Since the Syrian government detained Yehya Hijazi and his two sons in 2012, their relatives have held out hope that they are still alive and will be released one day.

Their hopes were dashed, however, after a decade of silence from the authorities, when the independent Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) monitoring group contacted the Hijazi family to inform them that it had obtained death certificates for all three.

"You're hoping every second for another glimpse of this person you love very much, for any news of him," Yehya's brother Mohammad told Reuters by phone from northwestern Syria. "And then you find out he's dead."

The SNHR stated that the documents confirming Yehya and his sons' deaths were among 547 detainee death certificates obtained from whistleblowers within government departments since 2017.

The documents, according to the rights group, provided answers to the fates of hundreds of missing people. Activists hope they will eventually be used in international proceedings against the government, which has been accused of crimes against humanity by a United Nations commission of inquiry for its detention policies.

The government did not respond to SNHR's emailed questions about the death certificates. Syrian officials have previously denied allegations of systemic torture and mass executions in detention.

Reuters reviewed 80 of the death certificates, including the three for the Hijazi family, as well as those for a three-year-old girl and her six-year-old sister.

A sample of the documents was reviewed by a Syrian human rights lawyer who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the situation. He stated that the layout, language used, and information included matched other Syrian death certificates.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm that the documents were authentic.

Mohammad Hijazi said the family had not requested death certificates from the authorities as they lived in areas controlled by the opposition. He added that acquaintances in government-held zones also refused to ask civil registries about deaths, fearing they might be seen as opposed to Damascus.

Syria's war erupted from a 2011 uprising against President Bashar al-rule, Assad's killing over 350,000 people, uprooting more than half the population, and forcing millions to flee abroad as refugees.

According to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, tens of thousands of people are believed to have been held in Syrian government detention centers. According to the commission and detainee families, detainees are frequently held incommunicado, leaving their families wondering where they are or if they are even alive.

International human rights organizations are not allowed to operate openly in Syria and do not have access to detention facilities. The United Nations secretary-office general's recommended establishing a mechanism to determine the fate of missing Syrians in August, but it has yet to be implemented.

Some of the certificates listed the place of death as military hospitals or military tribunals. The SNHR matched the names on the certificates with wider lists of people detained by the government. It was able to reach the families of 23 of the deceased, who had suspected their loved ones were dead.

It said the government was deliberately withholding information from the families of loved ones and has described its detention policies as amounting to crimes against humanity.

Relatives in government-held areas could find out if their loved-ones had died by requesting their family records from civil registries. They were not granted access to bodies to bury them, or told where the remains were, according to the SNHR and the U.N. commission. Others have learned of deaths by recognising their relatives in leaked pictures taken by military photographers working in prisons.

In a 2015 interview, Assad dismissed the Caesar photographs as unsubstantiated allegations. Former war crimes prosecutors described the images as clear proof of systematic torture and mass killings.

Fadel Abdul Ghany, director of the SNHR, expressed hope that the large batch of death certificates would provide some relief to those still waiting to learn the fate of their relatives.

But the wait for Mohammad Hijazi continues.

While he now knows what happened to his brother Yehya, he said 40 more relatives had been detained by the government in central Syria and the family had not heard anything about them.

"I haven't been able to tell our mother Yehya that she is no longer alive. I just keep telling her he's still in jail, "He stated.

Source: Reuters