Syria's National Commission for Missing Persons (NCMP) announced on Saturday that the six children of dentist and former chess champion Rania al-Abbasi, who disappeared with their parents over a decade ago under the Assad regime, are believed to be dead.

“We have reached reliable and corroborating results that allow us to conclude with a high degree of professional certainty that Dr Rania al-Abbasi’s children are deceased,” the NCMP said in a statement.

The children's fate, unknown for years, became a symbol of the plight of other missing children of detainees and those forcibly disappeared during the rule of Bashar al-Assad, which ended with his ouster in 2024.

According to rights groups, al-Abbasi went missing along with her husband, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and their six children, aged three to 15, in March 2013 after regime forces raided their home in Damascus.

The commission, established by the country's new rulers in May 2025 to investigate missing and forcibly disappeared people, said its findings were “based on multiple verification and analysis procedures” conducted in coordination with national authorities. “Efforts to find the remains … are still ongoing,” it added.

Hassan al-Abbasi, Rania's brother, confirmed the children's deaths in a Facebook video. He said the family had viewed video recordings linked to the main suspect in a 2013 massacre in a Damascus district, including one showing him accusing children in a dark room of being “major financiers of terrorism.”

“They turned out to be our children,” Hassan al-Abbasi said. “We finally saw them … but they were martyred.” The fate of Rania and her husband remains officially unknown.

Separately, the Syrian Ministry of Interior said its investigation into the children's disappearance had uncovered evidence linking Amjad Youssef – a notorious figure during Assad's rule and perpetrator of the 2013 Tadamon massacre – to their killing. Youssef was arrested in April.

The issue of missing people remains one of the most pressing in Syria. The NCMP said last year that the number of people who went missing over decades of Assad family rule may exceed 300,000.

Source: www.aljazeera.com