The families of Syria’s disappeared have put up posters in Damascus desperately pleading for information [Getty]
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has said that over 177,000 people in the country are now officially classified as forcibly disappeared.
In a new report released on the 14th anniversary of the 2011 Syrian uprising against the regime of ousted President Bashar al-Assad, SNHR said that it had increased the number of people it had previously classified as forcibly disappeared to 177,021.
These include 160,123 forcibly disappeared by Assad regime forces. Of these, 3,736 were children and 8,014 were women.
SNHR said 16,898 people were forcibly disappeared by other parties to the conflict, which over 14 years of conflict have included the Islamic State extremist group, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and the Islamist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham group which spearheaded the Syrian rebel assault which overthrew Assad in December 2024.
Last December, SNHR said that of the 136,614 people it had documented as forcibly disappeared at the time, only around 24,000 had been found in the Assad regime’s jails. The rest were most likely dead, SNHR director Fadel Abdul Ghany said.
Thousands of prisoners were freed from the regime’s prisons following the rebel assault but many more were not found, despite desperate appeals from their families for information.
SNHR also said in the report that it had documented the killing of 234,415 civilians throughout the Syrian conflict, which began in March 2011, following the brutal suppression of protests by the Assad regime.
It said that 202,012 civilians had been killed by regime forces while 32,133 had been killed by other parties to the conflict.
The total number of people killed is estimated to be much higher, at over 500,000, but most of these have not been documented by the SNHR.
The SNHR said that its latest report comes during a long awaited transition period following Assad regime rule, and added that the Syrian people had “suffered enormous human and economic losses and made great sacrifices for freedom, dignity, and justice”.
