The term “Children of the Revolution” later revised to “Children of the Crisis” appeared repeatedly in testimonies gathered during this investigation. It was not confined to oral accounts.

The change also appeared in a document we reviewed from one of the institutions. The heading originally read “Children of the Revolution” before the word “Revolution” was crossed out and replaced by “Crisis.”

Beneath the heading was a list of children's first names only, each accompanied by a file number.

The term “Children of the Crisis” was familiar to Zeinab Abu Al-Hija, who worked for 15 years at Dar Zaid bin Haritha, the former name of what later became Lahn Al-Hayat institution. The institution was located in the Barzeh district of Damascus.

We searched for the institution, but it no longer exists under that name and now serves a different purpose. During the years of the uprising, however, even after Lahn Al-Hayat Homes relocated to the Damascus suburb of Qudsaya, Dar Zaid bin Haritha became a temporary reception center for what were officially referred to as “Children of the Crisis.”

Beginning in 2012, the institution started receiving children of different ages under that designation.

“We never knew where they came from,” Abu Al-Hija said. “Some of the children told us their parents were in prison. Others arrived as newborn babies.”

She said the children typically remained at the institution for only one or two days before a vehicle from Lahn Al-Hayat in Qudsaya arrived to transfer them there. Some were later moved to SOS Children's Villages.

Children arrived on an almost continuous basis, sometimes every day, sometimes every two or four days, with between two and three children arriving each time. Their ages ranged from newborns to around 15 years old.

Abu Al-Hija said it was never clear which authority was bringing the children to the institution. Their transfers, she said, took place without any accompanying documentation.

“The buses would arrive, bring them in, and take them away without any paperwork or records,” she said.

She described the working environment as highly restrictive. Staff members were forbidden from communicating with people outside the institution or even speaking freely among themselves.

“I felt sympathy for the children, but there was nothing we could do,” she said. “Our job was simply to care for them, and we were afraid of being questioned.”

Abu Al-Hija resigned from Dar Zaid bin Haritha in 2016.

When the Assad government fell on December 8, 2024, the reality proved even more devastating than many families had imagined. Instead of reuniting with their loved ones, many were met only with absence. 

The luckier ones found little more than a name on a piece of paper, a faint trace that someone had once been there. Amid the chaos, countless official records were leaked, while many others were destroyed by fire, taking with them names, identities, and vital information.

Among the surviving records were two names:

Nour and Sham.

Today, Nour is 14 years old and in the eighth grade. Her younger sister, Sham, is 12 and in the sixth grade. Each lives in a different home, with a different family, and each carries a different surname and legal lineage.

It took us nearly a year to trace their story and reconstruct the path that led to their forced separation from each other and from their mother. 

Along the way, the two girls passed through multiple institutions before their original identities were erased. They were ultimately classified as “foundlings” , the official designation used by care institutions to describe them. We found the term in several official documents issued by those institutions as part of the process of registering the girls in the state's civil records under their new identities.

In early 2015, the girls' mother was transferred to a shelter for abused women, commonly known as Oasis of Hope for Abused Women (Wahat Al-Amal), located in the Bab Musalla district of Damascus.

It was there that two accounts emerged.

The first account, provided by sources from Lahn Al-Hayat, describes a pregnant woman aboard one of the green buses used by the Assad government to transport opponents to opposition-held areas in northern Syria. She was accompanied by her daughter, Nour, who was about two years old, while pregnant with Sham.

A second account tells a different story. It describes a homeless woman who arrived with her daughter, Nour, while pregnant with Sham. According to this account, she was brought to the shelter for abused women by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

Later that year, Husniya Abdullah encountered Nour, Sham, and their mother at the Oasis of Hope shelter for abused women. Husniya had previously lived at Lahn Al-Hayat before being transferred to the shelter as punishment by the institution's management for what she described as “bad behavior,” a practice she said was common among many of the girls.

“Nour was beautiful,” Husniya recalled. “And her sister, Sham, was still a baby.”

She vividly remembers the day the two girls were taken from the shelter. A vehicle belonging to SOS Children's Villages arrived to collect them. Husniya said she had previously overheard the shelter's director, Fidaa Al-Daqouri, who is currently detained as part of the investigation into Syria's missing children, speaking about plans to transfer the girls to SOS Children's Villages. 

According to her testimony, the transfer took place in November 2016.

After the SOS vehicle left with Nour and Sham, Husniya went to the administration office and asked the shelter's director, Fidaa Al-Daqouri, where the girls had been taken without their mother.

