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Yasmine Nayef Merei
29 April 2026
“I remember exactly what my wife and children were wearing … I’d know their remains from their clothes.” So says Ammar Qadi, his voice breaking with a grief that time has done nothing to erase, as we walk along the Ruwais road. This was the same road taken in March 2014 by a number of families from Qalaat Al-Husn, west of Homs, as they headed towards a checkpoint next to the Monastery of St George (Deir Mar Georges) in Al-Mishtaya, before vanishing forever.
Ammar cannot rule out the possibility that his pregnant wife and children are buried in a mass grave. Their remains may be mingled with those of other villagers who fled with them more than ten years ago. To this day, none of these people have been found, and no trace of them has ever come to light.
The town (now city) of Al-Husn, near Homs, sits high on a hill close to the Lebanese border overlooking main roads between the Syrian coast and the interior. In late 2011, there were street demonstrations in Al-Husn against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, followed by skirmishes between the armed opposition in the area and regime forces. Al-Husn was subsequently besieged for almost two years, which prompted residents to leave in periodic wavesto other parts of Syria or abroad. Over time, the number of checkpoints around the town grew, until Assad’s forces finally took control of the town in March 2014.
When the siege began, residents could rely on the fruit from their orchards. But with time food ran out, and there was nothing left to eat but grass and leaves, say many residents.
Ammar Qadi says that, because the siege lasted a long time, in the end he was eating mulberry leaves: “Towards the end, all we had to eat was grass.” Speaking of his daughter Sawsan, he says: “What tormented me most was seeing my two-year-old crying from hunger and having nothing to give her … I would sneak out to get hold of some wild greens, crawling so I wasn’t seen by a sniper.” A group of people were shot whilst trying to do the same, he says.
As the siege intensified, Ammar’s wife, Diala Sharafou, pregnant with their third child, left the town with their two young children – Muammar, aged ten months, and Sausan . She was accompanied by her mother, Asia Daaboul, and her father, Khaled Sharafou. When Ammar spoke to his father-in-law by phone on March 18, 2014, the day before regime forces took control of the town, he told Ammar his wife was at the Al-Khader Hotel (as it was then called) near the Al-Ruwais checkpoint, where they had all been detained.
The image was created using AI
Fouad Kandakji keeps several photos on his phone of his wife and their children: Nour, Salma, Adnan, Mansour and Ali. Little did he know that when he took these pictures they would be all he had left of them.
Fouad stares at one photo of his wife and children sitting around the table, each with a plate of mahalabia she had made after they managed to find some sugar. It was said later the sugar was poisoned, but they were so hungry they had no choice, even if it was the last thing they would ever eat. He also has a photo of the pot for making the coffee he would drink with his wife.You could almost smell its aroma.
Despite the siege and with limited resources, his wife, Asma Bitar, did her best to prepare meals with whatever she could find. Once she cooked anemones, which blossom in springtime, and served them to the children instead of spinach.She and her husband would boil off the brine used to soak olives in to extract the salt. Other people did the same.
But once Fouad and Asma were no longer able to provide food, he urged her to leave the town with their children and escape the consequences of a siege that could well have gone on longer. “There was no bread, no bulgur, nothing… some people were eating leaves off the trees,” says Fouad, adding that his weight dropped to around 40 kilograms after the food ran out.
Along with her sister Nima and some other women, Asma and her children crossed from the Saraya neighbourhood and headed for the Ruwais road. Fouad managed to stay in contact with his wife for three days until both she and the children disappeared.
In the final days of the siege, before Bashar al-Assad’s regime took control of Al-Husn, groups of residents left the town heading towards the surrounding checkpoints under what had become known as the “arrangement”.
Lawyer Anwar al-Bunni explains that this “arrangement” refers to measures taken by the regime against rebellious areas and means surrender in return for a promise of no immediate arrest. After the regime entered these areas, it hunted people down, arrested them and forced them out, according to al-Bunni.
The images were created using AI
Toward the end of the siege, people left in waves. Some were taken by bus to Talkalakh and elsewhere in Syria, and others headed for Lebanon. And a few days before Al-Husn fell, dozens of mainly women and children were held at the Al-Khader Hotel. The women were asked to contact their husbands and urge them to leave the town.
Regular army soldiers were at the checkpoint as residents of Qalaat Al-Husn arrived, alongside civil police and Political Security officers. There was also a team from the Homs branch of the Red Crescent in the vicinity of the hotel, according to Naji Masouh (not his real name), who was working at the Al-Khader Hotel at the time.
