Decades later, as many as 17,000 are still missing, yet even now - a quarter of a century after the war ended - there is still no official list of names.

Samia Abdullah remembers like it was yesterday. Now 61, with children and grandchildren of her own, she was 30 when her youngest brother Imad was taken. It was June 6, 1984, and Lebanon was nine years into its 15-year civil war.

Twenty-year-old Imad was taken in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, Samia says.

Syrian soldiers and Palestinian factions loyal to Damascus were arresting people who supported Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Imad, a member of Arafat's Fatah faction and already a lieutenant in its militia, was a target.

For a time the young man was kept in jails inside Lebanon but then, his family believe, he was handed over to Syria.

Samia disappears into a bedroom in her Beirut apartment and returns with a brown collared jumper, worn thin with age. "This was Imad's," she says, holding it up to the light, her fingers gently touching the fabric before folding it again and placing it next to the handful of treasured photographs and letters - all the family has left of their brother who, if he is still alive, is 51.

Lebanon is commemorating the 40th anniversary of the start of the civil war this month, but for many families the loss is still raw, the prospect of any peace denied to them by a nation that refuses to face its past.

Wadad Halwani, founder and chairperson of the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and the Disappeared, knows their pain. Her husband Adnan was 35 when he was taken at gunpoint from their home on September 24, 1982. She has not seen him since.

"When my husband was kidnapped I was 30 years old - since then 33 years have passed," she says.

With the support of the International Committee for the Red Cross and other experts, activist groups and campaigns, the families have pushed for the establishment of a national commission on Lebanon's disappeared. They want the files opened and the bodies buried in the hundreds of mass graves hidden around the country identified.

Their campaign has hit a wall of silence from the Lebanese government, forcing the ICRC to step into the void. It is conducting extensive forensic interviews with families of the disappeared and awaiting government approval for a program to establish a DNA database so there are samples to test when the mass graves are finally opened.

"We consider the DNA testing program to be a priority because the parents and wives are growing old," Halwani says. "My parents-in-law have both died, if I did not also have two children and my husband's three brothers we would have lost all these resources, and still there has not been any serious decisions made at a political level."

Riven nation

The fires of a war that burned for 15 years were ignited in April 1975. At least 150,000 died and twice as many were injured as the country divided into two warring coalitions – the Lebanese Front, made up of mainly Christian militias, and the National Front, consisting of armed secular and Muslim groups.

The capital Beirut was similarly riven, with the Lebanese Front controlling the city's east and the National Front holding the west. Crossing that divide, as civilians were forced to do to reach work, hospitals, schools and relatives, meant running a gauntlet of checkpoints and militias. Thousands who did so were never seen again, caught in a wave of tit-for-tat kidnappings and executions.

But it was not just local forces - including those Palestinian militias which had found a home in Lebanon after being expelled from Jordan - who were at war. On June 6, 1982, following an assassination attempt on Israel's ambassador to Britain, Israeli troops invaded from the south and were soon occupying Beirut.

Syrian troops had earlier been deployed in Lebanon under an Arab League mandate for a "peacekeeping" mission. They stayed until 2005 - 15 years after the civil war was officially declared over.

To this day, Lebanon and its citizens are still recovering.

Majida Bashasha, like many, fears she will not live long enough to uncover the fate of her younger brother Ahmad, who was kidnapped in 1976 aged just 18.

The 60-year-old widow now lives in a protest tent erected outside the United Nations' Lebanese headquarters in downtown Beirut, determined to keep Ahmad's memory alive in the eyes of the authorities.

"I am so tired and I am so sad," she says, brewing a pot of coffee in the small, white tent and pouring tiny cups for those who come to pay their respects. "My mother never stopped looking for her son and she became sick with her sorrow … now she is dead I must follow her search."

"It is to our shame if we sit back and do nothing," Halwani says. "At least if we take an inventory we will know what happened  - we will learn the lessons that need to be learned in order to avoid more war and to build an independent country without the constraints of sectarian segregation."

Cruel toll

At first the story of Imad's disappearance comes out in a rush of details: the Abdullah family's multiple, desperate searches and the brief spikes in hope when they received what they believed was a clear sign he was alive.Then Samia Abdullah slows and it is clear this 31-year battle to find her baby brother - a fight she has taken on since both her parents died - has exacted a cruel toll.

"My mother roamed around trying to find him, but no one could help," she says, while her eldest brother went to Syria to speak to intelligence officials about Imad's imprisonment. Every attempt to find him ended in failure and, adding to the family's grief, both parents died without knowing what had happened to their youngest son.

"My mother used to cry a lot, even when she was dying she was begging us to 'find my Imad'," Samia says. In 2003 they received two letters they believe were sent from Syria by Imad, who by then would have been a prisoner for 19 years.

He pleaded with his family. "Help me, please help me," he wrote. "I am tired, I am so sick, please save me, I trust no one, I talk to no one, please save me." They were signed "your small brother".

The letters prompted the family to renew their search, and it was then that they received another sign of life – he was seen in Tadmor Prison in Syria's Homs governorate, a jail renowned for human rights abuses, torture and summary executions.

In 2005, after Syria ended its military occupation of Lebanon, the Assad regime released a small number of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners from its jails, even though it had always denied holding political prisoners. Several of those released told the family they had been in the same cell as Imad Abdullah, Samia says. It was the last they heard of their brother.

