DAMASCUS, Syria — In the fall of 2018, Syrian security forces dragged a mother and her 2-year-old daughter, Hiba, from their home and detained them.
The mother, Sukayna Jebawi, says that they were taken hostage to pressure her husband's brothers to surrender to government forces. The brothers were part of an unprecedented uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad that erupted in 2011.
But this strategy of detaining family members of rebels created a new problem for Syrian security forces: What to do with all the children they were detaining?
Jebawi told NPR that she and her daughter were crammed in a dank, dark cell with other women and children. She said Hiba was losing weight for lack of food. Lice infested her hair. She developed a rash. "The conditions there were not conducive to keeping children alive," she said.
Nearly a month after the two were detained, Jebawi recalls, prison guards banged on their cell and ordered the detained mothers to hand over their children. "It was chaos," she said. "Some women held onto their children, so the guards took them by force."
Jebawi says she held her daughter and told her: "You are going to a better place, and when this ends, I'll hug you again." She hoped that was true. And she prayed: Oh, God, protect my daughter with your watchful eye that never sleeps."
The mother was released in March of 2019 — and the family began a search for the little girl.
Hiba is one of hundreds of Syrian children referred to as "security placement" kids — handed over to an orphanage while their mothers remained in detention.
An investigation by NPR suggests that by 2014, Syria's most notorious intelligence agency had decided to move the children of women they were detaining to at least four orphanages across Damascus. After gathering data from orphanages NPR found that the Air Force Intelligence Directorate hid more than 300 children in these institutions. It was not possible to reach members of the Directorate: They have fled Syria or have been in hiding since rebels toppled the Assad regime in early November.
The number may have been even higher. One person with knowledge of the largest orphanage in Damascus, where at least dozens of children may have been placed, told NPR that she suspected the orphanage took in many more. She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing loyalists of the former Assad regime would punish her for speaking out.
NPR extensively investigated what happened to the children of female detainees. Some information has also emerged in Syrian media and on their social networks as well as in a BBC article — triggering outrage among some Syrians, who have come to see the orphanages as complicit in the suffering wrought by the former Assad regime.
For this investigation, NPR viewed official documents and spoke to more than a dozen people with knowledge of the process, including orphanage workers and mothers of children who were taken into orphanages. They spoke to NPR weeks after rebels toppled the Assad regime in early December and established a new interim government.
No choice for the children – and the orphanage staff
Orphanage directors said they had no choice but to hide the children, who were handed over by a notoriously violent arm of the Assad regime: the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. "They would have put us through a mincer if we asked them anything," said Rana al-Baba, director of an orphanage run by the Muslim Women's Charitable Association. "They would have turned me into kebab. Or a hamburger. Do you really think we could challenge them?"
Orphanage directors told NPR that most of these children tended to be under 10 years old; some were born while the mother was in detention. Like Hiba, they often arrived malnourished, screaming for their mothers and sick with respiratory illnesses and skin conditions. Detained pregnant women had to hand over their babies just weeks after they gave birth. Those babies often arrived in poor shape, said Bara al-Ayoubi, director of the Dar al-Rahma orphanage.
She said one baby girl died soon after she was handed over to her institution.
Directors of two orphanages said most of these children were Syrian but perhaps a dozen or so were Russian and French — likely children of foreign soldiers fighting for ISIS to oust Assad.
The orphanage directors said days, weeks and even years after the children were placed in their care, intelligence agents returned to pick them up. The directors told NPR they presumed that the children were returned to mothers who were eventually freed from detention.
But it is unclear what happened to many of the children.
Of the four orphanages NPR contacted, two said they tried to trace the children after they were returned to intelligence agents — they wanted to confirm they were returned to their families. As for the two other orphanages — the headquarters of one only recently began trying to determine how many children were secretly placed with them. The other does not acknowledge that any children were secretly placed there. That has complicated the search to trace those children now.
It's also unclear what happened to children whose mothers died or were killed in detention.
A grieving brother raises the issue
The story began to emerge because of Hassan Alabbasi, a Syrian-Canadian whose sister, Rania, was detained by Assad's forces in 2013 along with her husband and six children. Amnesty International reported at the time that their relatives believed Rania and her family may have been targeted because they were providing assistance to families in need.
Alabbasi's brother-in-law was among those confirmed dead from the thousands of images of corpses taken out of the country by a Syrian army whistleblower who fled the country. Rania, who was a dentist and chess champion, and the six children are unaccounted for.
The role of the orphanages became widely known after Alabbasi saw a picture of a girl who resembled one of Rania's children in a Facebook post of the SOS Children's Village, an international charity headquartered in Austria, which offers alternative care to children who cannot live with their biological families. It has branches around the world, including in Damascus.
Alabbasi went on social media demanding information about the child. Soon after, SOS Children's Village released a statement acknowledging that intelligence agents secretly placed the children of female detainees in their Damascus branch. Other orphanage directors also went public, largely to defend their actions.
Alabbasi recognized that the child could not be his niece, who went missing as a little girl in 2013, which would make her a young adult today if she were still alive. But he was struck by the resemblance and wondered: What if Rania's daughters were raped and impregnated by one of Assad's forces?
Human rights groups have reported that Assad-loyal forces sexually assaulted and raped people in detention: men, women, boys and girls. "We are not searching anymore for Rania's children. We may be searching for her grandchildren," Alabbasi said.
A belated effort to uncover the truth
Tom Malvet, a regional director of SOS Children's Village, told NPR that over four years, starting in 2014, security forces arrived at their Damascus branch, ordering them to take in dozens of children, providing only the child's name and an order to keep the child's existence secret.
