Merve Aydogan
23 July 2026•Update: 23 July 2026
Karla Quintana, head of the Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic (IIMP), told reporters Thursday that the search for missing citizens remains one of the most pressing challenges facing Syria after more than five decades of "torture and detention and disappearances."
Quintana said hope has accompanied difficulties confronting the country as it works to rebuild, but noted that "few of the challenges are as profound as to look for the hundreds of thousands of missing persons in Syria."
She said Syria has one of the highest numbers of missing persons in the world, in absolute and relative terms -- a fact she called essential when assessing the challenges ahead.
"Every Syrian has a missing person. And every family in Syria knows someone that is missing," she said at a news conference at UN headquarters in New York.
Quintana said addressing the issue is not only a humanitarian and ethical imperative but also "fundamental for stabilization and for peacebuilding."
Over the past year, she said, the IIMP has been implementing its mandate and delivering information to families, while building systems capable of analyzing growing volumes of data.
"We have processed more than 75,000 documents," she said, adding that the figure is nine times higher than the previous year, and has allowed the IIMP to give families "some answers" while strengthening lines of inquiry.
Noting that accessing, analyzing and sharing information is the biggest challenge in the search for the missing, Quintana stressed that it is a collective process.
"No one can do this alone, not at a national, not at an international level, and it requires from all of us to work in collaboration, in coordination, and in complementarity. There are no shortcuts," she said, adding that hundreds of thousands of families are still waiting for concrete answers.
When asked whether some of the missing could still be alive, Quintana urged caution.
"We have to be very cautious, and I have to be very serious about what I say, about who can be alive or not," she said. "We have been analyzing lots of information, and we have gotten to the conclusion that to this moment we have the names of around a little bit more than 600 cases. Some of them we know for sure they are alive, and some of them have already gotten back to their families. So, there is a possibility of persons being alive."
Since the fall of the Baath regime, authorities have uncovered multiple mass graves during search and inspection operations across Syria, shedding further light on the scale of violations and atrocities committed under the former regime.
The discoveries have renewed calls for accountability and documentation of crimes committed during years of conflict as efforts continue to determine the fate of thousands of missing civilians.
Bashar Assad, Syria's leader for nearly 25 years, fled to Russia in December 2024, ending the Baath Party regime, which had been in power since 1963. A new transitional administration led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa was formed in January 2025.
