How Syria's stolen children were used to break the hearts and minds of their parents

A campaign of child abduction carried out in collusion with a western charity was used by the Assad regime as a weapon of war against the families that opposed him.

- Lynzy Billing reports

The first time Abdulrahman Ghbeis held his son, Mohammed was already three years old.

The dark-eyed, black-haired boy was stolen by Syrian intelligence from an incubator in a Damascus hospital just days after his birth.

For the next three years, he lived in the care of strangers. In an international orphanage on the city's outskirts, the infant was bottle-fed, surrounded by children he did not know, never knowing his mother or the warmth of her arms.

But day and night, in the darkness of her cell, his mother, Iman, whispered his name. She had never held him, never kissed him. Every night, silence pressed in. Where is he? Is he alive?

Thousands of children disappeared during Syria's 13-year civil war. But Mohammed is one of hundreds not taken by bombs, but by a quiet, bureaucratic violence, carried out through files, signatures and sealed envelopes.

His story can be told as a result of a nine-month investigation by an international consortium of Syrian and international journalists coordinated by investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports. It reveals how Bashar al-Assad's regime weaponised the children of political detainees to break their parents - and how the orphanages meant to protect the children became instruments of that abuse.

In spring 2011, Syria's streets filled with chants for freedom, carrying on the winds of the Arab spring. In Daraa, the arrest of teenagers for anti-government graffiti sparked protests against the president. Assad's regime responded with brutal crackdowns.

Prisons filled with protesters, activists and bystanders.

By autumn, Syria was at war.