The contrast between the Syrian initiative at the United Nations and what is happening inside Syria matters more than a contradiction that would make a good newspaper headline. The Syrian state is telling the world, rightly, that a woman searching for a missing person deserves recognition and protection, and that her search for the truth is a public cause, not a private family matter. But the same principle should apply when a father, a mother, a brother, or a husband knocks on the door of a police station and says that a woman from the family has disappeared.
On August 31, 2026, the U.N. General Assembly designated December 19 as the International Day of Women Searching for the Missing, on a Syrian initiative carried to the United Nations by the National Commission for Missing Persons and Syrian diplomacy.
In principle, this is an achievement that deserves to be welcomed, not belittled. Women who have spent years, and in some cases decades, searching for their sons, husbands, daughters, and brothers deserve international recognition of their experience and of their right to know the fate of their loved ones.
In a country like Syria, where detention and enforced disappearance have swallowed tens of thousands of people, and where the image of a mother holding a photograph of her missing son has become part of contemporary Syrian memory, turning this suffering into an international cause is not merely symbolic. Yet celebrating the Syrian initiative also raises a harder question, one that must not get lost amid the celebration of a diplomatic achievement: what does the state do when the woman is not searching for a missing person, but has herself become the one who is missing?
The question is not hypothetical, nor is it an attempt to spoil an occasion that deserves celebration. Since 2025, after the fall of the Assad regime, testimonies and reports have accumulated of women and girls disappearing or being abducted, particularly from the Alawite community, on the coast and in Homs and Hama.
In July 2025, Amnesty International said it had received credible information about the abduction of at least 36 Alawite women and girls, aged between three and 40, since February of that year. It documented eight cases itself, including five women and three girls who were minors.
In some cases, according to the organization, ransom was demanded from families, and in others there were indications of forced marriage, while some families said they had not received sufficient information from the police and security services about the investigations.
These facts do not allow us to say that every woman who left her home was a victim of abduction. But they also make it impossible to treat the issue as though it were mere rumor, exaggeration, or family stories that can easily be explained away.
The problem grew more complicated when the official account emerged. The Syrian Interior Ministry, through its spokesman Nour al-Din al-Baba, announced that it had received no reports of abductions of women or girls. In the results of official investigations announced later, a very different account was offered from those of some families and human rights organizations. Of 42 cases reported as abductions, the authorities said only one was confirmed as an abduction, while the others were explained as running away with romantic partners, temporary absence, escape from domestic violence, and other reasons.
Some of that may well be true. It is not the job of a writer, an activist, or a human rights organization to decide in advance that every report of a disappearance is a kidnapping, just as it is not the state’s right to assume the opposite. The essential issue here is not to choose beforehand between the family’s account and the authorities’ account, but to ask about the mechanism that leads us to the truth, and about the language used before it is reached.
This is precisely where a phrase like “she ran away with her boyfriend” becomes more than a possible explanation for an absence. When a family says its daughter has disappeared, the state’s first task is not to examine the girl’s morals or romantic life, but to look for her. Where is she? Is she alive? Did she leave of her own will? Was she abducted? Is she being held somewhere? Was a crime committed against her? Once she has been found and the facts are known, what happened can be described. But when the explanation precedes knowledge of her fate, the function of an investigation is turned upside down.
Worse, such language does not merely close a security file. It can shift suspicion from the alleged abductor to the absent woman herself. Instead of asking “who took her?”, the discussion turns to “why did she run away?” or “who did she go with?”, and the family finds itself forced to defend its daughter’s reputation at the very moment the state should be focused on finding her.
Nor can this contradiction be resolved by saying that the official account is the only one available. In June 2025, the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria said it had investigated cases of abductions of Alawite women, documenting the abduction of at least six women by unidentified perpetrators, and that it had also received credible information about dozens of other cases.
