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--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I'm Ayesha Rascoe, and this is a Sunday story from Up First, where we go beyond the news to bring you one big story.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Over the winter, NPR's Diyah Hadid was reporting in Syria. Rebel fighters had just overthrown the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. In her weeks of reporting, Diyah discovered something shocking. It wasn't just men and women who were imprisoned by the Assad regime. Children were also taken, and many remain unaccounted for.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Today on The Sunday Story, what happened to the disappeared children of Syria? Dia Hadid brings us the story from her reporting in Damascus after the break.
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--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I'm Aisha Roscoe. This is a Sunday story from Up First.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: NPR's Dia Hadid joins me now to talk about her reporting from Damascus, Dia, I know you were sent to Syria in the chaotic weeks following the Assad's regime's fall. How did you come across this story about missing children?
--:-- Diyah Hadid: I was seeing what was happening in Damascus, and I couldn't stop thinking about the children. I'd covered conflicts like this for so long, and I knew there'd likely be a large number of kids in orphanages whose parents had been detained or even disappeared during the Civil War. And I kept thinking, what was happening to them now?
--:-- Diyah Hadid: And let me tell you, this was hard for me. I have two young kids, so stories about vulnerable children really hit home. And I try not to take too many long trips away from them. So for this assignment, I felt like I needed their permission. So I told them, I'm going to Syria so I can meet little ones who don't have a mama. So is that okay to give your mama to some other kids for a little while?
--:-- Diyah Hadid: And my girls agreed. That's very sweet of your girls.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So I began calling groups that care for vulnerable children like UNICEF, the Red Cross, other big organizations that run programs in Syria. And one group I reached was SOS Children's Villages. That's an international aid group headquartered in Austria. It has branches all around the world, including in war zones.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: And a spokesperson for them told me they were coming to terms with a revelation that was shaking the organisation. Their Damascus branch had secretly taken in children whose mothers had been detained by intelligence agents. And this revelation was triggering a lot of anger in Syrian society. Well, I mean, and rightfully so.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: How did you investigate these allegations?
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Well, after getting this tip, me and producer Mirna Rashid, we went to other orphanages across Damascus and we asked, did intelligence agents force you to secretly take in children? And what happened to those children? And what did you find out?
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Well, it was really hard to get answers at first. Orphanages did not want to speak to us. The situation felt so uncertain. The Assad regime had just fallen at the time and people online were accusing them of collaborating with the former regime.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: But as we investigated, we finally met an official at the Ministry of Social Affairs who also wanted to know the answers. You see, the ministry had been overtaken by rebels who formed an interim government and Syrian families were asking them for help to find their children. So this official helped us by calling up orphanage directors and telling them that they had to talk to us.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: He requested anonymity through this process because he wasn't meant to be speaking to the media, let alone helping us.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Did you manage to speak to any parents whose children were taken away?
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Yeah, we spoke to one orphanage director who wanted us to hear from the detained women themselves. So she connected us to a couple of mothers. One of those women was Sukaina Jbawi. We reached her at her home in a village in the southern Syrian province of Daraa.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: That's where the uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad first erupted. She was keen to chat. So Ayesha, this is what Shbawi told me.
--:-- Sukaina Jbawi: In the fall of 2018, Syrian security forces turned up one day and they dragged me and my daughter Hiba from our home. Hiba was just two. I believe they were taken hostage to pressure my husband's brothers to surrender to government forces.
--:-- Sukaina Jbawi: That was a pretty common tactic at the time because my husband's brothers had joined the uprising against the regime. I and Heba were driven to holding cells run by the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. That was one of the most feared and violent arms of the Syrian regime.
--:-- Sukaina Jbawi: Guards pushed me and Heba into a cold, dark cell with about six other women and their children. Nearly all the women's cells also held children, but the conditions there were not conducive to staying alive.
--:-- Sukaina Jbawi: We were only allowed to use the bathroom three times a day, not enough for little kids. So the mothers procured a bucket for the children to use as a toilet, and they emptied it out whenever they could.
--:-- Sukaina Jbawi: There was never enough food. An egg once a week, 15 olives twice a week, plain yoghurt every four days, sometimes jam, boiled rice one day, boiled lentils the next, boiled potatoes after that.
--:-- Sukaina Jbawi: I gave Heba her share so she'd stay alive. But still, her daughter was losing weight. She became infested with lice. And she says 20 days after she arrived, prison guards banged on their cell doors and told the women, get your children ready.
