No Official Count, No Office
Nineteen months after the fall of the Assad regime, the United Nations still cannot say how many people are missing in Syria. The best figure it has to offer is a range, 130,000 to 300,000, and the width of that range is itself the story.
That admission came from Carla Quintana, head of the UN’s Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria (IIMP), during a press briefing at UN headquarters. Quintana, one year into her mandate, was direct about what her institution has learned and equally direct about what it still cannot answer. “We’re talking about — that’s what the official figures are — between 130,000 and 300,000 missing,” she told correspondents, adding plainly: “we still do not know the scope of this tragedy, because we don’t still have an official number, and we are working on that.”
A range spanning more than a factor of two is not a rounding error. Three years into IIMP’s existence, and a year and a half into a transitional government that has allowed broader UN access, nobody has produced a reliable count of how many Syrian families are still waiting for answers. Not the UN. Not Damascus.
No official count. No office. Those are the two facts anchoring this briefing, and neither has moved in a year.
How IIMP Organizes Its Search
How IIMP organizes its search matters here, because it shapes which gaps are structural and which are simply not yet staffed. Quintana described five lines of inquiry the institution works across: enforced disappearances carried out under the Assad regime, missing migrants, missing children held in state security facilities, disappearances carried out by other armed groups including Daesh, and disappearances that have occurred since the regime fell on December 8, 2024.
That structure matters for reading everything below. The Yazidi-women thread and the missing-children-abroad thread both fall under “other armed groups.” That’s a newer, less-developed line of inquiry than the Assad-era detention casework IIMP has spent three years building. The northeast-Syria and Yarmouk-camp gaps are less about which line of inquiry they belong to and more about a plain, admitted absence: IIMP staff have not physically reached those places yet, regardless of category.
No Office, No Constant Presence Despite Broader Access
The second headline out of this briefing is institutional, not dramatic, and that is precisely why it matters: IIMP still has no physical office and no constant presence inside Syria.
Quintana was careful to note progress. “We have been granted access by this government. And that was not the case before,” she said. But access is not the same as presence. “We still have not been granted an office,” she continued, “to have an office and a constant presence in Syria. And that’s something that we have been asking. And we asked the General Assembly also for their support yesterday.”
Pressed on why the office hasn’t materialized, Quintana gave the government’s own explanation, relayed secondhand but specific: “The reason the Syrian government has given us for not granting an office yet is that they are analyzing the requests from all the UN entities that are asking for the same.” In other words, IIMP’s request for physical presence is one of many parallel UN requests still sitting with Damascus for review.
There is a near-term hook attached to that delay. Quintana pointed to an imminent visit: “hopefully, now with the visit of the Secretary-General in a couple of days, we can receive some good news for us and for the missing and the Syrian families.” Whether that visit produces movement on the office question is something worth tracking directly in the weeks ahead.
The One Number That Isn’t an Estimate: ~600 Named Cases
Amid the broad ranges and hedged estimates, one figure in this briefing stood apart for its specificity. Asked directly whether any of Syria’s missing might still be alive, Quintana did not speak in the abstract. She cited a number tied to actual names, not a projection.
“We have the names of around a little bit more than 600 cases,” she said, describing IIMP’s work on missing children specifically. “Some of them we know for sure they are alive, and some of them have already gotten back to their families.“
It is a small number set against an estimate in the hundreds of thousands, and Quintana was careful not to let it become false hope. “We have to be very cautious, and I have to be very serious about what I say about who can be alive or not,” she said, adding that IIMP has to “manage the expectations with the families of the missing.” She also flagged that some missing persons may have been trafficked, a line of inquiry she said IIMP is still developing and, when asked directly for numbers or percentages, could not yet quantify: “I would not be able to give. We’re working on that.”
Still, in a briefing otherwise dominated by uncertainty, 600 named, status-confirmed cases (some of them reunions) is the closest thing to hard, verifiable progress that Quintana offered. It is small precisely because it is real: everything else in this briefing is an estimate, and this is a count.
Mass Graves: “Hundreds” Documented, a Hedged 2027-2028 Timeline for Opening Them
IIMP has already done substantial documentation work on mass graves in Syria. Quintana said the institution has “been able to document hundreds of mass graves” and has shared that analysis with Syria’s own National Commission on Missing Persons.
Actually opening and processing those graves is a different matter, and on timing, Quintana was explicit that she was relaying something she had heard rather than a government commitment she could confirm. “What the national authorities have said regarding opening mass graves is that they are not going to open mass graves until — I mean, I have heard 2027 or 2028,” she said. “They are planning, they are working on how to get there.”
That distinction matters. Quintana did not cite a document or a direct government statement. She used the phrase “I have heard,” and that hedge should travel with the timeline wherever it’s repeated. What is confirmed is that some mass-grave openings have already occurred, though Quintana said IIMP still doesn’t know the status of identification work tied to those openings. Separately, she noted the ICRC has been active on a related but distinct front: working in and on Syria’s prisons.
No Field Access Yet to Northeast Syria
A correspondent from Rudaw pressed Quintana on a specific, named gap: IIMP’s mandate covers “everyone, regardless of ethnicity,” but has that mandate actually reached northeast Syria, where thousands of Kurds disappeared when Islamist rebel factions took Afrin and Ras al-Ain/Serekaniye, factions since folded into the new Syrian national army?
