About a week ago, Syria's interior ministry announced that ongoing investigations into the disappearance of the children of Dr Abdul Rahman Yassin and Dr Rania al-Abbasi had uncovered information and evidence indicating that the children were killed by groups and militias affiliated with the former regime. This came 13 years after they were forcibly disappeared. The six children were between the ages of 14 and two when they were arrested with their mother. While the mother and father had been killed in prison, the fate of their children had remained unknown for all this time.
The confirmation of their deaths shook Syrians to the core. Hundreds of thousands were killed, detained and forcibly disappeared at the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Thousands of children, too, were arrested, killed or disappeared into the darkness of prisons and so-called "care homes." Yet the confirmed killing of these six children, after years in which their family searched for them, reopened wounds and sorrows that Syrians have scarcely had time to tend, let alone heal.
The families of Dr Yassin and Dr Rania called for justice for the children, as well as for their father and mother, and for the mother’s assistant at her clinic, Majdoline al-Qadi, who was arrested with Dr Rania and never returned.
At a time when most Syrians are demanding transitional justice and accountability for those who killed their sons and daughters, certain voices have emerged—some openly, in their own names and on camera, others behind false identities—seeking to turn attention away from justice and exploit every wound for sectarian incitement.
They call for revenge in the name of justice, but instead of holding the criminal to account, they seek to place an entire sect in the dock. Some have gone so far as to call for the killing of children from the Alawite community in response to the killing of these children, though no religious law, civil law or faith permits such a thing.
At first glance, one might imagine that the Alawite community is the first party harmed by these campaigns. In truth, the first and ultimate victim is Syria itself: the homeland, the state and the people. But let us be clear, dragging the country into sectarian violence will spare no one. A Syria struggling to rise after decades of oppression and torment cannot be rebuilt on a discourse that urges one segment of its people to kill or punish the other. This will almost certainly plunge the country into the furnace of bloody confessional conflict. Justice will not be served. The only result will be more blood, as though more than 14 years of Syrian bloodshed had still not been enough.
