At 80, Syrian Abdel Rahman Athab still holds on to hope of finding his son, missing for 11 years. He searched tirelessly—watching former detainees leave prisons, combing through hospitals, and finally, visiting suspected mass grave sites. Despite losing three other children, Athab clings to the hope of finding his son or at least laying him to rest.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that since 2011, about 136,614 people have been forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily detained. Of these, over 113,000 remain missing, leaving families in heartbreaking uncertainty.
The pain of Athab’s family began with the start of Syria’s revolutionary unrest. The father, who had six sons and two daughters, recalls with deep sorrow: “Four were engineers, and two were teachers. At the onset of the revolution, they joined protests against the regime, and I stood with them.”
By late 2011, three of his sons were killed, their bodies returned in disfigured remains wrapped in black bags. Athab buried them, held a mourning service, and, though devastated, accepted their deaths, seeing them as martyrs for Syria. “I found comfort knowing they were in a safer place,” he said.
However, just two years after losing his sons, Athab’s fourth child disappeared in Damascus. The remaining members of his family fled the country, leaving the father’s heartache to grow even deeper.
In his ongoing search for his missing son, Athab told Asharq Al-Awsat that he and his family have been tracing newly uncovered mass grave sites across Syria in the past month.
On January 4, local Syrian outlets reported that residents found a mass grave near the Ninth Division in the town of Sanamayn, located in the northern countryside of Daraa in southern Syria.
This discovery followed another mass grave found about two weeks earlier at “Al-Kuwaiti Farm” on the outskirts of central Daraa.
The area had been under the control of a militia linked to the military intelligence branch, and 31 bodies, including those of women and a child, were recovered.
Additionally, a team from Human Rights Watch reported visiting a site in the al-Tadamon neighborhood of southern Damascus on December 11 and 12, 2024.
They found a large number of human remains at the location of a massacre that took place in April 2013, with more scattered around the surrounding area.
