Archive: Missing Persons

PRESS RELEASE: First Forensic Training for Syrian Missing Persons and Forensic Team 

  This week, the Raqqa-based First Responders Team re-launched as the Syrian Missing Persons and Forensic Team (SMFT), following a week-long training in Erbil with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF). The training, which was coordinated by the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC), marks a turning point in the search for missing persons in […]

Perpetrators’ documentation as sources for casualty recording

  [Previously published on Every Casualty on October 20, 2021] This article is based on the presentation given by Roger Lu Phillips at a webinar on casualty recording in Syria, on 21 September 2021. Roger Lu Phillips is Legal Director at the Syrian Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC), where he oversees teams documenting and analysing […]

1,000 Families of those Kidnapped by ISIS Ask for Assistance from the United States

  We, the families of those kidnapped by ISIS, are writing to the U.S. administration to ask for support in the search for our loved ones. When ISIS entered Northeast Syria, our loved ones were among the first to stand up against the extremist group, leading to them being kidnapped and disappeared. While information regarding […]

Does Syria Need a UN Missing Persons Mechanism?

  In February of this year, a coalition of Syrian organizations led by survivors and families of the missing in Syria released the new Truth and Justice Charter, laying out their vision for a just peace. The first demand in the document is “the immediate release of detainees, and revealing the fate of the forcibly […]

New Justice Charter Gives Voice to Victims’ Demands

On February 17, 2021, a group of victim and family-led organizations working for justice for detainees and missing persons launched ‘The Charter for Truth and Justice.’ The Charter presents a unified vision for justice for the crimes of arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance in Syria and includes a list of consolidated demands. The document aims […]

PRESS RELEASE: New campaign reveals mass graves continue to be discovered in northeast Syria

Five mass graves found this year alone with many more expected to be uncovered  Twenty-eight mass graves have been discovered since the territorial defeat of ISIS in northeast Syria three years ago, report local First Responders who continue to exhume new graves in the search for thousands of missing people. Fifty-seven former detention centres where […]

The Women Left Behind

When Fatima’s (name changed) husband disappeared in 2013, she risked her life to find any news of him. “I searched in all security branches, but to give any information, they asked me for money which I did not have,” she recalls. Her husband is among the unknown thousands who have been abducted, detained, or gone […]

Letter to the Committee on Detainees and Kidnapped Persons in Syria

20 May 2020 To:     Syrians for Detainees and Abductees Syrian Democratic Council In a press release on 5 April 2020, the Syrian Democratic Council announced the formation of a committee to follow-up on the file of detainees and kidnapped persons in Syria, calling on the parties to the conflict in Syria to abide by international […]

SJAC Launches Missing Persons Program in Northeast Syria

SJAC, in collaboration with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), has begun providing technical trainings in mass grave exhumation and documentation to the First Responders’ Team (FRT) working to open mass graves in Northeast Syria. These trainings are part of SJAC’s larger efforts to address the thousands of missing persons in the aftermath of ISIS’s […]