian government for just $1 apiece.

Archived versions of the UAE Levant Fleet’s website show that as recently as January of this year, the site presented itself as the public-facing portal of the British Levant Fleet Ltd, where Kayali was director between August 2020 and April 2023 and the company’s sole shareholder in 2020. He resigned a week after he was sanctioned by the British government, which alleged that he is a “business magnate with links to the captagon industry” who has been “tied to multiple captagon seizures, including in Europe.”

While Kayali is no longer involved in the U.K. company, records show he is a director of a Panamanian company also called Levant Fleet Ltd S.A. whose executives have the same names as those of Levant Fleet in London, suggesting the companies are related.

The U.K.-based Levant Fleet has served as the safety manager for the Laodicea and the Souria since 2023, according to the shipping database Equasis, and as a crew manager for the Souria and the Finikia in 2024, according to partial employment contracts obtained by SIRAJ.

And a crew list for the Souria dated January 5, 2024, features the name Orient Fleet at the top of the document. Kayali is a 99-percent shareholder of a Syrian company established in 2022 named Orient Fleet Maritime LLC. 

The other shareholder of Kayali’s Orient Fleet Maritime bears the same name, Moaead Hani Walio, as the secretary of the U.K.-based Levant Fleet. Kayali and Walio have both served as officers in the U.K. and Panamanian Levant Fleets, while a third man, Ahmad AlKhanji, is also a director in both companies.

Walio did not respond to requests for comment. AlKhanji told OCCRP he parted ways with Levant Fleet, without specifying the jurisdiction, in 2023 due to “a dispute with the company personnel that continues to this day.” He said the dispute prevented him from answering further questions about the company, and did not respond to follow-up questions about his links to Kayali and Levant Fleet in the U.K., the UAE, and Panama in time for publication.

Orient Fleet Maritime and the UAE- and U.K.-based Levant Fleet companies did not respond to requests for comment. But after sending the queries, OCCRP received a message from an unknown Syrian number, whose profile image featured the name — Neptunus — of another Syrian company belonging to Kayali that was hit with Western sanctions. The author said they were responding to questions about Levant Fleet and promised to provide “all necessary documents and materials” but did not do so in time for publication.

In September 2025, Finikia’s ownership changed again: It was transferred to Bayaze Shipping Ltd, a company incorporated  in the Marshall Islands on 13 June, according to the International Maritime Organization and company records.

False Flags

When the Finikia was spotted this January by a granary at the Avlita cargo terminal in Sevastopol, the Ukrainian Black Sea port that Russia seized in February 2014, only two weeks had passed since it had been hit with EU sanctions.

The ship was now sailing under its third name since 2009 – Monte Bianco – and a new flag, Gambia, also its third since then. The AIS transponder used to broadcast its location had been switched off, but the vessel remained visible by satellite, according to an image provided to OCCRP by satellite intelligence company Vantor. 

This type of regular rotation of names and flags of registration, plus the disabling of AIS transponders, has been a feature of all three of the Syrian vessels since they were sold by Assad’s regime in 2023. All three have also misrepresented their countries of registration with so-called “false flags.”

For instance, in December 2023, the freighters registered with the Kingdom of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, in southern Africa. But just a month later, the landlocked nation rescinded the registrations, citing a “direct violation” of its policies, Eswatini maritime authorities told OCCRP.

All three of the Syrian freighters continued flying the Eswatini flag in 2024, primarily traveling between Russia and Syria, even though the African nation told the International Maritime Organization in a letter in August of last year that it had “not yet given permission to any company or agency to register ship vessels sailing in high seas in its flag.”

Michelle Bockmann, a senior maritime intelligence analyst with Windward, a maritime consultancy, said “flag-hopping” is typical behavior for sanctions-hit vessels that face limited options for countries willing to accept their registrations.

Lacking valid insurance and other safety certificates, such ships pose “significant threats” to maritime safety, security, and the environment, she wrote in a submission this year to the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission. “These ships are essentially lawless and stateless.”

Asked about false-flagging, the International Maritime Organization said that it is a problematic practice that prevents authorities from exercising effective control over vessels at sea, but that “[t]here is currently no binding international framework to regulate the process of ship registration.”

Despite their efforts at obfuscation, satellite images and dedicated ship tracking publications helped reporters track some of the freighters’ recent movements.

For instance, the Souria, which is now called San Damian and still flies a false Eswatini flag, departed the Kavkaz port in southern Russia in November 2024 and anchored a little over a week later at the grain terminal in Egypt’s Alexandria port. Satellite imagery analyzed by OCCRP indicates the ship was moored in Syria’s Latakia port on June 30.

After its January stop in Sevastopol, the Finikia was seen sailing in the crystalline blue waters off Cyprus in June with an East Timor flag that the International Maritime Organization website describes as “false.” The East Timor ship registry told OCCRP in July that the jurisdiction does not maintain an international ship registry and it has no knowledge of the vessel.