“At first, she refused to answer,” Husniya said. “When I told her I had seen the SOS vehicle, she admitted that she had sent them there.”

“A few days after the girls were transferred, their mother escaped from the shelter,” Husniya said.

We also met Harout, the facility's security guard, who has worked there since 2012. He told us about the Oasis of Hope shelter for abused women, which later became Dafa Association for Children Deprived of Family Care.

He said that although the center was intended for abused women and girls, it also received children who were brought there by police patrols or in private vehicles.

“As a security guard, it wasn't my place to interfere in anyone's private affairs,” Harout said. “It never crossed our minds to ask questions, and in any case, there was no room to ask those kinds of questions.”

He said the presence of children at the shelter struck him as unusual.

“By definition, the center was meant for abused women and girls over the age of 18,” he said. “But children were being brought there.”

The documents we reviewed are consistent with Husniya's account that Nour and Sham were transferred to SOS Children's Villages. A police report related to the two girls, dated 2016, bears the name of an SOS employee.

A former SOS Children's Villages employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told us that neither SOS nor any other child care institution is permitted to receive children without an order from a Sharia judge when parents are absent. If both the parents and the Sharia judge are unavailable, however, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour assumes that legal authority.

According to the former employee, these procedures are intended to protect institutions from potential accusations of child abduction. As part of the legal process, a police report is prepared and the child undergoes a forensic medical examination.

She said these steps form part of the official legal procedure used to formalize a child's placement.

That is what happened in the case of Nour and Sham.

A police report was filed for the two girls at the Al-Midan police station by an SOS Children's Villages employee who had been officially authorized by the organization. The report classified both girls as “of unknown parentage,” even though SOS describes itself as an independent international non-governmental organization dedicated to providing family-based care for children who have lost parental care.

In the report, the employee stated that she had received the two girls from the Oasis of Hope shelter for abused women, together with a letter from the Chair of SOS Children's Villages, Samar Daaboul, requesting approval to transfer them to SOS Children's Villages. The report further states that the girls underwent forensic medical examinations on November 1, 2016.

Samar Daaboul resigned as Chair of SOS Children's Villages in July 2025 before leaving Syria. Her father, Mohammad Dib Daaboul, better known as Abu Salim Daaboul, served as Director of the Office of the Presidency until his death in 2021.

Two days after the police report was filed, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour sent an official letter to Lahn Al-Hayat institution, acting on a request from SOS Children's Villages, approving the transfer of Nour and Sham to Lahn Al-Hayat. There, each girl was assigned a different legal lineage, and separate birth certificates were issued listing different mothers, fathers, and family names.

The police report prepared by the SOS employee later became the basis for a separate administrative process. Relying on that report, Hanadi Al-Khaimi, then director of Lahn Al-Hayat and now detained as part of the investigation into Syria's missing children, submitted two separate requests, one for each girl, to the Damascus Civil Registry. In those requests, she classified Nour and Sham as “foundlings” and used the police report as the legal document supporting the issuance of new birth certificates and their official registration under new identities.

To understand the legal implications of the case, we spoke via Zoom with Zeina Alloush, an international expert in child protection and alternative family care.

“There is no international law, no provision in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and no international standard under the 2009 Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children that permits the forced separation of siblings,” 

Alloush said. “In the case of Nour and Sham, what happened was a chain of violations that cannot be attributed to a single employee. It was the result of a series of decisions and, in the case of SOS Children's Villages, such decisions would most likely have come from the highest level.”

Alloush also questioned the legal basis of the police report.

“A police report cannot simply be based on the statement of an employee or another individual,” she said. “The police are not supposed to accept a reporter's account at face value. So how could that be considered sufficient when the case involves children alleged to be of unknown parentage?”

She also argued that transferring the two girls from SOS Children's Villages to another institution violated one of the organization's core principles.

“SOS presents itself as a permanent home for children, not a transit station,” she said. “That raises a fundamental question: Why were the children moved from one institution to another?”

According to Alloush, the sequence of transfers appears to have served a broader purpose.

“It seems clear that the objective of this process was to create a chain of administrative steps that would make it possible to falsify the underlying records, making it virtually impossible to reconstruct the children's original identities later,” she said.

“This is not something that happens overnight. It is a coordinated process carried out through multiple stages. When we see such urgency in completing these procedures, it suggests an effort to erase any trace that could lead back to the children's biological family. Moving the children from one institution to another only made that process of tracing them more difficult.”

