The Syrian government has profited off of the tens of thousands of people it has abducted since the start of the civil war four years ago, according to a report released on Thursday by Amnesty International. People loyal to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have collected up small fortunes from individuals desperate to learn about the whereabouts of loved ones.
After his brother was forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime in 2013, Hakim al-Saleh’s family paid $30,000 to someone who claimed to have information about his location.
Al-Saleh told the London-based rights group in an interview that the effort proved futile:
We sold our land so that we could pay this man… My grandfather didn’t sell this land, my father didn’t sell it, but I sold it, and for nothing in the end. But it was the right decision. If they find him, we would give everything we own.
“State officials are profiting from enforced disappearances in Syria, and given how widespread and common these bribes are, the state must either be expressly or implicitly condoning this practice,” Nicolette Boehland, the author of the report, said.
In the report, she said that Assad oversees an “insidious black market” that profits off of “widespread and systemic enforced disappearances.”
“The bribes that are paid by family members are a kind of business for the government,” Tarek Hokan, a Syrian human rights activist, told Amnesty. “They are now a big part of the Syrian economy.”
These bribes are a cash cow for the regime.
“These bribes are a cash cow for the regime — they are a source of funding that they have come to rely on,” A defense lawyer working in Damascus said. “Even the lawyers are taking bribes now. It’s a disgrace.”
More than 65,000 people, most of them civilians, have been forcibly disappeared since the start of the civil war in March 2011 according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. The report focuses only on disappearances by the regime. Amnesty said that it will release a report about similar crimes by non-state actors in the coming months.
Family members of those believed to have been disappeared by the regime said that they paid people ranging from prison guards to religious leaders for information, but the money they offered did not often accomplish much. Many said they paid bribes knowing they might be fruitless because the lack of information about their loved ones was too much to bear.
Fariza Bondek, a woman whose husband was forcibly disappeared last year, told Amnesty, “The most painful part is the uncertainty regarding his fate.”
“One day we will hear from someone that he is long gone and that he was executed in 2014,” she added. “Another day someone will tell us that he is still alive and doing well. I don’t know what to believe. It is so painful.”
Some people have paid their entire life savings only to find out that their loved ones were killed, according to sources quoted in the report.
The report included the cases of several protesters, human rights activists, media workers, humanitarian aid workers, and medical professionals who were disappeared by the regime. It also described the conditions faced by those who were disappeared and have since been released. The conditions faced by those who claim to who have been detained by the regime make for some of the most horrifying parts of the 71 page report.
Raneem Ma’touq is a fine arts student and the daughter of a human rights lawyer who was detained for four months by the regime after she was arrested at her home in Damascus, charged with inciting terrorism.
In an interview conducted in Germany, she told Amnesty that she and other detainees were beaten upon arrival to the detention facility where they were housed and faced subsequent abuse and unsanitary conditions:
Photos leaked to human rights activists by a former regime photographer, known only as “Caesar,” document how the state accounts for those who have died while in captivity. As ThinkProgress reported earlier this year, experts believe the photos provide evidence of systematic killing that could amount to war crimes for the Assad regime.