--:-- Sukaina Jbawi: It was chaos. The women were asking, why do they want the children? And even now, years later, I cry as I remember this. One woman who'd been detained for a while told them, say goodbye to your children now because they going to take them away. Don't make a fuss or they put you in solitary.
--:-- Sukaina Jbawi: But some women wouldn't let go, so the guards came in and took their children by force. I drew Heba into my lap. I put my arms around her and hugged her. I said, you're going to a better place and when this ends, you'll be with me and I'll hug you.
--:-- Sukaina Jbawi: I hoped that was true. I prayed. Oh God, protect her with your watchful eye that never sleeps.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: As the months went on, I watched more mothers come into the cell and I watched them have their children snatched away, including newborn babies.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: I says pregnant women detained alongside me were taken to hospital when they went into labour. After birth, the women were returned to their lock-up with their babies. They were allowed to nurse them for a few weeks and then the guards took the babies away.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: It was a fate spare we feared as well because when I was arrested with Heba, my two-year-old, I was also a few weeks pregnant. But after almost eight months of detainment and weeks before I was due to give birth, I was finally sentenced and I was shifted to a notorious prison called Adra.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: I still don't know what my crime was, but in prison I was told I'd be released soon and I was given one phone call. So I called my sister and asked if somebody could pick me up and I told her, Heba isn't with me. I don't know where she is.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: I returned to my village heavily pregnant. My husband by that point had abandoned me and married another woman. This happened a lot to women who'd been detained. When they were freed, they weren't greeted as heroes. They often faced immense stigma over the possibility that they'd been sexually assaulted while confined.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: I joke that it would have been better if my husband had died in a Syrian prison so I could tell our kids that he was a martyr.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So, Dia, I just want to interrupt you here. Do you have a sense of the scale of this? How many children were being taken away from their mothers like Heba?
--:-- Diyah Hadid: I'm not sure we'll ever be able to get an accurate count, but a respected monitoring group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, they estimate some 3,700 children remain missing after they were detained during the war by Assad regime forces.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: And based on our own investigation, we were able to confirm that at least 300 children were taken away from their mothers while they were being held by the directorate, including one baby girl who died while she was in the care of an orphanage. That was just in Damascus.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: We weren't able to reach orphanages in other parts of Syria at the time when we did our reporting. And in Damascus, children were handed over to four orphanages and care centres. Intelligence agents ordered them to keep the children's existence a secret.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: The practice became so common that orphanage workers even had a name for these kids, security placement children. Security placement children. It sounds so bureaucratic.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Yeah. And just like they were handed over by intelligence agents, days, weeks, months, even years later, intelligence agents took the children back.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Orphanage directors presumed the children were given back to their mothers once they were released from detention. And that did happen, like Heber Shbaoui, who was returned to her mother, Skaina Shbaoui.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: But these children aren't orphans as, you know, as I understand it, as, you know, these are children who still have mothers and in many cases also fathers who were still alive.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: First, Aisha, it's important to understand that an orphan in Muslim-majority countries like Syria is not a child who's lost their parents. It's a child who's lost their father. And often children are handed over to orphanages because the mother can no longer support them financially or because if she'd like to remarry, her new husband may not want to raise what conservative society sees as somebody else's kid.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Okay, so it sounds like Syrian orphanages were always pretty full of children, sometimes sometimes abandoned by their own parents. But then there was this shift. During the Civil War, they started taking in children whose parents had not given them up, but the parents had been forcefully detained by intelligence agents.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Yeah. Dia, how did people first come to know that these orphanages were taking in children this way?
