This was a @lighthousereports.com led investigation with BBC, SIRAJ, Women Who Won The War, Trouw, Der Spiegel. You can find find all the publications on this link
www.lighthousereports.com/investigatio...

Today, 100s of families are still searching for answers about their missing children. Our 9 month investigation, interviewing over 100 witnesses, survivors, and staff, and gathering official documents to reveal how Syria’s children were stolen and how international silence enabled this tragedy.

Local orphanages had no power to defy the regime, yet SOS Villages in Syria did—and failed to use it. Despite knowing the truth since 2017, the organization stayed silent until the regime collapsed.

Desperate families paid bribes and chased rumors for any news, while official denials and fake papers kept them from their children. Care workers who tried to help faced threats and even detention by intelligence agencies.

Children like Fawaz described systematic abuse at the hands of orphanage staff: physical punishment, interrogation, forced labor, deprivation, and intimidation. Some were denied food for minor infractions or had their skin burned with hot objects.

Abuse did not end at forced separation. Fawaz, who was 11 when separated from his mother and grandmother, was sent with his two younger siblings to Dar al-Rahma, an orphanage in Damascus. There, he endured harsh physical punishments, threats, and was forced to work for long hours

At the time, SOS Syria was run by the daughter of a senior Assad associate, compromising decisions about the children’s welfare. SOS collaborated with the regime in hiding 139 detainees’ children from their parents.

We discovered that as early as 2017, whistleblowers within SOS raised concerns about these “security referrals,” but the leadership failed to intervene or inform the children’s families. As one senior SOS officer put it: “Senior executives didn’t want to know the details and hid away from action.”

Shockingly, a €1.6 billion international charity helped enable this machinery. SOS Children’s Villages, a respected organization funded globally, quietly complied with Syrian intelligence orders—accepting children from security agencies and concealing their existence.

Our investigation built a database of +320 children treated this way, their identities and fates kept secret in official documents. Many were from families accused of opposing the Assad regime or related to dissidents and defectors.

This was no accident. For years, Syria's security services systematically used children as bargaining chipsand by detaining them, hiding them in orphanages, and cutting off their families to gain leverage in negotiations with the opposition.

Mohammad wasn’t the only child taken. His cousins Leila and Layan were also arrested with their parents, detained by security forces, and eventually transferred to the SOS Children’s Villages network—separated from their family, their names, and everything familiar.

True, but with everything happening in the world it doesn’t hurt if your team is playing properly to help you cope with everything else

🧵The story was already distasteful and orientalist (Western woman swooping in to save a brown man, days after the Syrian people had already saved themselves) and more about breaking a crazy headline than providing an alleged victim with urgent medical and psychosocial care. (5)

🧵Rushing to produce a story like this has obfuscated the truth, created a false equivalency between detainees and regime officers & is deeply disrespectful to the thousands of legitimate stories of prisoners who suffered at the hands of men like the one @cnnipr.bsky.social featured. (4)