Diala Sharafou and her two children took the tree-lined road from Al-Husn to Al-Mishtahya, as did Asma Bitar and her five children. Asma was accompanied by her three sisters-in-law: Waad Kassar Thalja with her two daughters, Nour and Khadija; Majda Safar, who was nine months pregnant; and Masarra Abdulrahman. Dozens of women and children left the town over the course of a few days, along with a number of men.
This road, from which you can take in the beauty of the region with its wild plants and vegetation, gives no hint of the dark fate to which it led people that day.
At the end of the road, a security checkpoint had been set up, which, according to Ammar al-Qadi, had been for some years controlled by the so-called Osud al-Wadi Battalion, an armed group affiliated with the National Defence Forces. At the checkpoint, they would identify women and children related to individuals who were wanted by the group, according to some of the people we interviewed.
The Osud al-Wadi Battalion is led by Bishr Yazigi, who previously worked in tourism. In an interview with the OTV channel, Bishr said it was not a regular battalion at first, but became so later. A report broadcast by the channel shows footage of members receiving their salaries at the headquarters of the battalion, which later became part of the so-called National Defence Forces (NDF).
In the interview, Bishr Yazigi said there was no difference between civilians and militants in Al-Husn: “The son of a fighter is a fighter too, and a fighters’ wife who cooks for him is a fighter too.”
The former bishop of Wadi al-Nasara region, Elia Tohme, says that Bishar Yazigi set up his headquarters near the bishopric in Marmarita, where Tohme resides. This upset the bishop, who did not want any security presence around his bishopric.
Bishop Tohme says that Yazigi, the commander of the Osud al-Wadi Battalion, was not originally a military man, but took up arms and then trained in Iran in communications and network technology.
Yazigi said, when interviewed on television about the relationship between the NDF and Iran, that Syria had been ill-equipped for street fighting: “We’re friends; what’s wrong with my friend supporting me or joining me?”
Yazigi appears to have wielded considerable influence. In the same TV interview, he explains that he successfully called for the complete shutdown of the communications network in the Wadi al-Nasara region, after a vehicle was suspected of being boobytrapped using a mobile phone.
In documenting cases of missing persons, we used testimonies from family members (husband, father, brother, son or other relative). The relatives of the missing were able to identify women and children from interviews shot with them which were broadcast on Al-Mayadeen TV. We verified the location where the video was shot by matching landmarks visible from the hotel with those that appeared in satellite images of the area from 2014. And we checked these landmarks on a visit to the site. We also used the testimony of relatives of those who disappeared, who told them by phone that they were being detained at this hotel. We also interviewed people who had met the missing at the hotel before they themselves managed to leave by some arrangement or other. The whole investigation involved forty interviews as well as follow ups with relevant sources to find out exactly what happened.
Video showing the route taken by the missing persons before they were detained.
The image was created using AI
Naji Masouh, who worked at the Al-Khader Hotel, says it was the NDF who told people to gather in the lobby of the hotel, which was then out of service due to financial problems. He said the Red Crescent provided them with meals and “medical care” and brought in some supplies, at the request of the NDF.
Masouh said that the Homs branch of the NDF were stationed in the lobby round the clock during that period and that a female member of the force was tasked with searching for the women. Anyone not detained at the hotel was transferred to other places such as Talkalakh.
In a video broadcast by Al Mayadeen in 2014, Khawla Haddad is sitting at the far end of the hotel lobby with a group of women from Al-Husn with her four daughters – Manar, Qamar, Zakiya and Nour – and her granddaughter Fatima Huwayr. Khawla tells the presenter about her previous attempts to leave, but is reluctant to give any details about her husband.
The presenter presses her with questions about her husband and whether he had taken up arms. Khawla denies her husband had any link with the militants and cuts off the interview.
Yahya Huwayr, the husband of Khawla’s daughter Manar, whom he recognised in the video clip, says he stayed in touch with them, checking on them via a mobile phone that they still had with them, until he lost contact after March 19. Yahya clung to the hope he would hold his four-month-old daughter Fatima in his arms again, but she disappeared, along with her mother, grandmother, and aunts.
