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The Hague – The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR)
Abdul Akram al-Saqqa, a revivalist Islamic thinker born in 1944, who founded the ‘Charity Association’ and the ‘Sharia High School’ in Darayya city in western Rural Damascus governorate, was arrested on July 14, 2011, by Syrian regime forces who raided his school in the city. He has been classified as forcibly disappeared ever since with the Syrian regime denying having him or allowing anyone to visit him, even a lawyer.
Abdul Akram al-Saqqa was known for his reformist work in his local community, where he was the imam and khatib (deliverer of the Friday sermon) at the Anas bin Malik Mosque. In 1988, he founded ‘al-Assad Institute for the Memorization of the Holy Quran’, serving as its director until the end of 2000. He also founded ‘al-Saqqa House’ for printing, publishing and distribution, through which he published several scholarly, cultural, social, and intellectual books. With the advent of the popular uprising for democracy in Syria in 2011, he participated in the peaceful anti-regime demonstrations in Darayya city. Given his status as a well-known and widely respected dignitary in the area, he and other popular figures were strategic targets for the Syrian regime who spared no efforts or resources in arresting, prosecuting, imprisoning and forcibly disappearing such individuals, without any legal cause.
On August 20, 2024, Abdul Akram al-Saqqa’s family obtained a death certificate from the civil registry office in Darayya city indicating that he had died on November 3, 2014, with no other details, such as cause of death, provided. This suggests that Abdul Akram died about three-and-a-half years after his arrest. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) can confirm that he suffered from several conditions prior to his arrest that required medical care and various types of medication, indicating a strong probability that he died due to torture and medical negligence. SNHR can also confirm that Syrian regime forces failed to announce Abdul Akram’s death when it happened, as well as failing to return his body to his family.
This failure to return Abdul Akram’s body to his family is the norm rather than the exception, with the regime routinely failing to return its victims’ bodies to their families to enable them to properly lay their loved ones to rest. Without returning the body, the documents from the registry office confirming the victims’ deaths in custody do not constitute a full revelation of the truth about their demise. Like many tens of thousands of Syrian families, Abdul Akram’s family has no possible recourse to legal action to determine the true cause of his death, or even to obtain his body since, as stated earlier, the Syrian regime absolutely refuses to return the bodies of any of its forcibly disappeared victims. SNHR is gravely concerned at the mechanisms and methods used by the regime to conceal and dispose of the bodies of its victims who died due to torture.
Since the start of 2018, SNHR has been documenting a practice adopted by the Syrian regime, whereby forcibly disappeared individuals are registered as dead in the civil registry’s records without any notification being issued to their families; we have detailed this phenomenon in previous reports. To this day, the families of persons forcibly disappeared continue to learn about the deaths of their loved ones through civil registry records. In total, we have documented 1,634 cases of this kind as of this writing, with the victims including 24 children, 21 women (adult female), and 16 medical personnel. In all these 1,634 cases, the cause of death was not revealed, and the regime failed to return the victims’ bodies to their families or even to notify the families of their loved ones’ burial places.
SNHR must reiterate that the Syrian regime bears a serious and binding responsibility to reveal the fate of forcibly disappeared persons and to launch independent investigations under the supervision of the UN to reveal the truth about the violations that occurred, to hold those responsible accountable, and to return the victims’ bodies to their families so they can be laid to rest with a proper funeral and burial. This practice by the Syrian regime of registering deaths in the civil registry records falls far short of conclusively and properly clarifying the fate of forcibly disappeared persons. Rather, it constitutes another damning indictment of the Syrian regime which, having arrested and forcibly disappeared these individuals, and denied any involvement or responsibility for their disappearance, then registers their deaths in its civil registry records without providing any details on how they died or returning their bodies to their grieving families. As such, we at SNHR reiterate that these victims are still included among the ranks of the forcibly disappeared, with the internationally outlawed crime of enforced disappearance still continuing to take place in Syria up to the present day, with the primary culprit behind these crimes being the Syrian regime.
SNHR condemns all arrest and torture practices by Syrian regime forces. We call for the immediate launch of an independent investigation into all incidents of arrest and torture that have taken place, particularly this latest atrocity, which again demonstrates the level of sheer barbarism that is the norm for this regime. We also must underline the need to support the Syrian people’s just demands for deposing and replacing the current monstrous and despotic ruling regime in Syria with a democratic system of elected government that respects human rights and defends the Syrian people.
SNHR stands in complete solidarity with Abdul Akram’s family and the families of all victims who have fallen victims to the heinous machine of torture in Syria. We wish to also express our most heartfelt empathy and condolences to all families who have suffered such terrible losses.