"I am afraid [that he may not have survived]," she acknowledges. "You never know what might have happened, whether the regime soldiers killed him, whether [Islamic State] killed him, who knows?"

'Knock on my grave'

For 18 years, the Youssef family had no idea if their son was alive or dead.

On August 30, 1983, 18-year-old Milad Youssef was a few months into his compulsory military service with the Lebanese Armed Forces when he disappeared on the airport road in Beirut's southern suburbs - an area notorious for kidnappings.

His sister Mariam, now 57, is still battling to find out the truth about her brother's disappearance. Both her parents died without knowing what happened to their son.

"There were lots of armed militia in the area when he was kidnapped," she says, "Syrian troops, Lebanese groups, they were all there, but the area was in the control of the militia from the Amal Movement [one of Lebanon's Shiite political parties]."

Like other families, the Youssefs were tireless in their campaigning, approaching any politician or party they believed could help shine a light on Milad's case. It was not until 2001 that they received any news of his fate.

"We have had two lots of proof that Milad was in Syria," Mariam says. The first was from a prisoner who had been held in a Syrian jail with Milad.

In 2008, another man who had been in Tadmor told Mariam's family: "While I was in my cell, there was a knocking on the wall from the cell next door. The voice said: 'I am Milad Youssef, I was caught on August 30, 1983, I am a soldier with the Lebanese Army, there are 120 of us here, they will not allow us to see anyone and we want our families to know we are still alive.' "

It was the last they heard of him. Miriam says: "My mother, who died in 2008, used to say to me 'when he comes back, if I am dead, make him come and knock on my grave'.

"I was 29 when he was kidnapped, we have all grown old since then, while he has grown old in prison - he only lived a free man for 18 years, with 32 years in prison."

As a country, Lebanon is reluctant to talk about the war and its legacy, says Carmen Hassoun Abu Jaoude, the director of the International Centre for Transitional Justice in Beirut.

"To learn the lessons of the war, the past must be confronted," she says. "The families of the disappeared … are unwelcome reminders of an unresolved past. But they have the right to know the truth and the government must respect that, rather than continuing to act with impunity."

Government inaction

Fabien Bourdier is the ICRC's delegate on The Missing Project in Lebanon. He is candid about the fact that Lebanese government inaction prompted the Red Cross to step in and begin collecting data on Lebanon's disappeared.

"After so many years of nothing, we decided to substitute ourselves for the national authorities," he says.

Since April 2012, the ICRC has done 1800 detailed, forensic interviews with families. Each 70-page questionnaire is then entered into a database. The Red Cross plans to cross-check that information against DNA samples it wants to collect from the families of the missing.

Fairfax Media asked Lebanese Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk, a member of the Future Movement, when the government would approve the DNA program. Through a spokesman he said: "Once we receive the request we will sign it immediately."

Bourdier says the issue has been discussed with the Interior Ministry "several times" and that this week the ICRC was told the proposal was being examined by the forensic police unit before final approval would be given.

There is also a draft law -  yet to be adopted by parliament - that includes the creation of a national commission on the disappeared. When that commission is established, the ICRC will hand over the information it has collected and, it hopes, the government will open the mass graves and begin the identification process.

"There is no national list of the missing," Bourdier says. "We have to go everywhere to collect information from individuals, families, from neighbours  … from political parties, religious groups, local authorities, we have gone district to district in Lebanon asking who is missing."

So far, he says, there is still no way of knowing how many have disappeared, but the "official" figure of 17,000 almost certainly contains some double counting.

"Lebanon is a rare case in which no institution exists to deal with the issue of missing - if you look at Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Georgia, Azerbaijan, everywhere where you have missing people you have a national commission or a ministry in charge of the issue and ICRC plays the role of adviser," Bourdier says.

And as the government stalls, the parents of the missing, by now well into their 70s and 80s, have started to die

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs approved the program in March, but it now needs the Interior Ministry's approval, Bourdier says.

And the mass graves? "We estimate there are several hundred mass graves all over the country. In Lebanon everyone was involved in the 'missing business' - there is not just one side the victim or one side the perpetrator."

Government fears that trying to resolve the issue of the kidnapped and disappeared might reignite the civil war are unfounded, he says.

"Our experience in other countries is exactly the opposite … in Bosnia, Kosovo, in Georgia resolving the issue reduced the tension, [while] not resolving the issue kept the tensions going in the communities."

And until there is some resolution, families are forced to live with a unique pain, Bourdier says: "All their lives after the disappearance the families are between despair and hope."

For the 40th anniversary of the start of the war, the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and the Disappeared, along with two of Lebanon's major mobile companies, are running a text message campaign to raise awareness about the thousands still missing.

The texts raise four simple questions: "Lebanon's governors, where are you? Lebanon's citizens, where are we? The missing of Lebanon, where are they? Children of Lebanon, where to?"

"We want people to think about these questions," Halwani says. "Our aim is to find a common space among all citizens beyond political or sectarian affiliations or loyalties."

It is not punishment of the perpetrators that the families are seeking - indeed, those responsible are already protected by the general amnesty passed by the Lebanese government in 1991, which covers crimes committed by militias and armed groups before March 28 of that year.

The families have a much more modest aim: to identify and where possible bury their loved ones' remains, to mourn them and to reconcile their fate.

"The politicians reconciled years ago, they distributed the spoils of money and power between themselves," Halwani says. "But the country has not – our children have inherited this crisis and we owe it to them to resolve it."