NEW YORK CITY: The head of the UN body tasked with finding missing persons in Syria revealed that her agency processed more than 75,000 documents over the past year, a ninefold increase over the previous 12 months.
However, authorities in Damascus have yet to grant her a permanent office inside the country, something she said would help her team build trust with families and deliver more answers.
Karla Quintana, assistant secretary-general and head of the Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic, briefed UN member states on Wednesday during an informal General Assembly meeting about the Situation of Human Rights in the Syrian Arab Republic, ahead of a press conference at the UN headquarters.
Her appearance capped two intense days in New York that also included an informal meeting of the Security Council on transitional justice and missing persons, at which UN and council members reaffirmed their support for the Syrian people as they rebuilding their country after the fall of the Assad regime.
Quintana, a human rights lawyer from Mexico who previously led her country’s National Search Commission for missing persons, told the General Assembly that cooperation with the new Syrian authorities and partners was helping to lay the groundwork for a national system to exchange information about missing persons in line with international standards, and that resolving the issue was a priority for rebuilding trust and lasting peace in the country.
Syria has one of the largest missing-persons populations in the world, in both absolute and relative terms, though estimates of the exact numbers vary widely.
The US has said that broad and enduring stability in Syria will depend on clarifying the fate and whereabouts of more than 125,000 missing people. The International Commission on Missing Persons estimated the figure to be at least 130,000 overall, about 17,000 of whom went missing during the rule of President Hafez Assad, the predecessor and father of Bashar Assad. Other estimates cited during the press conference put the number as high as 300,000. Quintana said her institution was still working to establish an official figure.
She told the Assembly and reporters that the fall of the Assad regime on Dec. 8, 2024, in the face of an opposition offensive after nearly 14 years of civil war, had opened “a new path towards hope” after more than five decades of torture, detentions and disappearances under the Assads, but the country now faced one of its most profound legacies: locating the hundreds of thousands of people who never came home.
“Every Syrian has a ‘missing,’ and every family in Syria knows someone that is missing,” she said, describing the search for them as “not only a humanitarian imperative and an ethical one, but also fundamental for stabilization and for peace-building.”
She said the Independent Institution on Missing Persons, established by the General Assembly in 2023 after years of advocacy by victims’ families and civil society, was pursuing several parallel lines of inquiry into: forced disappearances under the former regime; missing children held in state security facilities; disappearances attributed to Daesh and other armed groups; missing migrants; and cases that have arisen since the fall of the Assad regime.
The institution has also extended its work beyond Syria’s borders to take in diaspora communities in Turkiye, Lebanon, Jordan and Germany.
Quintana repeatedly stressed that information-sharing among Syrian authorities, international actors and her own institution remained the central bottleneck to the endeavor.
“The search for the missing is a collective process: no one can do this alone,” she said. “There are no shortcuts. Isolated efforts are not enough, even if they are well-intentioned.”
Asked whether any of the missing might still be alive, and whether thorough searches had been carried out to identify mass graves and secret prisons, Quintana said her institution has to be “very cautious” in managing expectations.
The presumption guiding the UN’s search is that missing people are alive until proven otherwise, she explained, though she acknowledged that many who passed through the former regime’s detention system were believed to be dead based on information gathered so far.
She added that her institution had documented about 600 cases of children who went missing in state security facilities, some of whom have already been confirmed alive and reunited with their families. But she cautioned that trafficking remained a possibility in some cases.
Quintana told Arab News that her team is on the ground in Syria on a consistent basis and has been granted field access that was previously denied.
But her institution still lacks a permanent office in the country, she added, and having one would “enable us to better implement our mandate, build trust with families, with Syrian authorities, and, in the end, to give more answers to families.” She said she raised this request for a local office with the General Assembly again this week.
Quintana said her teams have documented mass graves numbering in at least the hundreds, and shared that analysis with Syria’s own National Commission on Missing Persons.
She told Arab News that authorities in the country have indicated they do not plan to systematically begin opening graves until 2027 or 2028, even as limited exhumations have already occurred without a clear identification process attached. Internationally tested forensic identification methods will be essential given the scale of the work involved, she added.
On comparisons between her role in Syria with her prior work in Latin America, Quintana said the former defies a single template. Forced disappearances under the former Assad regime echoed patterns seen decades ago in Argentina and Chile. Cases of missing children recall Argentina’s experience. Disappearances attributed to nonstate armed actors resemble patterns documented in Mexico.
“It’s unique,” she told Arab News. “We cannot compare it to one country specifically, but it brings different realities.”
The International committee of the Red Cross has also been closely involved in work relating to Syria’s prison system, she added.
Asked by Arab News why families still struggle to contact her institution, and why Damascus has so far failed to provide office space, Quintana said Syrian authorities told her the government was still reviewing similar requests from several UN entities.
She said she hoped an upcoming visit to Syria by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres this week would help resolve the matter.
