What Happened to Syria's Lost Children?
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About a decade ago in Syria, when the Assad regime was focused on crushing an uprising challenging its rule, it faced a problem. It had too many children in detention. These children had been swept up with their mothers by regime forces. An NPR investigation has found that intelligence agents placed over 350 of these children, who had mothers, in orphanages across Damascus. The agents ordered the orphanages to keep the children secret.

Now that the Assad regime has fallen, NPR's Dia Hadid tells us about the efforts of parents to find out what happened to their children. In the fall of 2018, Assad security forces dragged a mother and her child from their home. They were taken hostage to pressure the woman's male relatives to surrender. The men were rebels. They joined the uprising against the regime that began in 2011 in their hometown of Daraa.

That woman was Sukaina Djibawi. She recalls she and her daughter Hiba were dumped in a dank cell, crammed with other women, children, babies. The little ones didn't stay for long. God soon ordered the mothers to hand them over.

Jbaoui says some of the mothers were crying and wouldn't let go of their kids. So the guards took them by force.

Shbawi says she held Heba. She was just over two years old. She was infested with lice and losing weight. Heba, she told her, you're going to a better place. And she hoped that was true. Shbawi was freed a few months later. She had no idea where her daughter was. Her brother spent weeks pleading with bureaucrats to learn where Heba was and obtain papers to get her released.

That was in the spring of 2019. Shbawi says their reunion, after seven months apart, was bittersweet. Hiba called her mama, but she didn't want to hug her. And yet, Shbawi is one of the lucky ones. Her daughter came back. I love you, baby.

The fates of the children of detained mothers emerged after rebel forces overran Damascus in early December and toppled the Assad regime. Reports say that President Assad has left Damascus by plane. That's when directors of some Damascus orphanages posted videos and did interviews explaining how intelligence agents came in white vans to their orphanages. They handed over children with a note demanding total secrecy.

Weeks, even years later, agents took the children back. The director said they presumed the children were reunited with their mothers. One director, Ronald Barber, later told me they didn't have a choice. The agents handing over children, she says, belonged to the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, notorious for its torture, sexual assault...

and murders of detainees. She says if we refused, they would have minced us into hamburger patties. The orphanages who took in the children of detained mothers included the Damascus branch of the SOS Children's Village. Tom Malvert, the regional director, says the Damascus branch took in those children over four years without telling the charity's headquarters.

Malvitt says they're now combing through branch records to work out how many children were placed there because staff didn't properly track them at the time. So far, they've found records for 139 children secretly placed at SOS Children's Village, but they can only confirm that 20 Syrian children were returned to their families.

They're working with authorities to try to locate the rest. We want to contribute to tracing children and families. What happened to the children of detained mothers at another Damascus orphanage remains murky.

The Life Melody Complex is a gated series of buildings on the outskirts of the capital. On a recent day, board member Nada Al-Ghabara introduced us to the children in their care. Toddlers watched funny cartoons. Carers fussed over crying babies.

Al-Ghabra told us she's volunteered with the orphanage for years and knows most of the children. But she insists she had no idea that some of the children were not orphans, but were actually the children of detained mothers. Copies of the orphanage records were handed over to the Ministry of Social Affairs after rebels established a new interim government. A

An official showed NPR a list of 45 children placed in the Life Melody complex by intelligence agents. They say there may have been hundreds more over the years. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from members of the former Assad regime. It's unclear what happened to those children. These revelations have provoked fury among Syrians.

But they've also kindled hope among the thousands of families whose children went missing during Syria's long war. We meet Hani al-Farrah at an orphanage while he was searching for three of his children.

They were detained with his pregnant wife at a regime checkpoint in 2013. Al-Farah says they were taken to pressure him to give information about rebels operating in his Damascus suburb. He says he refused to collaborate with regime forces and for a long time he thought his wife and children were killed because of that.

But now, maybe he hopes his kids might have been left in orphanages. He shows their faded pictures to orphanage director Rana Al-Baba. Al-Baba shakes her head sadly, and so she directs him to another orphanage, the House of Mercy, tucked in a Damascus alleyway.

There, girls practice a show to celebrate Syria's newfound freedom. The director, Bara' al-Ayoubi, tells us intelligence agents ordered them to take in about 100 children over the years, including babies of women who gave birth in detention.

Alayoubi says those babies were often sick. One newborn girl died shortly after she was handed over. Alayoubi tells us she tried her best. She lobbied intelligence agents to let older children visit their detained mothers. And in 2019, she succeeded. So in the waning years of the Assad regime, some detained mothers knew where their children were.

So in early December, after rebels toppled the Assad regime, rebels smashed open prison cells holding women. From there, orphanage director Bara' al-Ayoubi says many of them rushed to her orphanage.

Al-Ayubi shows us images of that day, mothers and fathers tightly hugging their children. It's a moment Al-Farrah can only dream of as he searches for his missing wife and children.

A few years ago, Al-Farrah tried to move on. He remarried, had three more sons, moved to this busy Damascus street. But now his little boys keep asking about their older, missing half-siblings, especially their sister Islam. Alhamdulillah.

She was five when she disappeared. Today, she'd be 17. But the boys only know her as a little girl with sandy hair. Al-Farras says his sons ask him, why don't you go get Islam? I tell them, he says, I swear, I'm trying. Dia Hadid, NPR News, Damascus.

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