Syria's Missing Children

0:00I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story. Over the winter, NPR's Diyah Hadid was reporting in Syria. Rebel fighters had just overthrown the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. In her weeks of reporting, Diyah discovered something shocking. It wasn't just men and women who were imprisoned by the Assad regime. Children were also taken, and many remain unaccounted for. Today on The Sunday Story, what happened to the disappeared children of Syria? Diyah Hadid brings us the story from her reporting in Damascus after the break.

0:45Stay with us.

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1:35You can invest and trade on your own. Plus, get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award-winning service, low costs, and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more. This message comes from NPR's sponsor, Odoo Business Management Software. Some say Odoo is like fertilizer because it promotes growth. Others say it's a magic beanstalk, scaling with efficiency. Odoo, exactly what a business needs. Sign up today at odoo.com. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. This is a Sunday story from Up First. NPR's Dia Hadid joins me now to talk about her reporting from Damascus.

2:21Dia, I know you were sent to Syria in the chaotic weeks following the Assad's regime's fall. How did you come across this story about missing children? Aisha, as I was seeing what was happening in Damascus, I couldn't stop thinking about the children. I'd covered conflicts like this for so long, and I knew there'd likely be a large number of kids in orphanages whose parents had been detained or even disappeared during the Civil War. And I kept thinking, what was happening to them now? And let me tell you, this was hard for me. I have two young kids, so stories about vulnerable children really hit home.

3:03And I try not to take too many long trips away from them. So for this assignment, I felt like I needed their permission. So I told them, I'm going to Syria so I can meet little ones who don't have a mama. So is that okay to give your mama to some other kids for a little while? And my girls agreed. That's very sweet of your girls. So I began calling groups that care for vulnerable children like UNICEF, the Red Cross, other big organizations that run programs in Syria. And one group I reached was SOS Children's Villages. That's an international aid group headquartered in Austria. It has branches all around the world, including in war zones.

3:47And a spokesperson for them told me they were coming to terms with a revelation that was shaking the organisation. Their Damascus branch had secretly taken in children whose mothers had been detained by intelligence agents. and this revelation was triggering a lot of anger in Syrian society. Well, I mean, and rightfully so. How did you investigate these allegations? Well, after getting this tip, me and producer Mirna Rashid, we went to other orphanages across Damascus and we asked, did intelligence agents force you to secretly take in children? And what happened to those children? And what did you find out?

4:35Well, it was really hard to get answers at first. Orphanages did not want to speak to us. The situation felt so uncertain. The Assad regime had just fallen at the time and people online were accusing them of collaborating with the former regime. But as we investigated, we finally met an official at the Ministry of Social Affairs who also wanted to know the answers. You see, the ministry had been overtaken by rebels who formed an interim government and Syrian families were asking them for help to find their children. So this official helped us by calling up orphanage directors and telling them that they had to talk to us.

5:19He requested anonymity through this process because he wasn't meant to be speaking to the media, let alone helping us. Did you manage to speak to any parents whose children were taken away? Yeah, we spoke to one orphanage director who wanted us to hear from the detained women themselves. So she connected us to a couple of mothers. One of those women was Sukaina Shbawi. We reached her at her home in a village in the southern Syrian province of Daraa. that's where the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad first erupted. She was keen to chat. So Ayesha, this is what Shbawi told me. She says that in the fall of 2018, Syrian security forces turned up one day and they dragged her and her daughter Hiba from their home.

6:16Hiba was just two. Shbawi believes they were taken hostage to pressure her husband's brothers to surrender to government forces. That was a pretty common tactic at the time because the brothers had joined the uprising against the regime. Shbawi and Heba were driven to holding cells run by the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. That was one of the most feared and violent arms of the Syrian regime. Guards pushed her and Heba into a cold, dark cell with about six other women and their children. Nearly all the women's cells also held children, but the conditions there were not conducive to staying alive.

7:08Jubewi says they were only allowed to use the bathroom three times a day, not enough for little kids, so the mothers procured a bucket for the children to use as a toilet, and they emptied it out whenever they could. There was never enough food. An egg once a week, 15 olives twice a week, plain yoghurt every four days, sometimes jam, boiled rice one day, boiled lentils the next, boiled potatoes after that. Shbawi says she gave Heba her share so she'd stay. alive. But still, her daughter was losing weight. She became infested with lice. And she says 20 days after she arrived, prison guards banged on their cell doors and told the women, get your children ready.

7:58It was chaos. The women were asking, why do they want the children? And even now, years later, Shbaoui cries as she remembers this. One woman who'd been detained for a while told them, say goodbye to your children now because they're going to take them away. Don't make a fuss or they'll put you in solitary.

