The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights

Regime brokers | Syrian families searching for detained members are victims of exploitations

Most of the Syrians families whose sons are either arrested or disappeared hope to free them. Those families are always ready to pay ransom, even large sums of money, and have become victims to the brokers who exploit the situation to profiteer.

Regime intelligence services work on manipulating the families for the same reasons to loot their money, as they employ mediators who pretend to be part of the judiciary system to blackmail the families and abuse their wish to free their beloved without considering their living and financial conditions.

SOHR activists have met with some of these families who paid large amounts of money to regime brokers to determine fate of their sons inside the regime prisons.

A father, known by his initials as “M.H.” from Jabal Shihshibo region, was a victim of two persons working with the regime government. They stole the money he paid them to know the fate of one of his arrested sons.

“M.A.” told SOHR that his son was arrested by the regime intelligence services while he was in the military service and trying to defect in 2012.

I recognized how dangerous was the action of my son and I tried by all means to release him,” said the father.

Five years passed on his son detention, while “M.A.” attempted many times to find him. In 2017, he managed to reach someone working for the Registry Office who asked for 5,000 US dollars to check his son’s name on the list of deceased persons.

With no hesitation, the father secured the requested amount despite his difficult living conditions and sent the money to the broker.

However, after two days of sending the money, communication was lost between the father and the broker, who most likely changed his phone number as “M.A.” had expected.

The father did not give up and repeated the same mistake again in 2019, but this time he asked a person who is a relative to Khalid Aly al-Hedyany , a member of the parliament, to find out whether his arrested son was alive or not .

“M.A.” paid two million Syrian Liras in collaboration with some of his relatives and sent the money to the mediator who allegedly claimed his son was detained in Hama Central Prison.

Later, the mediator started to shrink from the responsibility of helping the poor father, citing that he had contacted several officers, but the charges against the boy were too grave and seriously dangerous.

Regretfully, “M.A.” so far could not know any information about his son, and he believes that the boy was killed in the prison.

Many similar accidents of exploiting the Syrian families emerged, which prompted the the “Association of the Detainees and the Missing in Saydnaya Prison” to recently publishing a set of guidelines on the most important methods that families should follow to avoid the blackmail of regime networks of officers, lawyers and brokers.

The guidelines are a booklet that included several methods to alleviate the impacts of that phenomenon because these networks of ‘mediators’ have been using several methods of embezzlement and fraud against families of the arrested.

According to the booklet, the regime intelligence services have adopted such a method to generate revenues to compensate for part of the country’s large economic collapse. It is easy to blackmail those families who are in dire need to reach any information about their sons, while the regime security services are deliberately hidden details about the detained people to manipulate the families.

The booklet also highlights that regime brokers have received more than 900 million Syrian Liras from the families of the arrested people since 2011.

On the other hand, a legal activist told SOHR activists that “the regime brokers phenomena was accelerated in the past few years after several years had passed on the disappearance of thousands of civilians with no information has been revealed about them.”

He added the families have been tirelessly and desperately looking for their sons. The activist stressed that such attempts were profitable for the regime brokers who were mostly employees, lawyers, judges and officers with the regime government.

The legal activist has explained that the communication between the brokers and the families, most of whom are living in north Syria, take place via social media. The broker acts like an important official with good connections and asks for large amounts of money to bribe officers and officials in the regime’s prisons and security service branches.

The political activist added that the requested value could vary from two to twenty million Syrian lires.

Despite the hard living conditions, the families start to secure the money, by all means even via borrowing or selling their properties after being assured by the broker to work hard for releasing their sons.

The activist has also referred to the lack of official statistics on the number of families that are exposed to regime’s embezzlement. But, it is a prevalent phenomenon that leads the families to a dead end, where contacts with the brokers are lost and the money gone.
The activist called on the families of the detainees not to waste money and time using those brokers unless they provide them with concrete information first about the arrested whether the evidence is video or contact of their sons.

He also advised the families to find a trusted mediator to ensure the money would not be wasted if their sons are not freed.

Since the Syrian revolution broke out on March 15, 2011, the regime intelligence services have been continuing to arrest all the people who opposed or participated in anti-regime protests. Regime prisons and detention centres are full of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, while many others have been forcibly disappeared and the families cannot any information about their detentions.

SOHR activists have documented the death of 47,509 in the regime prisons since the beginning of the Syrian revolution including 47,106 men and adults, 339 under 18-year-old men and 64 females.