Syria chess champion and her six children still missing in Assad's jails

Under Bashar al-Assad’s rule, age is just a number that does not exempt anyone from being accused of terrorism, the regime’s favorite strategy to use against anyone who opposes it. The family of Dr. Rania Al-Abbasi suffered a similar fate, when she was arrested 8 years ago with her husband and six children–the oldest of whom was 14 at the time–without any trace or information about their whereabouts.

Rania Al-Abbasi, who was the Syrian and Arab champion in chess, was arrested from her home in Damar Project near Damascus, with her children two days after her husband was arrested on March 9, 2013. Her nurse, Majdoleen al-Qadi, who was visiting that day, was also arrested.

According to Dr. Naela Al-Abbasi, Dr. Rania’s sister, two days after his arrest Rania’s husband, Abdel Rahman Yassine was escorted back home by 6 members of the military security, and took Rania and her children after they looted all the money, gold jewelry, computers and phones they had. Then, they left using the family’s cars.

The neighbors saw the security forces arresting the couple and informed her family the next day.

Naela Al-Abbasi revealed that the only news that she received about her sister and her family was 8 months after their arrest, when one of the released detainees, who was also a doctor, told her that one of the officers in the military security had mentioned Rania by name during the first 15 days of her arrest and that she heard the voices of children with her.

Rania’s family did not leave a stone unturned looking for the place of her detention, bribing officers and using mediators to no avail.

Dr. Naela said that the reasons for which her sister’s family was arrested are absurd and do not deserve so many years in detention. Rania and her husband used to help displaced people, especially from Homs, giving them shelter and hosting families at their house. 

Naela confirmed that her brother-in-law might have been liquidated, as photos of someone with similar features was among the Caesar photos.

The doctor’s family later turned to human rights organizations and international bodies, and in 2016, Amnesty International and the United Nations launched a campaign to reveal her and her family’s fate.

Al-Abbasi and her children’s names were included in negotiations conducted between the Free Army and the regime for the prisoner exchange of detained women and nuns.

Her family communicated through intermediaries with the Free Army to add her name because of her six children. The regime, however, refused and excluded her name from the exchange. 

 Al-Abbasi was born in 1970 in Damascus, where she studied at the Faculty of Dentistry. At the age of 15, she participated in the national chess championship, and was crowned champion for ten consecutive years, winning the Arab Championship and ranking fifth in the East Asian Championship. She later gained an international rating from the International Chess Federation.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights has recorded the death of at least 173 children under torture in the regime's detention centers from March 2011 until the end of May 2014, an unparalleled number that confirms the regime’s inhumanity and its systematic and repeated violation of children’s rights, despite ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1993.