A/HRC/25/65 III. Not knowing: the enduring agony of Syrian families 32. The victims of enforced disappearance are not only those who have been disappeared. Enforced disappearances wreak havoc on families, tearing the social fabric of entire communities. Perpetrators intentionally create a paralysing uncertainty that leaves families hanging between hope and despair. Not knowing whether their loved ones are dead and, if so, what has happened to their bodies, they can neither mourn nor adjust to their loss. A. A climate of fear 33. Enforced disappearances are characterised by situations where family members fear retaliation if they question the authority of the disappeared person’s captors. Where the State maintains a climate in which family members are too intimidated to inquire about detentions by security services, this is tantamount to a refusal or a denial of the person’s fate. 34. In Syria, silence and fear shroud enforced disappearances. In several cases, individuals who reported a disappearance were themselves detained. The mother of two young men who disappeared in Idlib in June 2011 reported that her eldest son was arrested when he inquired at the Idlib Military Security Branch about the whereabouts of his brothers. He never returned. One interviewee further reported that while detained in Homs prison in 2012, she met a 60 year-old woman who had been arrested after she went to the Homs Security Branch to inquire about the fate of her disappeared son. 35. The result of such a climate of fear is that only a fraction of the number of disappearances is officially reported because relatives of those disappeared fear being targeted and punished by the authorities. 36. In the overwhelming majority of cases, when asked whether they inquired about the disappearance of their relatives, interviewees reported that they could not approach the authorities because of a well-founded fear of reprisal. Families revealed that attempts to locate their relatives would expose them to a fate similar to their loved ones and may subject the disappeared to greater danger. A young man whose brother disappeared in December 2012 in Homs explained, “Families constantly pray for their relatives, but will not risk sending another family member to detention.” Another interviewee, whose son was arrested during a house search by Military Security officers in late October 2012 in Damascus, stated that he did not go to the Military Security branch himself, as he feared that by requesting information, he would also be arrested. 37. Reporting on the arrest of his cousin by pro-Government militias and Air Force Intelligence officers in December 2012 in Nabul, Aleppo, an interviewee explained, “If you go to the branch to ask about detainees, they will interrogate you. If you are a man, you will be tortured and detained too. If you are a woman, they will harm you and might detain you instead.” B. A policy of concealment 38. Syrian families are in desperate need of official acknowledgment of what has happened to their relatives. An indication of this desperation are the 30 requests seeking official information from the Government, filed by Syrian families to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, over the course of 2012 (A/HRC/22/45). 41