Işık from the Bosphorus Observer consultancy spotted the ship — with yet another new name, Bayaze D — crossing the Bosphorus a few weeks later. According to the ship-tracking website VesselFinder it was heading for Russia’s Kavkaz port. Later that month, on July 17, it was again seen near Istanbul. 

According to Vladyslav Vlasiuk, sanctions commissioner for Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, the Finikia made a call at the occupied port of Komysh-Burun as recently as August 2025. (Ship-tracking data reviewed by OCCRP shows the vessel in the area at the time).^. 

The Laodicea, meanwhile, was seen in the vicinity of Simferopol in Russian-occupied Crimea last June, and was spotted several months later sailing near Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey before making a stop in Lebanon. In November 2024, it switched off its AIS transponder until April 2025.

During this “dark” period, SIRAJ reporters spotted the vessel anchored in Syria’s Latakia port in mid-January, just over five weeks after the fall of Assad’s regime.

 

The ship’s new name was hidden behind a tarp that someone had hung on the back of the vessel. But the new moniker — Monte Rosa — remained visible on a lifeboat on deck. A gust of wind lifted the tarp just long enough for reporters to see “Rosa” painted on the hull.

Ahmed Haj Bakri (SIRAJ), Rana Sabbagh, and reporters from Daraj contributed reporting.

The post Ships Accused of Stealing Ukrainian Grain Linked to Assad Regime Front appeared first on SIRAJ.

Credit: SIRAJ Chemicals used to make Captagon found inside an abandoned drug production facility in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.

Fighters from the new Syrian government forces uncover Captagon pills hidden inside an electrical power adapter in a facility used to produce Captagon under the previous regime of Bashar al-Assad in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.

Credit: Screenshot of a Facebook post by Syria’s Ministry of the Interior Syria’s Ministry of the Interior announced a Captagon seizure in Al Nabak, Syria, on June 27, 2025.

Credit: Ali Al Ibrahim/SIRAJ, Fighters from the new Syrian government forces inside a Captagon production facility in Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.

Credit: Lebanese Army, Lebanese authorities dismantled a clandestine Captagon lab in Hermel, near the Syrian border, after seizing a truck in May 2025 loaded with drug-making equipment.

The post Captagon Drug Networks Adapt and Survive in Middle East After Assad’s Fall appeared first on SIRAJ.

Over a decade, Syria’s security services took hundreds of children from their parents and hid them in a network of orphanages in order to coerce their families into cooperating with the regime. Some of the orphanages were run by major European charity SOS Children’s Villages, whose leadership knew for years and remained silent.

Hundreds of cases confirmed; thousands still missing

Over nine months, Syrian and international reporters from six media outlets built a database of children hidden by the Syrian regime as part of the Syria’s Stolen Children investigation.

Following the fall of the al-Assad regime in December 2024, we reviewed thousands of leaked and gathered documents with the names of over 300 children who were confined to orphanages by Syrian intelligence, some of them for years. Analysis of these records shows many were still toddlers when they were taken from families, and several were newborns. The files reveal systematic coordination between intelligence agencies, government ministries, and Syrian and international orphanages.

We found evidence of missing and possible falsified records that indicate the actual number of children who disappeared into orphanages is likely much higher. Some children were falsely recorded as abandoned orphans; others were referred to by new names. Families are still searching for at least 3,700 children who went missing under al-Assad.

Orphanages used as prisons; children as pawns

Over 100 interviews with families, whistleblowers and officials uncovered disturbing new details that undermine the orphanages’ justification that they were simply protecting children whose parents were jailed. Most parents were refused information about where their children were being taken. When grandparents and uncles did track them down, orphanages often refused to give their children back and sometimes denied they were even there.

Layla and Layan – two “disappeared” children ​taken in by SOS Syria, who have since been found by their mother. Thousands are still missing. | Image: BBC Eye / Jess Kelly

While living at the orphanages, the children remained under the strict control of the security services. Leaked intelligence files show that top security officials ordered orphanages to keep the children’s presence confidential, deny relatives’ custody and ask permission before making any decisions about the children, such as whether they could attend school. Staff were told not to talk to them about their families and to keep them out of publicity materials and public activities.

Intelligence records show why: the children were explicitly being held at orphanages in order to pressure their parents to collaborate with the regime. Many children were only reunited with their families as part of a prisoner exchange with armed opposition groups. Some, the children of suspected foreign fighters, were deported to Russia and Iraq.

A major international charity was complicit and kept silent

The largest number of children in our database were sent to orphanages run by an Austria-headquartered charity, SOS Children’s Villages International, which operates in more than 130 countries and raises around €1.6 billion annually, including from the UN, European governments and personal donations.

