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The report comes out after shocking legal neglect, especially with the proliferation of literature about what happens in Syrian prisons and disclosure of torture atrocities and horrifying killings in prison without reckoning or any real check.

The report concluded that the issue of the missing persons in Syria is as a tragic national case in the full sense of the word where the humanitarian aspect overlaps with the legal and political ones. Thousands of families beset by their children’s disappearance still do not know about their fate; the known destiny is harsher than what can the missing individuals’ households tolerate.

Years of Fear and Phenomenon of Forced Disappearance:
The late President Hafez al-Assad’s endeavour to seize power alone after a military coup in October 1970, based on sectarian practices has easily created a climate of fundamentalism. The escalated political Islamist (mainly represented by Muslim Brotherhood) protest was exploded by the artillery massacre in July 1979 and ended by a semi-civil war that claimed 1000s of civilians. Furthermore, there were many slaughters in the main Syrian cities, the most horrific of which was the massive massacre of Hama where approximately 15000-35000 were killed. During the years of fear, security services have detained more than a 100000 people. Hafiz Assad always denied before the world media any political prisoner at all. The Law 49 that calls for death penalty applied retroactively against all Muslim Brotherhood members. Hafez al-Assad issued a number of legislative decrees by establishing formal military courts, which lack the minimum conditions of justice and he referred all political prisoners to them. They were liquidated in organized mass executions over long years whose atrocities were narrated by survivors and those who had spent often more than 10 years, as admitted by the Minister Mustafa Tallas (Chief of Military Courts) in an interview with Der Spiegel 2005.

Since the massacre of Palmyra in 1980, political prisoners were isolated from the outside world and subjugated to several forms of torture and organized executions. The report stressed that the Forced Disappearance phenomenon is one of the worst forms of state terrorism that began as the Baath Party came to power (Baathist trend). However, it did not turn to a widespread and systematic process until the era of Hafez al-Assad, starting in mid-1980s. Groups belonging to Muslim Brotherhood, Communist parties, Palestinian organizations and Lebanese, Jordanians and some Iraqis were subjected to forced disappearance by the Syrian government. However, most of the victims are Muslim Brotherhood members and ordinary people who were held hostages or seized on suspicion or for their kinship ties. In some cases entire families, including women and children, disappeared such as "Julaq" family (Lattakia) who was taken hostage.