Quintana’s answer confirmed the gap without qualification. “We have been in contact with their families. We have been in contact with organizations on the ground,” she said. “And so far, we have not been on the field on the north, but we are in contact with them.”
It’s a distinct problem from the Damascus-office question. This is about IIMP’s people physically reaching a specific region with a documented disappearance history, and by Quintana’s own account, that hasn’t happened yet. The detail about the rebel factions’ integration into the national army sharpens the stakes. The same units implicated in disappearances during the Afrin and Ras al-Ain/Serekaniye takeovers are now part of the official Syrian military structure IIMP would need to work alongside to investigate them. Quintana didn’t address that overlap directly, and no reporter asked her to. It remains an open question rather than a resolved one, and it’s worth saying so outright rather than leaving it implicit.
The Same Question, Two Years Running: Missing Palestinians and Yarmouk Camp
Of everything raised in this briefing, one exchange carried a meta-story layered on top of the underlying facts. A reporter from Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Abdul Hamid Sayan, opened his question by pointing out that he had asked Quintana this exact question the year before: “I recall last year’s press conference, and I asked you a question. And I want to follow up with the same question I asked you last year,” he said. He was asking specifically whether IIMP had made any effort to reach Palestinian communities and civil-society organizations in Syria, and whether anyone from the institution had visited Yarmouk refugee camp, Syria’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, destroyed in the war, with thousands of residents reported missing. He noted, pointedly, that her answer the previous year hadn’t given him much to work with.
A year later, the substance of the answer covered similar ground. Quintana said IIMP is in contact with several Palestinian organizations. Its advisory board includes representation from the Palestinian community, though in an individual capacity rather than an institutional seat, and it is meeting with Palestinian civil-society groups and families. But the concrete limitation remained the same one Sayan had heard before: “We have not been able to leave Damascus on the field.“
What the Repetition Might Mean
That repetition (same question, same non-answer, two briefings apart) is as newsworthy as the underlying access gap itself. It leaves an open question this briefing didn’t resolve: whether the lack of movement on Yarmouk reflects a genuine, shared access constraint affecting all of IIMP’s fieldwork outside Damascus, or whether it reflects a lower institutional priority relative to the Assad-era detention casework that has occupied most of IIMP’s three years. Quintana’s answer is consistent with the former explanation, but nothing in the briefing rules out the latter, and a reporter asking the identical question twice suggests he isn’t fully satisfied either.
Yazidi Women of Sinjar: An Unconfirmed Figure and an Open Question
The same Rudaw correspondent who raised the northeast-Syria gap also raised the case of Yazidi women abducted from Sinjar, Iraq, saying nearly 3,000 were taken and are believed to have been brought into Syria by the Islamic State. That figure came from the reporter’s own question. Quintana neither confirmed nor disputed it on the record. Her response addressed the broader line of inquiry into disappearances carried out by armed groups including Daesh. IIMP is “working closely, especially with CSOs, with civil society, that are in contact with the families of some of these women,” she said, adding that she has personally spoken with one family and begun conversations with Iraq.
A later question in the same briefing, about whether children from the 2014 Sinjar attack may have been adopted abroad, got a similarly open answer. Quintana said IIMP has “heard about this” and is following up, but “I cannot give you specific information. We have not yet gotten to have enough information to be able to present it to you.” She added a clarifying detail worth preserving: IIMP’s missing-children work to date has focused on Assad-era security facilities specifically, not this population, though she said the institution isn’t limiting itself to that scope going forward.
Two years into IIMP’s mandate and more than a decade after the Sinjar attack, both threads remain exactly where they were before this briefing started: acknowledged, but with nothing concrete attached.
“Why Is This the UN’s Job?”: An Adversarial Exchange
One correspondent put a pointed challenge to Quintana, arguing that UN member states have the tools and authority to hold Syria’s current and former governments accountable and have chosen not to use them, in part to preserve diplomatic relationships. That exchange happened, and it happened as described here: as a challenge the reporter raised, not as an established fact. Quintana did not engage the accusation on its specifics; she redirected to IIMP’s origin, noting the institution exists because Syrian families themselves petitioned the UN for its creation, and that its mandate covers both past and present disappearances regardless of who governs Syria.
What’s Actually Been Established
Set against the uncertainty, a few things are now on the record. IIMP has processed more than 75,000 documents this year, nine times its prior-year volume. That figure is self-reported, though, and wasn’t independently corroborated in this briefing. The institution has been working with Syria’s National Commission on Missing Persons since May 2025, building trust and shared methodology from a standing start. Access, while still incomplete, has genuinely broadened compared to the previous government. Quintana was explicit that this is new.
What hasn’t changed in a year: no office in Syria, no firm count of the missing, and no field access to either northeast Syria or the areas outside Damascus where some of the most serious unresolved cases (Yarmouk camp, the Yazidi women of Sinjar) are concentrated.
Quintana closed her opening remarks with a note for the families still searching: recognition, she said, for “the women that are looking for their loved ones all over the world, especially in Syria, and that they have never abandoned hope.” Whether the institutional gaps she described in the same briefing close before the Secretary-General’s visit, and before 2027 or 2028 arrives, is the next chapter of Syria’s transitional-justice story worth following.