Although Lahn Al-Hayat submitted a request to the Criminal Security Directorate for DNA testing to confirm that Nour and Sham were sisters, a request reviewed during this investigation, and despite the testimony of two official witnesses in the case confirming their biological relationship, the girls were separated and placed with different families, with virtually no remaining connection to their past.

We contacted the foster mothers of both Nour and Sham by phone and requested interviews. Both declined, agreeing only to brief telephone conversations.

The foster mother raising Nour refused to discuss the girl's past, describing the matter as “personal.” She said that Nour still meets her sister, Sham, from time to time.

Sham's foster mother, however, denied that the sisters remained in contact. 

She said she had taken Sham in when the girl was “very young.” However, documents reviewed during this investigation show that Sham was approximately four years old when she was placed with her foster family. The foster mother said Sham knew nothing about her past and had lived with her for years as her daughter, with virtually no connection to her previous life. She also told us that, if Sham's biological family were ever found, the decision would ultimately be left to Sham herself, claiming that state authorities had told her the child would be given the choice if her family were located.

The term “alternative mother” appears in official Syrian documents, including those issued by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour and child care institutions. The terms “alternative family” and “alternative mother” are used to refer either to the woman caring for a foster child within a family setting or to female caregivers working in residential care institutions.

In 2025, Syria's current authorities launched a broad investigation into the cases of missing children and the children of detainees. The inquiry led to the arrest of former Ministers of Social Affairs and Labour Kinda Al-Shammat and Rima Al-Qadri, along with several former officials and employees of child care institutions, including former Lahn Al-Hayat directors Nada Al-Ghabra and Lama Al-Sawaf, as well as Rana Al-Baba, director of the Women's Charity Association (Al-Mabarra).

Later, some of those detained, including Al-Ghabra and Al-Sawaf, were released after questioning while the investigation continued. Others remain in custody as part of the ongoing inquiry into children who were separated from their families or placed in state care institutions during the war.

Unlike Nour and Sham, who were separated from each other as well as from their mother, brothers Abdullah, born in 2005, and Alaa, born in 2010, remained together as they were transferred from one institution to another.

They were referred from Security Branch 227 to Lahn Al-Hayat institution, where former Minister of Social Affairs and Labour Rima Al-Qadri, who is currently detained as part of the investigation into Syria's missing children, submitted a request to the administration of Lahn Al-Hayat regarding a visit by the two boys to their mother, who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges of financing terrorist activities, after five years without contact.

The brothers were later transferred from Lahn Al-Hayat to SOS Children's Villages. Once again, the name of the same SOS employee who had filed the police report in the cases of Nour and Sham appeared in the records. This time, however, she was listed as the staff member who received Alaa and Abdullah upon their transfer.

A document reviewed during this investigation records her as stating: “I received Alaa and Abdullah, both in good health.”

We contacted her by phone to ask about her role in the transfer of Nour and Sham, as well as her involvement in the transfer of Alaa and Abdullah, but she declined to comment.

We also contacted the regional office of SOS Children's Villages in Austria, seeking a response regarding the employee whose name appeared in multiple case files.

In an official email, SOS said the employee had acted under a formal authorization from the organization and had not been acting in a personal capacity. The organization said she worked within the Family Strengthening and Reintegration team and “had no responsibilities or involvement in cases concerning children referred by security agencies, nor was she aware of any details related to those cases. Such matters were handled exclusively by the Child Protection Officer in coordination with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour.”

The organization emphasized that the employee “had no role in these cases.”

Yet the employee's name appears in the case of Nour and Sham, whose legal identities were later changed, as well as in the case of Alaa and Abdullah, who were separated from their mother after she was convicted of financing terrorist activities and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Today, neither Alaa nor Abdullah remains in institutional care. According to one of Abdullah's friends, he is living in difficult financial circumstances and moves from one temporary job to another in a rural area outside Damascus.

While investigating Security Branch 227 in Damascus, the branch from which Alaa and Abdullah were referred, we came across testimony from a former detainee who told us that children were also being held there during his imprisonment.

Tawfiq Ashour, who was arrested in 2019 and was formerly detained at Branch 227, told us when we met him at his home in the Damascus countryside that he had seen children inside the detention facility.

On one occasion, he recalled, he was subjected to torture by a boy named Khaled. He learned the boy's name after an assistant called out to him and ordered him to pour cold water over Ashour during the winter.