SOS’ top leaders kept this quiet until the regime fell, seven years after whistleblowers first informed international staff. During this time, the international charity did not apologise, compensate or offer support to families. A senior staff member told us “senior executives didn’t want to know the details and hid away from concrete action and responsibility.” Most of the children were returned to government custody and until today, SOS says it does not know what happened to them.

Many families with missing children say Austria-headquartered charity SOS Children’s Villages was complicit in their disappearance and has offered minimal support since the fall of the regime | Image: BBC Eye / Jess Kelly

The charity, whose Syria branch was led by the daughter of a close Assad aide, says it stopped accepting children of detainees in 2018. But official records indicate that intelligence agencies continued to refer several children to SOS as late as 2022. SOS denies receiving the requests or the children.

SOS Syria is funded by European donations as well the United Kingdom and United States. Bashar al-Assad was sanctioned by the EU in 2011, his wife Asmaa al-Assad in 2012. But several whistleblowers told us that most of the senior positions at SOS Syria were appointed directly by the Assad palace and that Asma al-Assad played a leading role in the organisation. SOS Children’s Villages International said it is investigating what happened in Syria and said it was not in line with their usual policies.

Families lack support or a path to accountability

We spoke to over 100 families, orphanage employees and government officials. Some parents still lack basic details about where their children were held. Their children remain traumatised by the forced separation during formative early years. Many more families are still searching for any clues that their children might still be alive, their identities and whereabouts potentially lost in the chaotic orphanage archives.

Syria’s new transitional government has struggled to respond to the families’ needs and demands for answers and accountability. An official inquiry established in January was folded into a new committee in May, which led to a series of high profile arrests in July, but it has few resources and is yet to release any findings.

Reem al-Kari has still not found her son Karim, who was aged two-and-a-half when he went missing in 2013 | Image: BBC Eye / Jess Kelly

Leading human rights lawyer Kimberly Motely says, “the key findings of the project indicate that the children could be the victims of crimes against humanity, particularly in the forms of imprisonment or deprivation of liberty, persecution, and enforced disappearance.”

Syria’s Stolen Children is a joint investigation coordinated by Lighthouse Reports in partnership with Syrian investigative journalists from Women Who Won the War and SIRAJ and international journalists from BBC Eye, The Observer, Der Spiegel and Trouw, and also published by Sowt and Al-Jumhuriya.

METHODS

When al-Assad’s security state suddenly collapsed, journalists, activists and families had access to sources, locations and documents that were previously unimaginable under the decades-long dictatorship. Some families began to speak out about a secret they’d held for years – that their children had been forced into orphanages.

To understand the scale and inner workings of this system of state-run disappearances, over nine months we conducted more than 100 interviews with families, current and former orphanage staff in Syria, government officials, whistleblowers, activists, lawyers and other witnesses. We spoke to over 50 SOS insiders around the globe and scrutinised their internal investigations, financial documents and public statements.

We obtained thousands of official documents from the Syrian Ministry of Social Affairs, Airforce Intelligence and orphanages in Syria, including confidential correspondence, detainee lists, referral files, log books and detailed case records, making sure not to remove or otherwise interfere with these documents in order to preserve evidence for potential future justice mechanisms.

In order to authenticate the documents, we carefully reviewed them for inconsistencies and compared their contents to publicly available information, including social media posts, media and human rights reports and detailed documentation collected by Syrian civil society over the years. In some cases, we accessed legal records to verify charges against parents. When the same children appeared in files from multiple sources, we cross-checked key information such as file numbers, names and dates of birth across different sources.

Using these documents, we built a database of verified children of national security detainees who were transferred to orphanages, which ultimately included over 320 unique names. To distinguish between them and the thousands of minors arrested by Syrian security services for political activity or routine crimes, we applied the following minimum criteria:

• Child was under the age of 18 at the time of arrest
• Arresting agency was one of four intelligence services, not civilian polic
• Child was not personally accused of any crime, but an immediate family member was accused of a political or national security-related crime
• Child was separated from their guardian(s) and transferred to a civilian childcare organization without any attempt to locate relatives or other suitable caregivers

We gathered contact information for parents and relatives through open sources and our networks of contacts. Informed by trauma experts on how to interview families experiencing “ambiguous loss”, we spoke to the families of 54 children placed in orphanages by the security services, as well as dozens of others still searching for missing children. We compiled information about each of the 320 cases through interviews and documents, which we used to analyse key trends in how and why the regime hid children in orphanages.

STORYLINES

Over 100,000 people went missing under the Assad regime, including thousands of children. Syria has one of the largest populations of missing people in the world. After the regime fell in December 2024, thousands poured out of prisons and some mass graves were discovered. But most families found no trace of their loved ones.

