Last month, almost seven years after her father’s arrest at a regime checkpoint in Daraya and his disappearance into the maw of Syria’s detention system, Yasmin and her family learned through a lawyer in Damascus that he was listed among the dead in the civil registry, a government entity that gathers basic information on citizens. It was the same grim news for families of almost a dozen activists in Daraya, including Yahya Shurbaji and his brother Ma’an. Both had been missing since 2011, and are now listed as having died within 11 months of each other in 2013.

Syrian authorities, including the military police and the National Security Bureau, which oversees the mukhabarat centers where many activists were held and tortured to death, are methodically releasing these so-called death notices to local registration offices across Syria. In a statement last week, the State Department said these death notices serve as a reminder that the Assad regime “systematically arrested, tortured and killed tens of thousands of Syrian civilians” demanding basic freedoms and rights. Yasmin and relatives of the other men are now certain they were all executed at around the same time by a military tribunal at the notorious Saydnaya prison, where Amnesty International estimated at least 13,000 were hanged from 2011 to 2015. Assad called the report “fake news” when it came out last year.

The world abetted Assad’s victory in Syria

There is no precise estimate of the number of dead on the lists. That’s because many families keep the information to themselves after they receive it from the registry, for fear of retribution by the regime. On July 29, the Syrian Committee for Detainees, an opposition group, said that it had counted some 3,270 names, 1,000 of which were from Daraya alone. Another group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said at the end of July that it was able to cull the names of 532 forcibly disappeared persons from the state records of the deceased. The group estimated that there had been about 82,000 cases of forced disappearance at the hands of the regime alone since March 2011.

Many Syrians have said that Assad was compelled by his Russian patrons to begin releasing the death notices in order to tie up loose ends as Moscow tries to work out deals with European and Middle Eastern states to repatriate Syrian refugees and fund reconstruction in Syria, following regime victories in the Damascus suburbs and southern Syria. The regime is now talking about retaking the last major rebel enclaves in and around the northwestern province of Idlib.

Surviving in Syria’s ‘forgotten province’

Other Syrians, though, believe the regime wants the lists of the dead to serve as a cruel, macabre epilogue for all those who rose up more than seven years ago to liberate themselves from nearly 50 years of Assad-family rule. Assad’s message to the people of Daraya, a town besieged and bombarded for nearly four years and then emptied of its residents in 2016, is loud and clear: You must lose everything for having challenged me. Nobody is going to hold me accountable for punishing you.