Syria’s National Commission for Missing Persons (NCMP) announced on Saturday that it has concluded the six children of former chess champion Rania al-Abbasi are deceased. The children, along with their parents, have been missing since March 2013 after their home in Damascus was raided by government forces, according to human rights organizations.
In a statement, the NCMP said it had “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 commission, which was established by the current government in May 2025 to investigate cases of missing and forcibly disappeared individuals, noted its findings were “based on multiple verification and analysis procedures” conducted with national authorities. The statement added that “efforts to find the remains … are still ongoing.”
The children were between the ages of three and 15 when they disappeared with their parents, al-Abbasi and Abdul Rahman Yasin. Their case has been cited by rights groups as representative of detainees and their families whose whereabouts became unknown during the Syrian civil war.
Hassan al-Abbasi, Rania’s brother, confirmed the deaths in a video posted on Facebook. He said the family was able to view video recordings connected to an investigation into a 2013 incident in a Damascus district. He described a video that showed a man accusing children in a dark room of being “major financiers of terrorism.”
“They turned out to be our children,” Hassan al-Abbasi said in the video. “We finally saw them … but they were martyred.”
The official status of Rania al-Abbasi and her husband remains unknown. Contact was lost with them following their arrest on accusations related to opposition to the government of former President Bashar al-Assad.
Separately on Saturday, the Syrian Ministry of Interior stated that its investigation had linked Amjad Youssef, a former member of a pro-government militia during the Assad administration, to the deaths of the children. The ministry’s statement said that interrogations and information provided by the NCMP strengthened the case against Youssef, who was arrested in April.
The Tadamon case, in which Youssef is a suspect, received international attention in 2022 after The Guardian newspaper published footage it said showed members of Military Intelligence Branch 227 killing at least 41 people in 2013. The newspaper reported that the video, which it said was leaked by a conscript, showed an intelligence officer identified as Youssef shooting bound and blindfolded detainees.
The issue of missing persons remains a focus in Syria. The NCMP reported last year that the number of people who went missing or were disappeared over several decades may be as high as 300,000. This figure includes individuals who disappeared in government prisons, during fighting, or while fleeing conflict zones since the civil war began in 2011.
