The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mirjana Spoljaric, said that finding out what happened to the people who disappeared during the civil war in Syria will be a huge task that could take several years
The war in Syria began in 2011, when the government of President Bashar Al-Assad violently suppressed protests against the regime, leaving a painful legacy: the unknown whereabouts of tens of thousands of people, many of whom are believed to have died in Syrian prisons, possibly buried in mass graves after being tortured.
The war has already claimed more than half a million lives.
With the recent fall of the Assad regime and the release of thousands of prisoners by Islamist rebels, there is some hope for families, but many Syrians are still searching for their missing loved ones.
Spoljaric explained in an interview with AFP that the ICRC is working closely with the new interim authorities, non-governmental organizations and the Syrian Red Crescent to gather information and provide answers to families as quickly as possible.
“The task is enormous,” she said.
“It will take years to get clarity and inform everyone involved.
And there will be cases that we will never be able to identify.”
The ICRC is dealing with a huge backlog of cases; until recently, it was following 35,000 cases, and with the creation of a new hotline in December, another 8,000 requests have been added.
But that may be only part of the total.
The organization is encouraging the new Syrian government, now led mainly by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), which split from Al-Qaeda, to cooperate in building institutions and capacities to manage and protect data on the missing.
Spoljaric warned of the urgency of acting before valuable information is lost.
“We cannot rule out that data will be lost.
But we need to act quickly to preserve what exists and store it centrally to track individual cases,” she told AFP.
According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 100,000 detainees have died in custody since 2011, due to torture or appalling conditions.
Published in 01/08/2025 04h46
Text adapted by AI (Grok) and translated via Google API in the English version. Images from public image libraries or credits in the caption.
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