Since the Syrian government arrested Yahya Hijazi and his two sons in 2012, his relatives have held out hope that they are still alive and that they may one day be released.
His brother from northwestern Syria says, "You hope every moment that your eyes will fall again on that person you love so much, or that you will hear any news about him."
However, after 10 years of silence by the authorities, their hopes were dashed when the Syrian Network for Human Rights contacted the Hijazi family to tell them that it had obtained the death certificates for the three.
The network (an independent organization) said that the documents confirming the death of Yahya and his two sons were among the 547 death certificates of detainees issued by the authorities since 2017, and the network obtained them from internal sources in government departments, adding that the documents answered questions about the fate of hundreds of missing persons.
Activists hope to use those documents one day to take international judicial action against the government, which a United Nations commission of inquiry has accused of committing crimes against humanity, because of its detention policies.
According to a Reuters report, the Syrian government did not respond to emailed questions about death certificates obtained by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, and Syrian officials have previously denied accusations of systematic torture and mass executions in prisons.
Reuters reviewed 80 death certificates, including those of the Hijazi family, in addition to the death certificates of a 3-year-old girl and her 6-year-old sister.
A human rights lawyer reviewed a sample of the documents, and said that their format, the language used, and the information contained in them are identical to what is usual in Syrian death certificates.
Muhammad Hijazi said that his family did not request death certificates from the authorities, because they live in opposition-held areas.
He added that their acquaintances who live in areas controlled by the government refused to ask civil records about the deaths, fearing that they would be considered opponents of the regime in Damascus.
The war broke out in Syria after the revolution in 2011 against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, killing more than 350,000 people, displacing more than half of the population, and forcing millions to leave the country and live as refugees abroad.
According to the estimates of the United Nations Committee, tens of thousands of people are detained in centers affiliated with the Syrian government.
The committee and the families of the detainees say that they are not usually allowed to communicate with their families, which leaves the families wondering about their whereabouts and even whether they are still alive.
Women and children
The Syrian Network for Human Rights said that the death certificates it obtained include those of 15 children and 19 women.
Some of the eighty testimonies reviewed by Reuters mention that the place of death is military hospitals or military courts, while some of them did not include a specific place, as it only mentions "Damascus" or a village on its outskirts, while the place of death was left blank in other testimonies.
The testimonies reviewed by Reuters also included large time gaps between the date of death and the date it was recorded, reaching several years in most of the testimonies, and the difference was 10 years in one of them.
without reasons
The documents reviewed by Reuters did not mention a cause of death, and the Syrian Network said this applied to all of the other 547 testimonies.
The human rights organization stated that it matched the names mentioned in the death certificates with the lists of detainees held by the Syrian authorities, and was able to reach the families of 23 of the deceased.
She said that many of them had a feeling that their loved ones had died, a feeling that was confirmed after seeing the death certificates.
According to a report issued by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria in 2022, torture and ill-treatment in Syrian prisons is still "systematic".
The report indicated that there are violations in the detention centers of non-governmental factions as well.
He said that the government deliberately withholds information about the detainees from their families, and described the detention policies as amounting to crimes against humanity.
Update records
The UN committee said that the Syrian authorities began in 2018 to update the civil records with a large number of death certificates of people who died in detention, but they did not inform their families directly.
The government did not respond to questions about why relatives of the deceased were not informed.
Relatives living in government-controlled areas were able to find out if their loved ones had died by requesting their family records from civil registry offices, but they were not allowed to receive the bodies for burial, nor were they told the location of the remains, according to the committee and the network.
Others learned of the deaths by identifying their relatives in leaked photos taken by military photographers working in prisons, the most prominent of whom bore the pseudonym "Caesar".
During an interview in 2015, Al-Assad denied the authenticity of the photos published by Caesar, saying that they are allegations without evidence, and former prosecutors specializing in war crimes described the photos as clear evidence of systematic torture and mass killing.
The director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, Fadl Abdel-Ghani, said that he hopes that families who are still awaiting to know the fate of their loved ones will find some solace in the death certificates.
But the wait continues for Muhammad Hijazi, as although he now knows the fate of his brother, he says that 40 other relatives are detained by the government in central Syria and the family does not know anything about them.
"I couldn't tell my mother that Yahya was dead. I only told her that he was still in prison!" Mohammed says.