8:31But some women wouldn't let go, so the guards came in and took their children by force.

8:41Shbeawi drew Heba into her lap. She put her arms around her and hugged her.

8:49She said, you're going to a better place. And when this ends, you'll be with me and I'll hug you. Shbeawi hoped that was true. She prayed. Oh God, protect her with your watchful eye that never sleeps. As the months went on, Jfawi watched more mothers come into the cell. And she watched them have their children snatched away, including newborn babies. She says pregnant women detained alongside her were taken to hospital when they went into labour. After birth, the women were returned to their lock-up with their babies. They were allowed to nurse them for a few weeks, and then the guards took the babies away.

9:37It was a fate Shbewe feared as well, because when she was arrested with Heba, her two-year-old, she was also a few weeks pregnant. But after almost eight months of detainment, and weeks before she was due to give birth, she was finally sentenced, and she was shifted to a notorious prison called Adra, She still doesn't know what her crime was, but in prison she was told she'd be released soon and she was given one phone call. So she called her sister and asked if somebody could pick her up and she told her sister, Heba isn't with me. I don't know where she is.

10:20Shbewi returned to her village heavily pregnant. Her husband by that point had abandoned her and married another woman. This happened a lot to women who'd been detained. When they were freed, they weren't greeted as heroes. They often faced immense stigma over the possibility that they'd been sexually assaulted while confined. Shbowi jokes that it would have been better if her husband had died in a Syrian prison so she could tell their kids that he was a martyr. It was Shbowi's brother who began the search for Heba He heard that she might be in an orphanage and so he went banging on their doors across Damascus.

11:01And after three months of running around, the intelligence agency that had detained Shbawi finally returned Heba to him. Shbawi was in their village waiting. She'd just given birth and was recovering. And then they arrived. She says when she saw her daughter, their reunion was bittersweet.

11:27Shbowi says she came to her girl and asked her, do you remember me? And Heba replied, mama.

11:38She says, I hugged her in my arms and I saw her.

11:46But as the days wore on, Heba grew distant. She screamed when Shbowi tried to bathe her, feed her, dress her. it was like she blamed her mother for their separation. But Sukaina Shbowi, at least, was one of the lucky ones. Her daughter came back. So, Tia, I just want to interrupt you here. Do you have a sense of the scale of this? How many children were being taken away from their mothers like Hibba? I'm not sure we'll ever be able to get an accurate count, but a respected monitoring group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, they estimate some 3 ,700 children remain missing after they were detained during the war by Assad regime forces.

12:36And based on our own investigation, we were able to confirm that at least 300 children were taken away from their mothers while they were being held by the directorate, including one baby girl who died while she was in the care of an orphanage. That was just in Damascus. We weren't able to reach orphanages in other parts of Syria at the time when we did our reporting. And in Damascus, children were handed over to four orphanages and care centres. Intelligence agents ordered them to keep the children's existence a secret. The practice became so common that orphanage workers even had a name for these kids, security placement children.

13:21Security placement children. It sounds so bureaucratic. Yeah. And just like they were handed over by intelligence agents, days, weeks, months, even years later, intelligence agents took the children back. Orphanage directors presumed the children were given back to their mothers once they were released from detention. And that did happen, like Heber Shbaoui, who was returned to her mother, Skaina Shbaoui. But these children aren't orphans as, you know, as I understand it, as, you know, these are children who still have mothers, and in many cases also fathers who were still alive. First, Aisha, it's important to understand that an orphan in Muslim-majority countries like Syria is not a child who's lost their parents.

14:12It's a child who's lost their father. And often children are handed over to orphanages because the mother can no longer support them financially or because if she'd like to remarry, her new husband may not want to raise what conservative society sees as somebody else's kid. Okay, so it sounds like Syrian orphanages were always pretty full of children, sometimes abandoned by their own parents. But then there was this shift. During the Civil War, they started taking in children whose parents had not given them up, but the parents had been forcefully detained by intelligence agents. Yeah. Dia, how did people first come to know that these orphanages were taking in children this way?

15:04Yeah, the fates of these children of detained mothers first bubbled to the surface through the activism of one man, Hassan Al-Abbasi.

15:17Al-Abbasi is a Canadian Syrian engineer who lives in Canada, and he's been searching for his sister, Rania Al-Abbasi. She was taken by Assad forces on March 11, 2013, alongside her husband and their six children, from Dima, the eldest at 14, to Layan, who was two years old at the time. Aranya's relatives believed that her decision to give food to families displaced by fighting at the time made her a target. Aranya very quickly became one of the most prominent women held by the Assad regime. That's partly because of Al-Abbasi's activism, and partly because Aranya was a national chess champion in Syria.

