A year and two months after the fall of the Assad regime, thousands of Syrian families remain trapped in that deadly gray area: no confirmed news, no complete truth, not even a single official narrative to lean on in their exhausted state.
The Commission for the Missing, which is supposed to be the compassionate face of the state in the most agonizing cases, has yet to move beyond mere "reception" to "disclosure." All we see are general statements, postponed promises, and dry, bureaucratic language that chills the heart and is utterly incompatible with the burning anguish in the hearts of mothers and fathers.
The victim's family has the right to ask questions: Where was my son killed? In which branch? When? And under whose responsibility?
We cannot expect the families of victims to file complaints or navigate complex legal procedures when they are denied their most basic right: knowledge.
The file of those who died under torture is not merely a technical matter, nor an archive to be postponed, nor an administrative burden to be discarded. It is the first and truest moral and political test for the new state. What is needed now is the immediate release of available information: preliminary lists, branch names, approximate dates, and a structure of responsibility, even if incomplete.
The question also extends, with deep sorrow, to human rights organizations.
These organizations fill the public sphere with studies, reports, and methodologies, yet they always freeze at the most painful point: names.
We read lengthy reports, well-organized charts, and rigorous documentation methodologies, but we find no names of the victims, no clear identification of the perpetrators, and no direct link between the killing and its perpetrator. Death under torture is reduced to mere "numbers," and the tragedy is reframed in cold language reminiscent of the official circles these organizations are supposed to monitor, not imitate.
The question here is legitimate, and very painful:
Is this what the victims' families are waiting for? Are they waiting for a new study? Another documentation bulletin? Or a working paper presented at a prestigious international conference, while the mother sits at home, not even knowing in which basement her son perished?
When human rights work is divorced from the families' right to certainty, it transforms from a tool for accountability into a mere bureaucratic exercise, utterly ineffective.
No one is calling for a departure from professional standards, but between the prevailing silence and responsible reporting lies a vast, uncharted territory.
The families of the victims are not seeking academic descriptions of their suffering; they are seeking a name, a place, and someone responsible.
Between a missing persons agency that fears to speak out and human rights organizations that are content with mere documentation, the victims remain suspended in limbo—neither alive, awaiting their return, nor recognized martyrs whose memory we honor and whose cases we close.
And therein lies the danger.
Al-Hussein Al-Shishakli - Zaman Al-Wasl
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