Naji Masouh, the hotel employee, remembers in detail what happened that last day the people were held, the day Bashar al-Assad’s regime took control of Al-Husn. Around midday, he says, the Homs NDF began firing through the windows to celebrate the takeover of the town, while sounds of weeping came from the people held in the lobby. “They’d broken through the front line,” says Masouh. And at the same time there was gunfire from the Osud Al-Wadi battalion outside.
According to Masouh, people were loaded onto large trucks that were ordinarily used to transport goods and livestock. A separate truck was set aside to carry livestock that had been seized from the local residents. Masouh believes the trucks then headed toward Homs. In the meantime, the looting of Al-Husn began and continued for four days.
We contacted the General Security Directorate in Homs to inquire about those who went missing. An official, who declined to give his name, said they had not managed to arrest any of those who had carried out massacres in the western region, in and around Qalaat Al-Husn, as there was no evidence of their involvement.
He said that the security forces had succeeded in arresting those responsible for kidnappings and mass killings in and around the city of Homs. Similar arrests were also made in the Al-Qusayr area. Those detained admitted to the existence of mass graves that had been uncovered in both regions.
At the Red Crescent office in the Al-Inshaat neighbourhood of Homs we met Tarek Al-Ashraf, operations coordinator for the local branch of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, to try to find out what had happened to the missing. Al-Ashraf took up this post in March 2014 and since then has visited the Wadi al-Nasara district once.
He explained that the Red Crescent was present at all evacuations, where it acted as a partner to the authorities in providing humanitarian services, “in a manner consistent with its fundamental principles of neutrality, impartiality and humanity,” as he put it.
Al-Ashraf emphasized that the Red Crescent played no part in the evacuation agreements themselves and that its role was limited to providing humanitarian services – food and water, children’s needs and medical care. “The state used to offload these tasks on the Red Crescent,” he said.
I continued my search for the commander of the Osud al-Wadi battalion, Bashar Yazigi. After several weeks I managed to obtain his mobile number in Canada, where he was now living. I began by texting him saying I was a journalist and asking to speak by phone. We then spoke for an hour and a quarter. Bashar at first refused to let me record the conversation, though he did allow me to take notes for my story. He talked proudly of his role in leading an organisation with around 700 members. He said he knew nothing of what had happened to any of the women and children taken from the Al-Khader Hotel and put the blame squarely on the security forces of the time.
Bashar Yazigi, the Osud al-Wadi Ba commander, denies ties to the disappearance of these people. After the call ended, he sent me a message asking me not to publish the details of our conversation.
More than ten years have passed since the disappearance of little Noura, daughter of Fouad Kandakji, who went missing along with her four siblings and her mother Asma, after they were taken from the Al-Khader Hotel. Fouad still misses what he calls Nora’s gentle nature. Even though they were all suffering from hunger due to the siege, she would hide half her ration of bread and whisper to him when he came home, “I’ve hidden this for you, daddy.”
I went to the General Security Directorate in Homs to ask if I could access the military and political security records in Talkalakh, to see if the names of the missing women and children were recorded there. Their response was that all the records were found to have been burned before the fall of the Assad regime.
According to an official in the directorate, the issue of the missing in Syria’s western region “remains a mystery to this day.”
Al-Husn was not the only town where forced disappearances took place. A report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, published last August (2025), indicates that at least 181,312 people remain either in arbitrary detention or were victims of forced disappearance between March 2011 and August 2025. These figures include 5,332 children and 9,201 women.
As part of our efforts to find out what happened to these missing people, we contacted the National Commission for the Missing Persons and shared with them the names of the missing in this report. Their response was: “The National Commission for the Missing is currently analyzing a large number of documents and data from cross-referenced sources, in order to obtain reliable information on the fate of the missing; including the women and children of Qalaat al-Husn. The process of verifying this information takes time, given the complexity and sensitivity of this issue. But we are committed to taking a professional and transparent approach. As soon as any reliable information becomes available, families will be informed, using appropriate professional methods that take account of their humanitarian circumstances.”
ARIJ submitted reports to a number of organizations – the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), the Syrian Justice & Accountability Centre, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the ICRC delegation in Syria, and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria. Our reports refer to “the detention, followed by enforced disappearance, of a number of residents of Qalaat al-Husn/Wadi al-Nasara (west of Homs), after they had been held, in March 2014, inside the St George/Al Khader Hotel in the town of Al-Mishtaya”. The reports included a list of those missing.
The SCM confirmed that they had received our report. The ICRC mission in Syria told us that the names we had provided were included in the ICRC records. We have yet to receive responses from the other organizations.
