Looking for Father Dall'Oglio, and all the others
Jomana Solman, project manager for the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, told AsiaNews that no remains have been found where the Italian priest was abducted in 2013. The organisation continues to work on mass graves in northeastern Syria, but identifying remains is complex and expensive. A recent spate of fake news has fuelled hope among the families of the missing.
Damascus (AsiaNews) – The discovery of the body of Father Paolo Dall’Oglio was “fake news” because “no body was found,” said Jomana Salman, project manager of the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre (SJAC).
Speaking to AsiaNews, she dismissed recent stories that appeared in Italian media regarding claims that the body of the Italian priest had been found. A member of the Society of Jesus, the clergyman went missing on 29 July 2013 after entering an area controlled by the Islamic State group to negotiate the release of some hostages.
“We have not worked on mass graves in Al-Furusiya or Raqqa, so there is no body to identify,” the expert said.
For years, the SJAC has been working to uncover the fate of tens of thousands of people who went missing during Syria’s civil war. According to a 2021 United Nations estimate, this involves more than 130,000 individuals.
Syria’s current government recently stated that at least 140,000 people were buried in mass graves, at least 12,000 in the Kurdish-majority northeast, but the figures could be much higher.
The SJAC has not stopped its activities since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime at the hands of various Islamist groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). However, for the time being, it is active only in areas under the control of Kurdish militias.
“We have permission from the autonomous administration to work on missing people, in particular those kidnapped by the Islamic State, thanks to a memorandum of understanding,” said Jomana Salman, who also noted that other NGOs are active elsewhere in Syria.
This is an extremely expensive job carried out thanks to the collaboration with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG). The Central American country too was marked by decades of civil war and tens of thousands of missing, mostly indigenous Mayans.
“We had a partnership with Argentina,” Jomana Salman explained, “but they stopped operating in Syria at a certain point, so we turned to Guatemala because they have a long forensic experience and very reliable laboratories.”
Sending DNA samples to Guatemala is only the last step. “Our work is actually concentrated in two first phases: training local teams and conducting contextual investigations.”
Examining all the remains would be too expensive (at least three samples are needed from the victim and family members for a cost of US$ 100 to US$ 150), so the SJAC, funded mainly from the United States and Germany, has the task of focusing its energies on places where it is most likely to immediately ascertain already collected information about human presence.
“To proceed, it is necessary to have stories that match, both from family members who filed a complaint, but also from survivors or local residents, even former combatants.
Once we have collected information from at least three sources, we use satellite images to locate the burial sites. Other times we have very specific details about people’s features or the clothing they were wearing. If the various elements match, we can proceed to collect the DNA.”
In Father Dall’Oglio’s case, the SJAC is still at the stage of contextual investigations, which potentially covers 16 burial sites. “Father Paolo was known to many people in Syria, so we collected many stories, but most of them were not reliable, completely false information,” the project manager said.
“One source, for example, told us that Dall’Oglio was arrested by the Islamic State in Al-Karamah (east of Raqqa), but then moved to another town. However, after various checks, the region where Father Paolo was supposed to be in was held by the (Assad) regime at the time, so it does not appear to be reliable. We are still working on this, not only for Father Paolo, but for all the missing persons in Syria.”
This activity turns out to be very painful for Jomana as well. Hailing from Al-Hasakah, she now lives in Belgium.
“When I started this job I thought that dealing with bodies and mass graves would be the hardest part, but after just three or four months I understood that talking to the families is much more demanding, because you have to deal with their sadness and their expectations.”
For many, the wounds have been reopening following the change of government. “Now on social media there is a lot of fake news without any form of control; this is the main problem. And when families receive information, even fake, they feel they have to struggle again to find their loved ones.”
In the areas taken by the government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former HTS fighter, first affiliated with Al-Qaeda and then with the self-styled Islamic State, other groups deal with missing people, and could now work together under UN guidance. The latter recently approved the creation of an Independent Institution on Missing Persons (IIMP).
“Other teams are trying to coordinate with the IIMP so that the UN can centralise the data. For now, we have reported our presence, but we would also like to see how things are proceeding.”
Despite the fall of the Assad regime, a large part of the population still does not trust the Islamist authorities who took over in December. The Alawite minority has especially endured persecution in recent months from armed groups that supported the HTS. The Assad clan is Alawite.
Jomana herself has not yet returned to her country. “I fled in 2014 and moved to Iraq, from where I could return to north-east Syria without any problems. But now I am waiting to obtain Belgian citizenship before I return,” she said, full of hope. Yet, for her, “It is strange to think that I am waiting for foreign papers before returning to my country.”
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