Assad's Regime Made Children 'Disappear'

It's a harrowing story about the brutality of Bashar al-Assad's former regime in Syria. As the investigation by Shane Bauer for the New York Times Magazine notes, the regime "disappeared" an estimated 100,000 people over the course of its 13-year civil war, the most since the Nazis. But Bauer's story has a particular focus: "Among the missing are thousands of children." What happened to them is still being pieced together in the aftermath of Assad's ouster, but Bauer's story lays out a grim narrative:

• "From at least 2013 through the end of the war, Syria's secret police conspired with ministers and governors to place the children of political prisoners in orphanages—including several run by an international nonprofit organization—where they were hidden from their families and encouraged to forget their pasts and, in some cases, had their names changed and were adopted away."

Typically, the children would be detained with their parents, then sent to orphanages when their parents were imprisoned or killed. Boys would often be conscripted to serve in the Syrian military when they came of age. The children were "brainwashed," as one survivor puts it, to obey Assad and forget their parents. The nonprofit mentioned above is SOS Children's Villages, which tells Bauer it "did not intentionally contribute to the disappearance of any child, and we unequivocally disapprove of such practices." But Bauer cites documents showing that children were brought there straight from the regime's secret prisons. "Then, as the secret police requested, the organization kept the children's presence secret." Read the full story, which details how families are scrambling to find long-lost young relatives.