Once Again, Umm Khaled Tells Her Story and Demands the Rescue of Her Child Detained by the Assad Regime
Statement on the International Day of the Disappeared
August 30, 2024 – Mizan Organization for Legal Studies and Human Rights
Another year passes, and the child Khaled remains missing. His mother, father, and family endure the anxiety, anguish, and pain of separation. Their exhausting and long journey has continued for twelve years, during which they suffered the horrors of arrest, torture, the violation of their dignity, the burning of their property, and displacement. All of these – in their impact on them – are not like what they endure due to the enforced disappearance of their son by the Assad regime after he was detained at the age of ten.
On the International Day of the Disappeared, MHR NGO narrates Umm Khaled’s testimony in a storytelling style that tells the truth as it is. We publish it under the title “Where is My Child?” as part of the series “Women in the Assad Holocaust.” We urge the free people of the world to read it in less than 15 minutes and to support the family in demanding that the cases of the missing not be overlooked by insisting on revealing their fate and rescuing them before proceeding with normalization projects.
We demand effective pressure to compel the regime’s government to comply with the recommendations of the United Nations and human rights organizations, sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, lift reservations on the Convention Against Torture, and open all secret and public prisons to the new Missing Persons Institute, investigation committees, and special rapporteurs.
We remind you that enforced disappearance is one of the most serious crimes against humanity, where the catastrophe extends beyond the disappeared to their family, relatives, friends, and society as a whole, making everyone a victim.
Saving millions of victims of enforced disappearances and their families in Syria is a collective responsibility that falls on the international community—peoples, organizations, and governments.
The relatives of the victims—as victims themselves—have the right to know the truth, participate in uncovering it, proclaim it, and seek justice for it. The free world must develop United Nations mechanisms to guarantee this right in non-traditional ways, under legitimate pretexts and noble goals of protecting peoples from genocide and safeguarding international peace and security.
Victims are being tortured for our freedoms. To fulfill some of their rights and to achieve justice, we must uncover their fate, release them, care for them, compensate for their losses, commemorate their memory, hold those involved in crimes against humanity accountable, and ultimately eradicate enforced disappearance, combat it, and protect future generations from its disasters.
To download the full testimony of Umm Khaled / the story “Where is My Child?”