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Yeah, the fates of these children, of detained mothers first bubbled to the surface through the activism of one man, Hassan Al-Abbasi. Al-Abbasi is a Canadian Syrian engineer who lives in Canada and he's been searching for his sister, Rania Al-Abbasi.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: She was taken by Assad forces on March 11, 2013 alongside her husband and their six children, from Dima, the eldest at 14, to Layan, who was two years old at the time. Aranya's relatives believed that her decision to give food to families displaced by fighting at the time made her a target.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Aranya very quickly became one of the most prominent women held by the Assad regime. That's partly because of al-Abbasi's activism, and partly because Aranya was a national chess champion in Syria.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: The US State Department still advocates for her release and Hassan al-Abbasi keeps trying to find clues to his sister's fate and of her family. Sometimes he uploads old home videos of Rania's daughters to sad music just to remind people that they're maybe still out there.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Then last year, after the Assad regime fell Al-Abbasi made a remarkable claim that aired on a popular Syrian opposition television station that he was told by an anonymous friend that Rania children were being hidden in an orphanage.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Al says he sent friends to ask around the orphanages immediately and he began to cast doubt on the Damascus branch of the SOS children villages Al-Abbasi's claim was picked up by other Syrians on social media, who began accusing the orphanages of human trafficking.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: As this unfolded, SOS Children's Villages issued a statement. They acknowledged that their Damascus branch had taken in security placement children over a period of four years until the charity's headquarters found out and ordered their Damascus branch to stop.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: The regional director, Tom Malvert, who's a Swedish national, told me they're trying to rectify the situation now as much as they can. We will do everything to open the books and the records and we want to contribute to tracing children and families.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: SOS Children's Villages has trawled its records to find 139 children who'd been placed there. But they can only confirm that 21 Syrian children were reunited with their families as of this April.
--:-- Diyah Hadid: Malvit says he believes the staff were operating under extreme conditions. They were trying to do their best by the children who were appearing at their doorstep.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: When we come back, Dia visits a crowded orphanage that took in the children of detained mothers. Stay with us.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Right now, grab a pack of hoodie and score a free pair of Alpaca Cruise socks. Moisture wicking, odor resistant, and guaranteed for life. Level up your hoodie game at go.pakaapparel.com slash NPR.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile might be right for you with plans starting from 15 bucks a month. Shop plans today at mintmobile.com slash switch.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Upfront payment of $45 for three-month five-gigabyte plan required. New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: We're back with NPR's Diyah Hadid and her story about the missing children of Syria.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: The Life Melody Complex, or Tajammar Lahna al-Hayat, is a gated complex. It's perched on a hill overlooking Damascus. Syrians appear angriest at this orphanage more than any other.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: That's because it was once sponsored by Asma al-Assad, the wife of Syria's former ruler. She used to visit the institution, cameras at the ready to show her with orphans. She was photographed alongside a long-time board member, Nada Al-Ghabara.
--:-- Nada Al-Ghabara: We met Al-Ghabara on a winter's day. She walked us through the orphanage. She wanted to show us how well they care for the children. There's about 400 boys and girls here, from babies to women in their early 20s who have nowhere else to go.
--:-- Nada Al-Ghabara: We met toddlers who were warmly dressed watching cartoons. In other rooms, babies nap two or three to a cot. There just wasn't enough room for all the babies that had been abandoned here.
--:-- Nada Al-Ghabara: As we walked, Al-Khabra proudly told us she's familiar with all the children in the orphanage. She laughed and said she even arranges the circumcisions of all the baby boys. Muslim boys are expected to be circumcised.
--:-- Nada Al-Ghabara: She paid for the weddings of the older kids. She was really proud of that. She pulled up one video on her phone of one of those weddings.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But Al-Habra says she only found out that intelligence agents were delivering children to the orphanage after the Assad regime was toppled. She says that's because she didn't spend any time in the administrative building where children were handed over.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: She was with the children in the main building, the orphanage, and she says she didn't notice some of the children suddenly arriving or leaving.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But Life Melody Complex actually did keep records of the security placement children who were transferred into their care. Copies of those records were handed over to the new interim government.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: An official showed NPR a list of 45 children who were placed there by intelligence agents. That official told us there was a stack of pages an inch thick filled with other names of other security placement children who were cycled there over the years.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But the official didn't show us that stack of papers. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation from members of the former Assad regime.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: They said, my life is worth the price of a bullet.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: During this investigation, I visited every single orphanage I could find in Damascus to figure out if there were patterns to these children being hidden away. One of them was Al Mubarra Nisaia, which is on a busy Damascus road.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Here, the director kept detailed records of the 50 children who were deposited by intelligence agents. Inside, Director Anal Baba is chatting to some colleagues when I met her in December.
--:-- Anal Baba: Compared to what we heard at the Life Melody Orphanage, I was sharply aware of the transfer of security placement kids into my orphanage's care.
--:-- Anal Baba: Over bracing Turkish coffee, she tells us the first time an agent came knocking with a baby boy to hand over, I didn't believe it. I even asked for the man's ID. I said, how do I know you haven't kidnapped these children?
--:-- Anal Baba: He looks at me and says, you're asking me for my ID? Do you understand who I am?
