The U.K.-based Syrian Network for Human Rights documented more than 181,000 people who were arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned or who forcibly disappeared between March 2011 and August 2025
Its founder, Fadel Abdul Ghany, said that Syria continues to face an overwhelming crisis of missing and detained persons and “the fact that these individuals are still listed as missing does not imply they are alive.”
Abdul Ghany said his network’s analysis and statements by the new authorities suggest that surviving detainees held by the former regime have largely been released, and that no official acknowledgment has been made of remaining secret detention sites.
“In practice, this means that the vast majority of those still missing are presumed to have been killed in detention or extrajudicially executed,” he told UPI.
Abdul Ghany said Syria’s new authorities established the National Commission for Missing Persons and the Transitional Justice Commission with “broad formal mandates, but their operational performance is hampered by serious structural deficits.”
He cited key obstacles, including the failure to clearly define investigative powers and the lack of sustainable funding, which undermine their capacity to “deliver meaningful truth, accountability, or reparations.”