Khaled approached him and said: “I'll splash the water on the wall, and you make it sound as if it's being poured on you.”

Ashour said that is exactly what happened.

He also recalled hearing the sounds of children being tortured, although he could not determine exactly where they were coming from. He said he regularly saw children being forced to perform labor inside the detention facility.

“They used to bring us food, carrying pots that were heavier than they were,” he said.

The detention of children was not limited to individual testimony.

An analysis of nearly 1,600 records from the Air Force Intelligence Investigation Branch covering the period between 2011 and 2016 shows that the names of hundreds of children under the age of 18 appear in those records. Some were detained alongside their parents, while others were arrested separately, and many were subjected to detention and interrogation procedures similar to those imposed on adults.

The records also indicate that a number of these children were not released directly to their families. Instead, some were referred to care institutions and residential facilities under classifications such as “orphanage” and “social care.” Among the institutions identified in the records are SOS Children's Villages, Lahn Al-Hayat in the Damascus suburb of Qudsaya, and the Women's Charity Association (Al-Mabarra).

Within the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, the Committee for Investigating the Fate of the Sons and Daughters of Detainees and the Missing is responsible for documenting and identifying cases of missing children.

New names and cases continue to emerge almost daily, according to Mayassa Ahmad, a member of the committee investigating missing children.

She said public reports claiming that 200 children had been returned to their families were based on a misunderstanding of remarks made by Minister of Social Affairs and Labour Hind Kabawat.

“Those children were not missing, nor were they in another place or another country and then returned by us,” Ahmad said. “I read inaccurate interpretations of the minister's statement in the media. These children were not lost, and it was not the committee that returned them.”

She explained that one of the committee's responsibilities is to verify the status of children whose names appeared in security referral files and who had already been returned to their families before the fall of the Assad government. As part of that work, the committee reviewed security referrals linked to care institutions and confirmed, through telephone contact, the circumstances of 200 children who had previously been reunited with their families.

Ahmad said, “The committee was tasked with reviewing security referral files to determine which children had already been reunited with their families and which had not. We verified the circumstances of around 200 children through telephone calls. These children were not missing, nor were they in other places or countries and then brought back by us. The committee did not return them to their families.”

Ahmad, whose own husband remains missing and whose fate is still unknown, believes one of the main shortcomings in the investigation is that the issue remains confined to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour. She stressed the need for cooperation among multiple ministries and state institutions to conduct a comprehensive investigation and examine the role of everyone who worked in child care institutions and orphanages.

“It may take time,” she said, “but no one involved should escape accountability.”

Fadel Abdul Ghany, founder and chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), said that “what has been uncovered so far does not represent a comprehensive breakthrough in the file of forcibly disappeared children. It primarily concerns a specific group whose cases can be traced through institutions. The figures related to care institutions do not reflect the true scale of Syria's forcibly disappeared children.”

He noted that, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights database, at least 5,359 children have remained detained or forcibly disappeared between March 2011 and November 20, 2025, including 3,736 children who were detained or forcibly disappeared by the former Assad government.

“What has been uncovered so far represents only a limited part of a much larger case,” Abdul Ghany said. “It is neither a final figure nor one that comes close to reflecting the full extent of the problem.”

He concluded with a message to the families of missing children:

“Your right to know the truth does not expire with time. It cannot be replaced by general promises or administrative settlements. Keep every photograph, document, testimony, letter, employee's name, date of a visit, and every piece of information about the last place your child was seen. Do not hand over original documents except in exchange for an official receipt and only to a trusted authority. Try to document every communication with institutions or government authorities. At the same time, families cannot be expected to carry the burden of this search alone. The primary responsibility lies with the current Syrian state, every institution that possessed, received, or concealed records, and the international community, which established mechanisms to address Syria's missing persons crisis.”

The stories of Lotus, Nevin, Nour, Sham, Alaa, and Abdullah do not tell a single story. Together, they reveal a recurring pattern: children entered this system with known identities and, in some cases, emerged with different names, different legal identities, or disappeared altogether.

In a country where tens of thousands of people remain missing or forcibly disappeared, and where detention, killing, enforced disappearance, displacement, and the loss of official records have become deeply intertwined, the question of missing children remains one of Syria's most complex and least understood files.

While thousands of families continue searching for answers, another question remains unresolved: How many children were separated from their families during the war? And how many are still living today under names that are not their own, with families that are not theirs?