UNITED NATIONS — U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that he is appointing the former head of Mexico’s National Search Commission to head an independent mechanism for determining the fate of tens of thousands of missing and forcibly disappeared persons in Syria.
“We pledge our support to those who continue to live with the agony of uncertainty,” Guterres said of the families of the missing.
In June 2023, the U.N. General Assembly created the Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, or IIMP. It is mandated to establish the fate and whereabouts of all missing persons in Syria, and to support victims, including survivors and families of the missing.
“I am announcing today the appointment of Karla Quintana of Mexico as head of this Institution,” Guterres told reporters. “She and her team must be allowed to fully carry out their mandate.”
From February 2019 to August 2023, Quintana was the national commissioner for the Search of Missing Persons in Mexico, where more than 110,000 people are listed as missing or disappeared, mostly because of organized crime.
Quintana, 46, a human rights lawyer and professor, will have a mammoth task ahead of her. The Syrian Network for Human Rights, or SNHR, says at least 157,634 people went missing from the start of the Syrian civil war in March 2011 until August 2024.
Since the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria on Dec. 8, prison doors in many parts of the country have been opened and thousands of the detained released. Mass graves have been discovered. But families continue to search for information about tens of thousands of loved ones who are still unaccounted for.
In an interview with VOA last week, SNHR Founder and Director Fadel Abdul Ghany said about 105,000 people are still unaccounted for and the organization believes that “the vast majority” of them are dead.
Political transition
The U.N. chief also urged an “inclusive, credible and peaceful” Syrian-led political process, saying they must manage the situation carefully or risk progress unraveling.
In the meantime, he said the United Nations is shifting its humanitarian response inside the country to respond to the new situation on the ground. Guterres’ new humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, has been on the ground in Damascus, Aleppo and Homs this week.
After 14 years of civil war, Syria already was one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with 17 million people — more than 70% of the population — in need of assistance and funding in short supply.
The U.N. chief warned that the war is “still far from over.” He pointed to “significant hostilities” in the north, the threat to “many parts” of Syria from Islamic State fighters, and ongoing Israeli airstrikes and military movement in the zone where U.N. peacekeepers patrol between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the rest of Syria.
“They are violations of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. They must stop,” he said of the Israeli strikes, which have targeted military facilities, including chemical weapons stockpiles and the entire Syrian navy.
“Syria’s sovereignty, territorial unity, and integrity must be fully restored, and all acts of aggression must come to an immediate end,” Guterres said. “This is a decisive moment — a moment of hope and history, but also one of great uncertainty.”
…