## A nation still searching
A year after Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, Syrians are still searching for the truth.
The portraits that hung from lampposts have been replaced by the faces of the missing, photocopied pictures taped to shopfronts and walls. Families have searched graveyards and abandoned prisons, hoping a scrap of fabric or a piece of paper might give them answers.
Over 13 years of war, which killed more than half a million people and displaced half the country, the regime and it’s allies disappeared between 120,000 and 300,000 people, according to the government’s National Commission for the Missing.
The system that disappeared them was deliberate – a web of informants, secret police, files and fear. Arrests were made without warrants, over a neighbour’s grudge, a relative’s rumour, or a bribe.
In the days after the regime’s collapse, some Syrians celebrated.Others ran to the prisons. At Sednaya Prison, people grabbed whatever documents they could, as papers were trampled into the ground and crucial evidence disappeared underfoot. Families searched for loved ones,even beneath the floors – what they found were ropes,chains,and electric cables.
Onyl a few families were reunited after al-Assad’s fall.
For the rest, grief and hope coexist as the whereabouts of the disappeared remain unknown.
The new government, led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, has pledged to uncover the truth.In May 2025, decrees created the National Commission for the Missing and the National Commission for Transitional Justice. Advisory boards have been appointed, and legislation is being drafted.
But progress is slow in a nation stripped of laboratories, specialists, and funds. Officials admit they face a mammoth task: building a national database, recruiting forensic experts, establishing DNA capacity – and finding the dead before time and decay erase them.
On the ground, the work has fallen largely on those who once pulled survivors from rubble, the White Helmets, volunteers for the Syria Civil Defense (SCD).
They photograph and document, noting fragments of identity like clothing, teeth, bones. Each set of remains is boxed and sent to an identification center. There, the process stops. The boxes of bones stay sealed. According to the White He
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