In one of the cases the commission investigated, a woman was abducted, raped, and beaten, then forced to marry a man who held her and prevented her from leaving. The commission also said that, at the time of its report, it was not aware of the arrest or prosecution of anyone in connection with these cases. Here it becomes hard to reduce the whole issue to a misunderstanding or isolated cases of running away. There are, at the very least, real and documented cases of abduction, and that alone is enough for the issue to become a public matter calling for a serious investigation, regardless of how many other cases later turn out not to have been abductions.
A woman may flee violence inside her home, another may leave with a person of her choosing, a third may lose contact temporarily, and a fourth may be the victim of an actual crime. The very function of an investigation is to distinguish among these cases. That is why ten cases that were not abductions do not negate an eleventh if it was one. A state is not measured by its ability to prove that the circulating figures are exaggerated, but by its ability to reach the truth in each case. In disappearance cases, an explanation cannot precede finding the person, and an account cannot replace an investigation.
That is why the contrast between the Syrian initiative at the United Nations and what is happening inside Syria matters more than a contradiction that would make a good newspaper headline. The Syrian state is telling the world, rightly, that a woman searching for a missing person deserves recognition and protection, and that her search for the truth is a public cause, not a private family matter.
But the same principle should apply when a father, a mother, a brother, or a husband knocks on the door of a police station and says that a woman from the family has disappeared. The value of the right to know a person’s fate should not differ according to the identity of the missing person, their sect, or the region they come from, nor according to whether their story is comfortable for the prevailing political narrative or embarrassing to it. A state that wants to turn the page on the former regime cannot build its new legitimacy on asking citizens to trust its account. It must build it on institutions that make that account verifiable and subject to accountability.
The issue goes beyond Alawite women themselves, even though the first reports focused on them in particular. It concerns the kind of state that Syrians are trying to build after decades in which disappearance was one of the most terrifying instruments of power. Syria knows well what it means for a person to leave home and never return, and for a family to spend years among security branches, prisons, rumors, and middlemen, searching for a single piece of information saying whether that person is alive or dead.
For this very reason, sensitivity to any report of a disappearance should be heightened today. Not because every disappearance resembles those of the past, and not because the new authorities are automatically responsible for every crime committed in the country, but because building a different state begins with rejecting the old idea itself: that a person can disappear, and that their family is then left alone to face the void.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights, in its comment on the U.N. resolution, pointed to an important aspect of this issue: women are not only mothers, wives, and daughters searching for missing men; women themselves are also victims of disappearance. According to the network’s estimates, the number of people forcibly disappeared in Syria from 2011 to August 2026 exceeded 177,000, including 8,984 women.
It is wrong to set the International Day of Women Searching for the Missing against the cause of abducted or missing women, as if talking about the latter detracted from the importance of the former. At their core, the two are one cause: the human right not to disappear outside the protection of the law, and the right of one’s family to the truth when that happens. The woman who holds her son’s photograph and asks about him, and the mother who holds a photograph of her daughter who disappeared today, ultimately face the same question: where is he? Where is she?
The international day proposed by Syria deserves to move from a diplomatic achievement to a national commitment. The test will not be the number of countries that observe it, nor the statements issued on December 19 of each year, but what happens in a small police station when a mother walks in to report her daughter’s disappearance. Will the report be taken seriously? Will an investigation begin immediately? Will evidence be gathered, cameras reviewed, phone contacts traced, and witnesses heard? Will the family know what the authorities are doing? And if a crime is proven, will its perpetrators be prosecuted, whoever they may be? These everyday details, not international speeches, are what ultimately define the meaning of the state.
There is, then, no problem with Damascus celebrating that a Syrian initiative has become an international day for women searching for the missing. There is even reason to take pride that the harsh experience of Syrians has produced international recognition of the suffering of the families of the missing. But the real achievement will not be honoring more women each year who search for their loved ones. It will be reducing the number of those forced to begin the search in the first place. Syrian women deserve an international day that honors their steadfastness, but before that they deserve a state that looks for a woman when she disappears, reveals the truth to her family, and holds accountable whoever caused her disappearance. A state that does not turn the woman searching for the missing into another missing woman whom her family must search for.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