16:01The US State Department still advocates for her release. And Hassan al-Abbasi keeps trying to find clues to his sister's fate and of her family. Sometimes he uploads old home videos of Rania's daughters to sad music just to remind people that they're maybe still out there.

16:24Then last year, after the Assad regime fell, Al-Abbasi made a remarkable claim that aired on a popular Syrian opposition television station that he was told by an anonymous friend that Rania's children were being hidden in an orphanage. Al-Abbasi says he sent friends to ask around the orphanages immediately and he began to cast doubt on the Damascus branch of the SOS children's villages.

17:03Al-Abbasi's claim was picked up by other Syrians on social media who began accusing the orphanages of human trafficking. As this unfolded, SOS Children's Villages issued a statement. They acknowledged that their Damascus branch had taken in security placement children over a period of four years until the charity's headquarters found out and ordered their Damascus branch to stop. The regional director, Tom Malvert, who's a Swedish national, told me they're trying to rectify the situation now as much as they can. We will do everything to open the books and the records and we want to contribute to tracing children and families.

17:48SOS Children's Villages has trawled its records to find 139 children who'd been placed there. But they can only confirm that 21 Syrian children were reunited with their families as of this April. Malvit says he believes the staff were operating under extreme conditions. They were trying to do their best by the children who were appearing at their doorstep. And after Malvit's statement, multiple orphanage directors spoke up to defend the work they continued to do in Syria. These orphanages, however imperfect, have played a vital role in Syria, particularly through the Civil War. They remain one of the only places that vulnerable kids can receive care.

18:31From our interviews with orphanage directors, patterns emerged as to how these placements happened. Agents delivered the children in white vans to the orphanage. They came with a paper listing the child's first name and a demand to keep the child's existence totally secret. it. And one institution appears to have obeyed that order to the letter. When we come back, Dia visits a crowded orphanage that took in the children of detained mothers. Stay with us.

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20:02Michelin isn't just making exceptional tires. They're helping build a better future. Motion for life. More at michelinman.com slash y hyphen Michelin slash innovation. We're back with NPR's Diyah Hadid and her story about the missing children of Syria. The Life Melody Complex, or Tajammar Lahn al-Hayat, is a gated complex. It's perched on a hill overlooking Damascus. Syrians appear angriest at this orphanage more than any other. That's because it was once sponsored by Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syria's former ruler. She used to visit the institution, cameras at the ready to show her with orphans.

20:47She was photographed alongside a long-time board member, Nada Al-Ghabara. We met Al-Ghabara on a winter's day. She walked us through the orphanage. She wanted to show us how well they care for the children. There's about 400 boys and girls here, from babies to women in their early 20s who have nowhere else to go. we met toddlers who were warmly dressed watching cartoons.

21:19In other rooms, babies napped two or three to a cot. There just wasn't enough room for all the babies that had been abandoned here. As we walked, Al-Khabra proudly told us she's familiar with all the children in the orphanage. She laughed and said she even arranges the circumcisions of all the baby boys. Muslim boys are expected to be circumcised. She paid for the weddings of the older kids. She was really proud of that. She pulled up one video on her phone of one of those weddings.

21:58But Al-Habra says she only found out that intelligence agents were delivering children to the orphanage after the Assad regime was toppled.

22:10She says that's because she didn't spend any time in the administrative building where children were handed over. She was with the children in the main building, the orphanage, and she says she didn't notice some of the children suddenly arriving or leaving.

22:32but life melody complex actually did keep records of the security placement children who were transferred into their care copies of those records were handed over to the new interim government an official showed NPR a list of 45 children who were placed there by intelligence agents. That official told us there was a stack of pages an inch thick filled with other names of other security placement children who were cycled there over the years. But the official didn't show us that stack of papers. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from members of the former Assad regime.

23:13They said, my life is worth the price of a bullet. During this investigation, I visited every single orphanage I could find in Damascus to figure out if there were patterns to these children being hidden away. One of them was Almobarra Nisaia, which is on a busy Damascus road. Here, the director kept detailed records of the 50 children who were deposited by intelligence agents.

23:48Inside, Director Analbaba is chatting to some colleagues when I met her in December. Compared to what we heard at the Life Melody Orphanage, Albaba was sharply aware of the transfer of security placement kids into her orphanage's care. Over bracing Turkish coffee, she tells us the first time an agent came knocking with a baby boy to hand over, she didn't believe it. She tells me, I even asked for the man's ID. I said, how do I know you haven't kidnapped these children? Al-Baba tells me, this man looks at her and says, you're asking me for my ID? Do you understand who I am? and Al-Baba says it began to sink in.