--:-- Anal Baba: And I began to sink in. Saying no to the Air Force Intelligence Directorate would be a death sentence. They would have put us through their human mincer. They would have made us hamburgers or kebabs.
--:-- Anal Baba: When the children arrived, they were sick, thin, dirty, infested with head lice, like they'd just come out of prison and they were distraught.
--:-- Anal Baba: For the first week, they isolated the kids with a caregiver. They call them housemothers. And the housemother would offer the kid new clothes, a pink pyjama or a blue one. Do you want a toy? What do you want to eat today? Fries?
--:-- Anal Baba: She says they wanted the kids to see they were cared for. But I was not at peace with the arrangement. And there were limits to what I could do.
--:-- Anal Baba: I had to turn away relatives who came to my orphanage looking for their missing children. I had to obey.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: We end our interview with Al-Baba. She tells me she hopes she was worthy of the burden that God made her carry.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: It's at this moment. I look out the window and see a man lingering outside. He's clutching his mobile phone and looks nervous.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I ask Al-Baba, does he work here? Al-Baba peers out the window. No. And she invites him into the office.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: He walks in and tells Al-Baba that his children went missing in 2013 with his wife. She'd been detained by forces loyal to Syria's former ruler, Bashar al-Assad, as she was trying to get to hospital because she was nine months pregnant.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: For a long time, I believed my wife and kids had been killed to punish me because I'd refused to provide information about rebels operating in my area.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: He pulls out his phone to show her pictures of his kids. There's Mohammed, seven. Islam, she's five. Yusuf, three.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: His name is Hani al-Farra. And in December, 11 years after they disappeared, He saw the social media buzz about children hidden in orphanages and he began hoping, just maybe, his children were alive. Maybe they'd been hidden in an orphanage. Maybe this orphanage.
--:-- Anal Baba: I'm sure his children weren't placed here, but just in case, I ask for his wife's name. The children typically came listed under their mother's names.
--:-- Anal Baba: Al-Baba shakes her head sadly. Not here, sir. I wish they were. I would have given them to you.
--:-- Anal Baba: But she tells him, you mustn't give up hope, sir.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: We took Hani al-Faraz's details and we met him a few days later in his tiny apartment in a working-class suburb of Damascus.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: It's up a few flights of narrow stairs. And al-Faraz holding his youngest son from his second marriage. Hello, Habibi.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: We sit in a room that feels like a cubbyhole. During the years that he tried to find his wife and children, he angered the Assad regime soldiers who manned the checkpoint in his area.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: They detained me and ultimately shifted me to a lock-up where I was tortured for hours, every day, for three months.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: He says he was strung up from a ceiling, beaten and starved. After that, he began to hope that his wife and children were dead, rather than experience the depravities of detention under the Assad regime.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: And that includes well-documented cases of rape, of women, men and children.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: Al-Farra says his friends urged him to move on, marry a good woman, make a new family. One of his friends set him up with his sister and they fell in love.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: He calls her his everything. His mother, his father, his friend. He now has three sons with his new wife. The youngest is baby Muhammad, about a year old.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: He squirms on Al-Farraa's lap and toddles off to examine a drainpipe. But even as he cuddles his youngest son, the hope of finding his older children and first wife won't leave him.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: He says he even asks his current wife, what will you do if I find my first wife?
--:-- Hani al-Farra: He tells us, my new wife lost her brother during the war and she understands the pain I'm feeling. And she told me, if you find your first wife, I'll put her in this eye before that eye.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: It's an Arab saying that means I'll honour her.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: And his sons, especially the oldest, know that something is right. His oldest son is eight now. He's aware of the world around him. He keeps asking about his older half-siblings, particularly his sister, Islam.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: She was five when she disappeared. In a photo Al-Farra keeps on his phone, she's sitting in a garden. Her sandy hair touches her tan shoulders.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: Al-Farra is crying. He takes a deep breath and says, praise be to God, and continues.
--:-- Hani al-Farra: My sons ask me, why don't you get her? Why don't you find her? And I tell them, I swear, I'm trying.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Thank you so much, Dia, for this reporting and for shining a light and being a voice for the missing during this time of so much uncertainty.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Thank you for listening. That's NPR international correspondent, Dia Hadid.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yan. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt and Vincent Nee.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Maggie Luther mastered the episode. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our senior supervising producer, Liana Simstrom.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
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