Moayad Mohammad al-Ibeid and his son Abdul Aziz, born in 1976 and 1996 respectively, from al-Qaryatein village, east of Homs governorate, were arrested on February 5, 2021 by Syrian regime forces in a raid on their home in al-Qaryatein’s northern neighbourhood.
Moayad and Abdul Aziz were among the people who had previously agreed to a security settlement when they returned from al-Rukban IDP camp, located in eastern Homs governorate. They have been forcibly disappeared roughly since that time, with the Syrian regime denying their detention and refusing to allow anyone to visit them, even lawyers. On October 31, 2022, their family learnt that both had died in a Syrian regime detention center in Damascus city. SNHR can confirm they were in good health at the time of their arrest, which makes it highly likely they died due to torture and medical negligence.
We can also confirm that the Syrian regime has not returned their dead bodies to their family; this is a common practice for the regime, which fails to return the overwhelming majority of the bodies of those who die inside its detention centers to their families.
Instead, the Syrian regime dispose of these dead bodies in deliberate mass incinerations. It should be noted as long as the victim’s body is not returned to his or her family, the individual in question is still classified as a forcibly disappeared person.
It is worth noting that roughly 135,253 Syrian citizens are still detained or forcibly disappeared in Syrian regime detention centers. We have serious concerns about their fate. We have documented the deaths of at least 14,475 Syrian citizens due to torture in regime detention centers since March 2011.
