They carried photographs of four faces Syria has not seen in eleven years. In Douma, residents gathered on New Year’s Day to demand justice. The scarred Damascus suburb endured years of siege and a chemical attack. They want answers for human-rights lawyer Razan Zaitouneh and three colleagues — the “Douma Four”. Gunmen seized the four from their office in December 2013. The four never resurfaced.
The sit-in took place in the town’s main square. It was one of the first public acts of memory in a Syria suddenly able to speak. Bashar al-Assad fled the country on Dec. 8, ending five decades of his family’s rule. Demonstrators held banners reading “they are in our hearts” and, pointedly, “we won’t forgive”. That message aimed at the armed group long accused of the kidnapping. It also aimed at the new authorities, now expected to answer questions the old order buried.
Key Points
- Gunmen abducted Zaitouneh, her husband Wael Hamadeh, Samira Khalil and Nazem Hammadi on Dec. 9, 2013, from the Violation Documentation Center’s office in Douma.
- All evidence and logic point to the Army of Islam, families say. The Islamist faction then controlled Douma, and the group has consistently denied involvement.
- Speakers included Yassin Haj Saleh and activist Wafa Mustafa. Haj Saleh, the writer and husband of Samira Khalil, has documented the case for a decade.
The Douma Four: the night the office went silent
Zaitouneh was one of the most prominent civilians of the Syrian uprising. She was a lawyer who had defended political prisoners before 2011. Then, as the revolt militarized, she co-founded the Violation Documentation Center. It recorded abuses by all sides — regime, rebels and jihadists alike. That impartiality made enemies everywhere. Armed groups angered by her documentation of their abuses had threatened her. Weeks before the abduction, she wrote about armed men appearing near her office.
On the night of Dec. 9, 2013, gunmen raided the centre’s Douma office. They took the Douma Four and their computers. No ransom demand, no proof of life, and no bodies followed. In an enclave then besieged and bombarded by the regime, the kidnapping extinguished the suburb’s best-known civil-society project. Haj Saleh was in Turkey that night and learned of his wife’s abduction by phone. He has spent the years since assembling the case against the Army of Islam. His book-length investigation argues the group’s leadership either ordered the seizure or knows its outcome. The group, whose political office later operated openly under Saudi patronage, has always denied it.
Background: one case among more than 100,000
The Douma Four are a fraction of Syria’s disappeared. The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that more than 100,000 people suffered forced disappearance during the war. The Assad regime accounts for the overwhelming majority. Its prison system — laid bare since December in Sednaya and other facilities — consumed tens of thousands. Rebel and jihadist groups account for thousands more cases. For families across every line of the conflict, the demand is the same: names, fates, graves.
That is why the Douma protest matters beyond one case. It tests Syria’s transition. Will it treat enforced disappearance as a crime to investigate wherever it leads? That includes factions now negotiating their place in the new order. Or will it only pursue cases that incriminate the fallen regime?
What happens next
Syria’s transitional authorities inherit registries, mass graves and prison files. Activists are racing to secure them, alongside the demand for a national mechanism to trace the missing. For the families who stood in Douma’s square on the first day of 2025, the ask is narrower and older than politics. After eleven years, they want an answer. “We won’t forgive” is also, read another way, a promise — that the four will not disappear a second time, into forgetting.
Douma itself is evidence in the protesters’ argument. The town was the stronghold of the Army of Islam through the siege years. Yet its people also starved under the regime’s blockade. They suffered gassing in the April 2018 chemical attack — a place victimised by every armed actor that touched it. Its main square now hosts a protest naming a rebel faction, weeks after the regime’s fall. That shows how abruptly the space for accusation has widened. It also shows how contested the reckoning will be. Every faction in the new Syria has files it would rather keep closed. The families of the disappeared intend to open all of them.
Sources: Violation Documentation Center case files; Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates on enforced disappearance; family statements, including Yassin Haj Saleh’s published investigation.
