11/09/2026
Transforming Mezzeh Military Airport into an airport for private aviation and businesspeople is not merely an infrastructure project.
Within these grounds operated one of the most prominent detention systems run by the Air Force Intelligence Directorate. Field investigations verified 13 detention sites inside the airport. A joint human rights investigation indicates that at least 29,000 detainees passed through the site between 2011 and 2017, and that 1,154 names of detainees who died there appear in two internal Air Force Intelligence datasets.
Seven locations suspected of being associated with the burial of victims have also been identified, one of them within the airport grounds themselves.
Yet today, there is talk of hotels, business facilities, commercial complexes, and private aviation, without any publicly announced plan to protect the detention sites, evidence, or potential human remains.
This is unacceptable.
Mezzeh Airport cannot be treated as an ordinary piece of land for investment. Thousands of victims, tens of thousands of survivors and former detainees, and the families of those who remain missing have rights connected to this place: the right to truth, the right to know the fate of their loved ones, the right to justice, and the right to have evidence and memory preserved.
We call for a halt to any demolition, excavation, or alteration within the detention sites and suspected areas until a comprehensive forensic and forensic-medical survey has been conducted, the site has been documented, evidence has been protected, and survivors and victims’ families have been involved in determining its future.
Syria’s future cannot be built on evidence that has not been collected, graves that have not been opened, and questions to which families have yet to receive answers.