LONDON: In an orchard behind her family’s home in Syria’s eastern province of Deir Ezzor, 3-year-old Ghala Khamis Al-Saleh Al-Khamis was found dead on Aug. 2, about two hours after she vanished.
She was the third girl killed in the Syrian Arab Republic in less than three weeks, reigniting concerns about child safety even as the guns of war fall silent across much of the country.
The three victims — ages 2, 3 and 12 — died in separate incidents in Daraa and Deir Ezzor provinces, their bodies found hours or days after they disappeared. Investigators say the injuries ranged from strangulation to severe beatings.
For Syria’s youngest residents, the danger no longer comes only from shelling, clashes and explosive ordnance. It also comes from inside homes, from relatives entrusted with their care, and from a justice and child protection system that has yet to catch up with the threat.
Faten Derki, a Damascus-based lawyer and writer, said Syrian institutions are making an effort.
The deeper problem, she told Arab News, is “the absence of an integrated and publicly declared child protection system,” defining responsibilities, rapid response, follow-up mechanisms, psychological and social support, alongside a shortage of resources and specialist personnel.
Ghala, 3, was found dead near her family's home two hours after she went missing. (Social media)
Closing that gap, she argued, requires more than tougher sentencing.
“What we need is not only harsher penalties after a crime has occurred, but the building of a culture of protection before it occurs,” Derki said.
“We need to activate child protection laws, train law enforcement officers in handling disappearance reports, establish units specialized in children’s cases, and strengthen the role of the school, the family, and the community in detecting danger early.”
She stopped short of saying the three killings were preventable.
“I cannot claim with certainty that these crimes could have been entirely prevented,” she said. “Crime can occur even in societies with the most robust systems and oversight.”
“Here,” she added, “the answer is: yes — if an effective and rapid protection system had been in place.”
The government has begun to respond. Against the backdrop of the killings, the Justice Ministry announced this week a draft law to combat domestic violence and strengthen protections for children and women.
Justice Minister Mazhar Al-Wais said on Aug. 2 that the bill was awaiting submission to parliament.
Al-Wais said the legislation forms part of a broader judicial reform program aimed at strengthening legal protections for victims, particularly children and women, describing child protection as a national responsibility.
Farah, 2, was found dead inside a fodder store four days after she disappeared. (Social media)
Ghala’s death was the most recent of the three. Her body was taken to the National Hospital and referred to forensic medicine to determine the cause of death and complete legal procedures.
Local media reported that she had been strangled with the inner tube of a motorcycle tire. No official findings have been released on the circumstances of the crime, its motive or the identity of the person responsible.
The first victim, 2-year-old Farah Al-Hammoud, disappeared on July 16 during a family visit in the Daraa countryside. Her body was found four days later inside a fodder store at the same site.
Her family believes the body was moved there days after the killing, noting that the location had been searched several times, Sky News Arabia reported.
A forensic report found the body in an advanced state of decomposition and concluded that she most likely died from suffocation.
Syrian media reported that specialized units within the Internal Security Command in Daraa detained several suspects. The investigation continues.
A week later, on July 23, 12-year-old Nour Muhannad Al-Dous was killed in the town of Nimr in Daraa. Her body was found three days after her murder, according to Syrian media.
Preliminary investigations and forensic reports found that she had been beaten severely.
Her mother told Syria TV that she had been barred from seeing her daughter for months after custody passed to the girl’s father.
She said she later received reports that Nour was being beaten and mistreated, and traveled from Idlib, where she was living, to Daraa to ask a judge to remove the child from her father’s home and place her under protection.
Nour, 12, was reportedly beaten to death. (Social media)
Daraa’s Internal Security Command said it had established the circumstances of the killing after a search and investigation, and detained the girl’s uncle as the principal suspect.
It also detained her father and another uncle on charges of covering up the crime, and referred the case to the competent authorities.
In all three cases, the child was found only after the window for intervention had closed. That interval, Derki said, is where a protection system either works or fails.
When a child goes missing, Derki said, the first hours “are not merely a period of waiting or routine searching; they are decisive hours.”
She said authorities should immediately treat the disappearance as a potential danger, register the report, identify the child’s last known location and launch an urgent search.
Within hours, the search should expand to include security agencies, CCTV reviews and coordination with the local community through a designated lead authority.
“As for the first day,” she added, “there must be a national or local mechanism for responding to child disappearances, bringing together the police, the judiciary, social agencies, schools and civil society.”
Derki stressed that in cases involving children, “the time factor can be the difference between rescue and loss.”
Ghala, Farah and Nour are among a larger group of child victims. A Syrian rights group has documented 25 criminal homicides of children across several provinces since the start of 2026.
“Protecting children is not the responsibility of one family or one institution — it is the responsibility of a society and a state,” Derki said.
“Every crime of this kind must not have its file closed at the point of punishment alone; rather, it must open a painful question: What could we have done before the child became a victim?”