Syria’s Stolen Children, a documentary by BBC Eye, follows the journeys of three mothers who are still trying to find their missing children, reunite with those held in orphanages or seek justice for what happened to their family. They confront a labyrinth bureaucracy, missing and falsified records, and broken promises.

The system that swallowed their children was overseen by the top levels of al-Assad’s security apparatus and government, Al-Jumhiriya reports. In a podcast series, released on Sowt as well as Syrian radio stations, grandmothers describe begging the orphanages to see their children, while jailed parents were taunted with their disappearance during interrogations.

Mohammed Ghbeis was a few days old when he was taken by security agents from an incubator in a Damascus hospital. His mother, still recovering from a C-section, was also detained, along with seven other family members. The next time she saw Mohammed, during a prison visit, he was a year old, already taking his first steps. They did not recognise each other.

Mohammad and his cousins spent three years living in orphanages before they were released in a prisoner exchange. They are still living with the impact of those lost years. The Observer reports how families like Mohammad’s were harmed by the very institutions meant to protect them, and documents years of allegations of abuse across SOS’ global operations. In Syria, the investigation found evidence staff subjected young children to virginity tests and abuse allegations were not properly investigated.

The charity, founded in 1949 by Austrian Hermann Gmeiner, is popular in Europe and collects millions of euros in personal donations. Der Spiegel reports how a German association of SOS funded the majority of SOS Syria’s budget until this year, when it decided to phase out funding because “the well-being of the children… can no longer be reliably guaranteed.” In the Netherlands, Trouw reports that the Dutch association has also suspended funds. SIRAJ reports that SOS had partnered with Asma al-Assad’s Syria Trust for Development for many years, despite international sanctions on the al-Assads.

The post Syria’s Stolen Children appeared first on SIRAJ.

The post From the Steppes of Donbas to the Deserts of Syria appeared first on SIRAJ.

It’s an important distinction, because little is known about Tice’s disappearance. His mother, Debra Tice, recently traveled to Syria in hopes of learning details about his detention and whereabouts.

“I feel very strongly that Austin’s here, and I think he knows I’m here,” she told Reuters in mid-January in Damascus.

Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ), a collective of journalists and OCCRP partner, found the documents in late December while combing through files left behind during the hasty collapse of the Assad regime earlier that month.

The documents are dated March 4, 2013, about seven months after Tice’s presumed capture. They suggest that he was alive at the time, but give no further details. If alive today, Tice would be 43.

SIRAJ interviewed a former prisoner who said he had been detained by Syrian intelligence in 2018 in a cell next to one that he believed held Tice. The man, who requested anonymity due to security concerns, said he did not know who Tice was at the time. But he recalled that guards would bring an English translator to speak to the prisoner, who they referred to as Austin.

“The translator would ask him, ‘Austin, what do you want to eat today?’ I could hear the translator talking to Austin directly, because I was close to his cell,” the former prisoner said.

Former members of the Assad regime who could have information about Tice have fled the country or gone into hiding since a rebel coalition took control on December 8.

And Syrian officials were uncooperative before the regime fell, according to a person who has been involved for more than a decade in U.S. efforts to find Tice.

“In numerous meetings and exchanges with the Syrian government we were never able to… obtain proof of life or an admission that they had had him at any point,” said the person, speaking anonymously to avoid disrupting ongoing search efforts.

Tice was detained at a checkpoint after leaving a Damascus suburb as he headed for Lebanon, according to a website run by his family. Just over a month later, the family was sent a 43-second video showing Tice with a group of armed men. The family never received any more information after that video, which had been titled “Austin Tice is Alive.”

The documents discovered by SIRAJ are written in Arabic and include a list of journalists who snuck into Syria to cover the war. Among those listed along with Tice are reporters from BBC and CNN, as well as Spain’s El Pais and France’s Le Monde newspapers.

Also listed is Marie Colvin who was killed along with French photographer Remi Ochlik in a targeted attack by Syrian forces in the city of Homs.

“She entered the country illegally to Homs—Baba Omar in the first month of 2012 and she died there,” reads the matter-of-fact entry.

The entry for Tice says simply: “He entered Syria illegally at the Turkish border in mid-June and he spent several days in Khan Shaikhoun where he met individuals who call themselves the Free Army.”

That town in northwestern Syria gained infamy in 2017 for the use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces. The Syrian Free Army was the name given to opposition forces who rose up against the Assad regime in 2011, leading to a nearly 14-year civil war.

The advocacy group Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF) said 23 journalists remained in prison the day the Assad regime fell. Another seven journalists “were victims of enforced disappearances — abducted to unknown locations.”

Assad’s regime and its affiliates have killed at least 181 media professionals since 2011, according to RSF.

The post Syrian Intelligence Files Offer Clues in Case of Abducted American Reporter appeared first on SIRAJ.