JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
As it tried to crush an uprising about a decade ago, the Assad regime ruling Syria faced a new problem - it had too many children in detention. An NPR investigation has found that intelligence agents placed over 350 of these children in orphanages across Syria's capital, Damascus. The agents ordered the orphanages to keep the children secret. Now many of them can't be traced. NPR's Diaa Hadid reports from Damascus.
DIAA HADID, BYLINE: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Chanting in Arabic).
HADID: That woman was Sukayna Jebawi.
SUKAYNA JEBAWI: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: 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.
JEBAWI: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: Guards soon ordered the mothers to hand them over.
JEBAWI: (Crying).
HADID: Jebawi says some of the mothers were crying and wouldn't let go of their kids...
JEBAWI: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: ...So the guards took them by force. Jebawi says she held Hiba. She was just over 2 years old. She was infested with lice and losing weight. Hiba, she told her, you're going to a better place. And she hoped that was true.
JEBAWI: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: Jebawi was freed a few months later. She had no idea where her daughter was. Her brother spent weeks pleading with bureaucrats to learn where Hiba was and obtain papers to get her released. That was in the spring of 2019. Jebawi says their reunion after seven months apart was bittersweet.
JEBAWI: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: Hiba called her mama, but she didn't want to hug her. And yet Jebawi is one of the lucky ones. Her daughter came back.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (Singing in Arabic).
HADID: The fates of the children of detained mothers emerged after rebel forces overran Damascus in early December and toppled the Assad regime.
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LUCY GREY: Reports say that President Assad has left Damascus by plane.
HADID: 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 directors said they presumed the children were reunited with their mothers.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
RANA AL-BABA: (Speaking in Arabic).
HADID: One director, Rana al-Baba, 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.
AL-BABA: (Speaking in Arabic).
HADID: 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 Malvet, the regional director, says the Damascus branch took in those children over four years without telling the charity's headquarters. Malvet 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.
TOM MALVET: We want to contribute to tracing children and families.
HADID: 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.
NADA AL-GHABARA: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: On a recent day, board member Nada al-Ghabara introduced us to the children in their care. Toddlers watched funny cartoons...
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Laughing).
HADID: ...Carers fussed over crying babies.
(SOUNDBITE OF BABY CRYING)
HADID: Al-Ghabara 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.
AL-GHABARA: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: Copies of the orphanage records were handed over to the Ministry of Social Affairs after rebels established a new interim government. 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-Farra 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.
HANI AL-FARRA: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: Al-Farra 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-FARRA: (Speaking Arabic).
AL-BABA: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: 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 new-found freedom.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Singing in Arabic).
HADID: The director, Baraa 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. Al-Ayoubi says those babies were often sick.
BARAA AL-AYOUBI: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: One newborn girl died shortly after she was handed over.
AL-AYOUBI: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: Al-Ayoubi 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...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in Arabic).
HADID: ...Rebels smashed open prison cells holding women.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PRISONER: (Shouting in Arabic).
UNIDENTIFIED REBEL: (Shouting in Arabic).
HADID: From there, orphanage director Baraa al-Ayoubi says many of them rushed to her orphanage.
AL-AYOUBI: (Speaking in Arabic).
HADID: Al-Ayoubi shows us images of that day - mothers and fathers tightly hugging their children. It's a moment al-Farra can only dream of as he searches for his missing wife and children. A few years ago, al-Farra tried to move on. He remarried, had three more sons, moved to this busy Damascus street.
AL-FARRA: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: But now his little boys keep asking about their older missing half-siblings, especially their sister Islam.
AL-FARRA: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: She was 5 when she disappeared. Today, she'd be 17. But the boys only know her as a little girl with sandy hair.
AL-FARRA: (Speaking Arabic).
HADID: Al-Farra says his sons ask him, why don't you go get Islam? "I tell them," he says, "I swear I'm trying." Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Damascus.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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