He says the charity's headquarters learned of what was happening in 2018 and ordered the branch to stop accepting such children.
Malvet says they are now combing through the branch's archives to understand how many such children were hidden at the Damascus branch of SOS Children's Village. In December, they found evidence of 35 children placed there by intelligence agencies. By early February, they'd found records for 139 children. "We will do everything to open the books and the records. We have nothing to hide and we want to contribute to tracing the children and families," Malvet said.
Not every orphanage is combing through records.
It's not clear what happened to the children of detained mothers who were handed over to the Life Melody Orphanage.
Prominent board member Nada al-Ghabara says she was not aware of Syrian children being delivered to the orphanage by intelligence agents until the Assad regime collapsed. She says that's when a panicked administrator informed her that the children of female detainees had been hidden at the orphanage. "I said, by God, we must tell the Ministry of Social Affairs," she recalled in an interview with NPR.
But one person who has seen the Life Melody archives showed NPR two pages listed with the names of 45 children whom she said were placed by security forces in the orphanage. She said there was a file about an inch thick with the names of other children. She did not show NPR that file. She spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing loyalists of the former Assad regime would hurt her for speaking out. "I am worth the price of a bullet," she said.
A senior official in the Ministry of Social Affairs, which is trying to trace these children, also told NPR that the Life Melody Complex had at best kept chaotic and fragmented records. He said it suggested administrators were neglectful of their duty, under government rules, to closely track the movement of children in and out of the orphanage. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to media.
When we asked al-Ghabara about these specific allegations, she said she did not work as an administrator and wasn't aware of how records were kept. Even so, she says she did authorize the adoptions of newborn babies who were found abandoned across Damascus. She says in the chaos of war, she wasn't always able to follow the progress of those babies.
A glimmer of hope
Even as these revelations have triggered fury, they've also kindled anguished hope among families whose children went missing after being taken by the Assad regime during the war — an estimated 2,300 children, according to an estimate by the Syrian Network for Human Rights. That estimate is seen as credible by international organizations and the State Department.
The family members of these children include Hani al-Farra, whose pregnant wife and three children disappeared at a regime-run checkpoint in 2013 as they were leaving a rebel-held area. Al-Farra said his wife was about to give birth. She was trying to get to a hospital. Al-Farra believes his wife and children were taken to pressure him to give information about rebels in his area.
After years of fruitless searching for his wife and children, al-Farra said, "I began to wish they were dead." He said that was better than detention under the Assad regime. But after hearing that some children of detained women were hidden in orphanages, he began hoping his own had survived.
We bumped into al-Farra at the office of Rana al-Baba, the director of the orphanage run by the Muslim Women's Charitable Association. While we were intervieiwng al-Baba, he had walked in to show her pictures of his missing children on his battered phone.
"May they be found, brother," al-Baba responded, and handed over a list she kept of the 80 children deposited by intelligence agents in her orphanage over the years. "I don't think your children were here, but you should check, to reassure your heart," al-Baba said. Al-Farra nodded sadly. They were not on the list.
The orphanage director al-Baba said she looked out for these "security placement" children. She says the orphanage caregivers made the older children memorize the phone number of their house mother — so if security forces took them back to their families, the children could try to let the orphanage know where they were. Al-Baba says some of the children — and their parents — did call to let the orphanage know they'd been reunited.
But there were limits to what al-Baba could do.
She recalled turning away a woman looking for her granddaughter — a 2-year-old called Hiba. Al-Baba says she was under strict instructions from intelligence agents not to reveal information about the "security placement" children and turned the woman away.
Days later, al-Baba says intelligence agents shifted Hiba to Dar al-Rahma, an orphanage nestled in a Damascus alleyway, so she couldn't be found. The director there, Bara al-Ayoubi, says they also tried to do their best by the "security placement" children — including by securing visits for older children to see their detained mothers. By 2019, those visits were routine, according to one former female detainee whose child was placed in Dar al-Rahma. The former detainee, who declined to be named, owing to social stigma, says Dar al-Rahma became known as a good place for children of detained mothers.
When the Assad regime fell and rebels smashed open the prisons, freed mothers and fathers rushed to Dar al-Rahma, hoping to find their children. "On the morning of liberation day," said al-Ayoubi, "the parents of 22 children came." Her staff shared images of the reunions, including one father, tightly embracing his children. She said some parents later returned to thank the orphanage.
But not Hiba's mother.
Weeks after the girl's mother was released from prison, she says her brother finally found her daughter. They were reunited in mid-2019.
"Our reunion was sad and joyful at the same time," Jebawi recalled. Her daughter called her "mama" — but she screamed whenever her mother tried to hug her, feed her or bathe her.
Hiba's mother says the workers at the Dar al-Rahma orphanage still call her to check on her daughter. They invite them to visit. She has so far declined. "I don't want to remember the past," she said.
Al-Farra, whose wife and children went missing in 2013, also tried to move on.
He remarried a few years after his first family disappeared. He has three sons with his new wife: Samir, 8, Ibrahim, 6 and baby Mohammad, who sat on al-Farra's lap in a working-class quarter on a recent day.
But al-Farra says he's not the only one who can't stop thinking that maybe the children of his first wife are alive in an orphanage somewhere. His sons keep asking him about their older missing siblings too, particularly their sister, Islam. She was 5 when she disappeared. If she's still alive, Islam would be 17. Al-Farra's young sons only know her as a little girl, from a photo al-Farra keeps on his phone: Islam is smiling. Her sandy hair touches her tanned shoulders. "My sons ask me: why don't you get her, why don't you find her? I tell them: I swear, I'm trying."
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