Discarded documents from Assad’s regime offer clues to Syrians searching for lost family and friends.

JULY 24, 2025

Over several trips to Syria, I’ve documented the country’s transition since Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. Up to 200,000 people were disappeared or went missing under the Assad regime, including thousands of children, according to human rights groups. After the takeover, facilities long hidden from public view — military bases, prisons, intelligence branches — were in disarray, their secrets exposed. Families rushed to the prisons, intelligence branches, air bases and government offices, desperate to find out what had become of their missing loved ones.

In the first week alone after the fall, I photographed documents and objects at the sites before they disappeared forever. Inside the buildings I visited, documents were piled high, despite attempts by the former regime to destroy them — a vast trove of evidence exposing the abuse and corruption of Assad’s regime. There were entire rooms of carefully preserved archives detailing the depth of Assad’s brutality: meticulous records of those arrested, notes on bribes paid, forced confessions, interrogations and prisoner exchanges, lists of medicines given, employee rosters, handwritten logs by doctors containing post-torture interviews, family photos of children and hundreds of IDs of those disappeared by the regime.

Sednaya prison — dubbed a “human slaughterhouse” by Amnesty International — opened for the first time in 13 years. When I entered days after the Assad regime had collapsed the air was thick with dust, and the floor was blanketed in paper: interrogation files, prisoner ledgers, employee lists, execution lists — layer upon layer of evidence of the regime’s crimes. Families searched on their knees, through papers and books, tracing names in fading ink. In the nearby women’s detention facility at Mezzeh Military Airport in Damascus, small clay heart decorations inscribed with messages were hanging alongside crayon-colored drawings of peaceful homelife — a kitchen table, a garden, a child’s bedroom. The pictures were sketches of a world the prisoners had long been cut off from.

Beneath the Air Force Intelligence Directorate Headquarters in Damascus, behind a blown-out basement wall stood crates of hard-drives and obsolete surveillance gear. Floor to ceiling archives had been incinerated, and hallways were left dark with ash. At the Mezzeh Military Airport in southwest Damascus, toppled filing cabinets and banker boxes overflowed with evidence of the disappeared.

With every day that passes, more of the evidence from these buildings is lost, trampled or scattered by the wind. Rooms that, days after Assad was ousted, were covered in six inches of documents, have been looted and now lie empty. Each document holds a clue to the fate of someone’s loved one.

The task now is to preserve, with legal integrity, evidence of the Assad regime’s crimes — to transform these thousands of photographs, documents, and found objects into prosecutable evidence. But this moment is fragile. The evidence is quickly vanishing as is the narrow window to preserve it.

Syria has moved into a new uncertain chapter. In January, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of HTS, was named as interim president of Syria. The work of rebuilding trust — and delivering justice — is only just beginning. Groups like Caesar Families Association and The Syria Campaign have called for justice and for answers for Syrians whose family members have disappeared, but many people are still waiting for the government to establish a system for them to search for their loved ones and for accountability. Frustration is growing. Hope that the new leadership would act swiftly has been replaced by disappointment.

On May 17, 2025, a small but symbolic step was taken. A presidential decree announced the creation of the National Transitional Justice Commission and the National Commission for Missing Persons. These bodies are tasked with exposing the crimes of the past, helping families learn what became of their loved ones and ensuring accountability.

It’s a beginning — but only that.