Vanished: Enforced Disappearances in Suwayda

At around noon on July 15, 2025, Ahmad Mowaffak Arabi left his small shop in Umm al-Zaytoun village in Suwayda governorate to visit his sister in the regional capital. The 32-year-old took his motorcycle, promising his wife he would be home before evening.  But he never returned.

“They came in their military vehicles,” Arabi’s sister explained. “They were not masked. They grabbed my brother from the street for ‘two hours of questioning’ as they said.  He was not seen again since.”

Arabi’s case is one of multiple disappearances over just a few days in mid-summer 2025 when Suwayda governorate saw a swathe of arrests, detentions and summary executions.

The violence began on July 13, 2025 when clashes between armed Druze groups and Bedouin tribal factions escalated into major security operations involving forces from Syria’s Ministries of Defence and Interior, reportedly backed by tribal militias.

According to Human Rights Watch, more than 93,000 people were displaced; a lack of accountability means that the number of those disappeared varies wildly.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that at least 560 were missing, while the Supreme Legal Committee of Suwayda but the figure at 230. The authorities, in contrast, acknowledged only 61 detainees in Damascus’ Adra prison.

Observers argue that these violations represent a systematic pattern, using the overlap of roles among government forces, tribal groups and local factions to destroy evidence and conceal direct responsibility.

“What happened was not random chaos,” said Assi, a human rights activist who asked to remain anonymous for his own protection. “The fact that the same tools, methods and locations recur indicates prior coordination.”

The situation is further confused by widespread reluctance, particularly from within the Bedouin community, to provide even informal testimony about the disappearances, for fear of relation from those responsible.

On July 16, armed men wearing Public Security uniforms raided the house of Rimah Massoud, a volunteer with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, in the Al-Omran neighborhood of Suwayda city. According to his family, the assailants shot his elderly father in front of them, then took Massoud to an undisclosed location.

His family is yet to hear any official information about his fate.

“Rimah was unarmed and neither he nor any of the present family members resisted, but they entered the house as if they knew exactly who they were looking for,” said a relative.

The Syrian Arab Red Crescent did not respond to a request for comment.

Raids were carried out in the same way in dozens of other cases. In Al-Thaala town, Akram al-Halabi, a diabetic elderly man, disappeared; his house was found locked from the outside, with broken windows. Likewise, after the village of Al-Matuna was raided, both the village’s mukhtar Nasser Farhan Amir and his cousin Fadil Amir disappeared.

“It was a tribal group,” a neighbour of the mukhtar related. “Everybody knew the way was paved for them to enter the village because the military was there only a few hours earlier.”

Checkpoints were also used as arrest and detention centres, especially those handled by the Al Shoulah (Torch) groups, affiliated with the Public Security forces.

On August 6, 2025, 17-year-old Taim Abu Yahya was arrested at a Public Security checkpoint. According to a relative, his phone was searched and he was taken to Adra prison where he remains, despite no formal charges being filed against him.  

A pattern of reciprocal abductions also emerged, with detentions used as a bargaining chip; an official from one local faction related that at one point his group held 33 people, including seven members of the same family.

While authorities justified the arrests as targeting armed men, plentiful video evidence clearly shows civilians, with their hands bound, being seized from residential neighborhoods.

“I saw him handcuffed, wearing the same clothes he had on when he left his home,” said the wife of one detainee. “They said he was armed but he was not carrying any weapons.”

A Damascus-based security official, contacted for comment, said that the matter did not fall within his responsibilities and asked for his name to not be mentioned in any report.

Local activists argue that the overlapping identities of abductors was a deliberate mechanism employed by government forces to deny direct responsibility.

They warn that it would have been impossible for local militias to have carried out detentions on this scale without cover and direct facilitation from government forces.

“We are facing grim scenarios,” said Khalil, a local human rights activist. “The first is normalising disappearance till missing people just become numbers. The second and most serious is that of parallel justice where factions counter-abduct to recover their own abducted people, thrusting the governorate into a vortex of identity-based retaliation.”

The result has weaponised enforced disappearance as a tool of intimidation. The security forces attain their goal of imposing power, control and intimidation; tribal and armed groups leverage the resulting vacuum for economic gains or to serve local agendas.

Meanwhile, the disappearances leave many Suwayda families suspended in legal and financial limbo, as the authorities refuse to disclose the whereabouts of detainees or issue death certificates for the missing.

“The only thing we want to know: is he alive? Martyred? Where is he imprisoned?” said the mother of one disappeared man. “His absence hits harder than any answer I would get, even if the answer was a confirmation of his death.”

The author is a Syrian journalist working inside the country.