The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that many children, detained alongside their parents who were later tortured and executed, were transferred to foster care centre (Getty Images)
Children of Syrian detainees held in Assad regime prisons were reportedly handed over to foster care after being imprisoned alongside their parents who had endured atrocities ranging from torture to execution, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said on Tuesday.
Many children were falsely labelled as “homeless”, while the fate of their parents was concealed, and were transferred by prison authorities to foster care centres under the former regime’s Ministry of Social Affairs, the report said.
SOHR also gathered harrowing accounts from employees at state-affiliated childcare centres, who told the UK-based watchdog that security forces had arrested entire families, including children.Â
“Those children later were integrated with homeless children and children of unknown parentage with the aim of obliterating their identity and covering up the crime,” SOHR said in its report.
Some security officials allegedly attempted to return to these centres to destroy evidence, including documents that could implicate the Assad regime in human rights abuses. The evidence could be used in future trials to hold those responsible accountable, SOHR said.
According to testimony given to SOHR by a Syrian mother, her husband and children were arrested together several years ago. Â
She was later informed of her husband’s death in prison.
SOHR reported that despite the woman’s persistent efforts to locate her children, she was unable to find them, as security officials denied having any information about them.Â
“After the fall of the regime, she managed to find and take back her children at a childcare centre in Damascus… she [earlier] found out that security services had delivered the children to the centre following the death of their father,” SOHR said.
The leaked documents not only exposed crimes against Syrian children but also reveal the presence of children of Russian descent, whose mothers had been in detention, SOHR reported.
The documents provide “irrefutable” evidence against officials involved in these crimes, SOHR said, urging both local and international human rights organisations to investigate and protect these records from potential destruction.
“We also call for the monitoring of children in childcare centres and for checking the identities of children who are staying there,” SOHR said.Â
SOHR also issued another report on Wednesday, detailing the brutal physical and psychological torture of 300 civilians in the former regime’s prisons.Â
Those targeted were arrested under various circumstances and for different charges, and their bodies have yet to be found. Â
However, the report did not specify the timeframe or the specific security branches involved. Â
Since the beginning of 2024, 1,400 civilians were recorded as killed due to torture and inadequate healthcare in regime prisons and security centres, SOHR reported.
Among the victims were a political activist, a university student, a writer, an engineer, a civilian with US nationality, a Lebanese civilian, and a regime army defector.Â
Meanwhile, former US ambassador-at-large for war crimes, Stephen Rapp, told news agency Reuters on Tuesday that evidence emerging from mass grave sites in Syria has revealed a state-run “machinery of death” under the toppled leader Bashar al-Assad.
He estimated that more than 100,000 people have been tortured and murdered since 2013.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are estimated to have been killed since 2011, when Assad’s brutal crackdown on protests against his rule escalated into a full-scale war.
Both Assad and his father Hafez, who preceded him as president and died in 2000, have long been accused by human rights groups and governments of widespread extrajudicial killings, including mass executions within the country’s prison system, as well as the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people.
