Six children of former Syrian chess champion declared dead

Syria's National Commission for Missing Persons (NCMP) on Saturday announced it had confirmed that the six children of dentist and former chess champion Rania al-Abbasi—missing along with their parents for over a decade under former President Bashar al-Assad—are now presumed dead.

“We have obtained reliable and consistent results that allow us to conclude with a high degree of professional certainty that the children of Dr. Rania al-Abbasi have died,” the NCMP declared Saturday.

The mysterious fate of the children had for years become a symbol for the plight of many other missing children among those detained and forcibly disappeared under al-Assad's rule, which ended when he was overthrown in 2024.

According to human rights organizations, al-Abbasi vanished along with her husband, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and their six children, aged 3 to 15, in March 2013 after government forces raided their home in Damascus.

The commission—established by Syria's new administration in May 2025 to investigate disappearances and enforced disappearances—said its findings were “based on multiple verification and analysis procedures” conducted in coordination with national authorities. “Efforts to recover the remains … are ongoing,” the commission added.

Hassan al-Abbasi, Rania's brother, confirmed the children's deaths in a Facebook video. He said the family had viewed footage related to the main suspect in the 2013 massacre in a Damascus district, including a clip showing the man accusing the children in a dark room of being “major sponsors of terrorism.”

“It turned out they were our children,” Hassan al-Abbasi said. “We finally saw them … but they had been martyred.”

The fate of Rania and her husband remains officially unknown since all contact was lost after their arrest on charges related to opposing the Assad government. Human rights groups and media have suggested they may be dead, though their bodies were never found.

The issue of missing persons remains one of the most urgent problems in Syria. That number includes prisoners who vanished in government jails as well as people who went missing amid fighting, at checkpoints, or while fleeing their homes during years of civil war. Tens of thousands were detained or disappeared during the war, which erupted in 2011 after al-Assad's brutal crackdown on anti-government protests. The NCMP said last year that the number of missing persons over decades of al-Assad family rule could exceed 300,000.

In a separate development Saturday, Syria's Interior Ministry said the investigation into the disappearance of al-Abbasi's children had uncovered evidence linking Amjad Youssef—a notorious figure under al-Assad and the perpetrator of the 2013 Tadamon massacre—to the killing of the children. In a statement, the ministry said that interrogating prisoners, together with video and information shared by the NCMP, helped strengthen the case. Youssef was arrested in April, prompting many Syrians to demand “fair punishment” for the man they say carried out the massacre coldly.

The Tadamon case drew international attention after footage of the killings was released. In 2022, Britain's The Guardian published video allegedly leaked by a conscript in a pro-government militia, showing members of the Assad-era Military Intelligence Branch 227 killing at least 41 people and burning their bodies. The video showed an intelligence officer, identified as Youssef, shooting blindfolded and bound prisoners.