Who owns the right to handle the bitter truth?

When I saw the news about the confirmed death of Rania al-Abbasi and her family, I thought of a mother I know whose daughter was arrested while pregnant with her first child. The daughter was not yet 19. She had been married for less than a year when she disappeared alongside her husband and his family. 

Even after many years had passed since the young family vanished without a trace in 2014, the mother spoke of her daughter as though she could still see her standing before her. The likelihood that her daughter had died was far greater than the hope that she might one day return alive. But I did not have the courage to say so.

Now, Hassan al-Abbasi, the brother of Rania al-Abbasi, appeared in a video mourning his sister and her children. For those unfamiliar with Rania al-Abbasi, she was a dentist, Syria’s national chess champion, and the mother of five children. She was arrested two days after her husband, Abdul Rahman Yassin, was detained on charges of financing terrorism in March 2013. Since then, her name, along with those of her husband, her children and her secretary, has appeared on lists of Syria’s missing. Her case became one of the most prominent examples of enforced disappearance in the reports of Syrian and international human rights organisations.

On 30 May, Syria’s National Commission for the Missing announced that it had obtained evidence that Rania and her children have been murdered in the Tadamon pit by Amjad Yousef. Hassan al-Abbasi said the commission had rushed to issue its statement. He said that he and his sister, Naela al-Abbasi, had not yet been able to prepare their parents to accepting the news, and that the Commission’s statement had plunged the family into shock.

I do not know where the truth lies here. In its statement, the Commission insisted that it had acted with the family’s consent. And while it confirmed the deaths of the children and their parents, it did not publish the evidence on which it relied, saying only that investigations had led it to that conclusion and that it was now working to locate the remains of a family wiped out in its entirety.

Let us return to Hassan al-Abbasi, who levelled direct accusations at the team headed by the journalist Intisar Shahoud — the team whose investigations led to the identification of Amjad Yousef and exposed him to the world as one of those implicated in the Tadamon massacre.

It later emerged that Shahoud’s team possessed nearly 29 videos documenting the massacre. The footage that was published and widely circulated was only one of them. The team retained the remaining videos, it said, in order to preserve the integrity of the evidence, prevent tampering, and submit the material to international courts rather than turn it into media content vulnerable to distortion. The footage that did appear was published in 2022, before the fall of the regime.

But the controversy did not end there. After Assad’s fall, the team refused to hand over the evidence directly to the relevant authorities in the new Syrian government, citing a lack of trust. This came amid a series of decisions and measures that had already stirred deep unease over the seriousness of Syria’s transitional justice process. Among them was the inclusion, in government-established reconciliation committees, of figures linked to sensitive files — most notably Fadi Saqr, a senior Assad-era military commander, whose public appearance provoked a wave of anger that continues to grow in both scope and intensity.

Shahoud’s team later stated that it had transferred the evidence and related documents in its possession to German authorities as early as 2022. It stressed that its mission had been primarily one of research and documentation, not a judicial or executive task concerned with identifying every victim or contacting their families. The team also said that the material was later transferred to the Syrian government through an intermediary organisation.

Here, then, a legitimate question arises. Does a research team have the right to withhold evidence for years? What of the right of families and relatives of victims to know the fate of their loved ones? And if the evidence has been in the hands of official and international bodies for years, who bears responsibility for transforming it into a truth that reaches the families still waiting?

After the National Commission for the Missing issued its statement, the case quickly became a battleground of mutual accusations. Many became consumed with apportioning blame: who was responsible for the delay, who for the announcement, who for retaining the evidence.

Perhaps the current controversy will open the door to a broader debate about the relationship between documentation groups, victims and their families; and about the line that separates the protection and preservation of evidence from the right of families to access the truth.

Yet amid this dispute, none of the parties holding the evidence, or parts of it, appears willing to release it publicly. They justify this by invoking the need to preserve civil peace and prevent horrific images from being exploited to inflame divisions. Yet civil peace itself is now facing a severe test, amid waves of anger and polarisation sweeping social media — anger that has at times turned into collective incitement extending beyond accused individuals to entire communities.

Between the right of families to know the truth, the right of justice to protect evidence, and the duty of the state to manage this sensitive file, one question remains open: who has the right to handle the truth when the truth itself is a wound?

As for the mothers who are still waiting for their children, the debate raging around them matters little. What they are waiting for is to know how their children’s stories ended.