Searching for Missing Persons in Northeast Syria. Assessment and Recommendations for the First Responders' Team

SJAC, in collaboration with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), has begun providing technical trainings in mass grave exhumation and documentation to the First Responders’ Team (FRT) working to open mass graves in Northeast Syria. These trainings are part of SJAC’s larger efforts to address the thousands of missing persons in the aftermath of ISIS’s territorial defeat. Its new missing persons program, announced today in Berlin, combines technical trainings with documentation and a close collaboration with families of the missing to start laying the ground work for identification of remains as well as collecting evidence of ISIS’s crimes. This report assesses the ongoing efforts to exhume mass graves and explains SJAC's plans to provide forensic training and begin documentation of the missing.