Warning: This article contains descriptions of torture.
DAMASCUS, Syria – Photographs of tortured and broken bodies are taped to the outside walls of Al-Mujtahid Hospital in central Damascus.
Every day, since the fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a crowd of mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers gather here to examine this wall of terror. They look closely at the bruised corpses with bashed in heads, the gaunt faces with no eyes, the close ups of tattoos and birthmarks to see if any of them belong to their loved ones who disappeared into Syria’s notorious prison system during the 13-year civil war.
At the front, a young woman with a high bun scours every feature on every image. Sarah Abdel Hamid Al-A’ami is searching for her four brothers who were snatched on their way to work by government forces years ago on what she says were bogus accusations of terrorism.
Finally the 23-year-old turns away from the wall and begins to cry.
“I didn’t find my brothers. I didn’t find them,” she cries out. “I swear they didn’t do anything.”
Her grief quickly gives way to anger.
“They killed our children. I want blood for blood, I want soul for soul,” she screams.
She is one of tens of thousands desperately searching for clues to whether their loved ones may be found dead or alive.
Under Assad’s long and oppressive rule even the slightest criticism could land a citizen in prison. Since the uprising against his regime began in 2011, some 157,000 people disappeared into Syria’s prisons and other government facilities according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Families like Al-A’ami’s are coming from across the country to look for their missing at prisons, hospitals and morgues. They’re leafing through abandoned prison ledgers, they’re posting missing fliers on the streets of Damascus.
As Al-A’ami pulls out pictures of her four brothers — Abdullah, Ibrahim, Ahmed and Mohammed — others crowd around her and do the same.
A mother holds up a picture of her son, another reaches over Al-A’ami’s shoulder with a picture of her child’s ID in her hand. They beg for help from the outside world, for international rights organizations to come and aid in their search, to forensically document the torture and abuse prisoners endured.
Searching for Americans
Mouaz Moustafa, the founder of the human rights and aid organization Syrian Emergency Task Force, is on a mission to look for Americans.
On a recent night, the Syrian American activist is in a hurry to get on the road.
“We have a tip that Austin may be in this building. We believe that he may be in the basement,” he says.
He’s referring to the journalist Austin Tice who was detained in Syria in 2012. Authorities believe he was held by the regime.
In the dark of night, Moustafa’s van weaves through the capital where digital billboards light up with the new Syrian flag and the words “Syria Free.”
The vehicle stops at concrete barriers where rebels, now in control of Damascus, guard an air force intelligence building.
Inside, Moustafa and the rebels begin their search.
With no electricity they use the flashlights on their phones to look through abandoned offices and rifle through files.
Moustafa pulls strips of shredded paper from a bin and tries to piece the strips together.
“I’m looking for anything about detainees,” he says. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack though, it’s ridiculous.”
He bangs on a locked door.
“Anyone there?” he yells out in English. His question is met with silence.
Whenever he or the rebels see a portrait of Bashar al-Assad or his late father Hafez al-Assad they tear it down.
They step on the glass of framed portraits that have been ripped from the walls.
On one floor of the building a directive is framed and hung in the entryway. It warns employees not to talk to anyone from international organizations or from outside the country. If someone does get in touch, the memo says, report it to the higher ups.
In the basement there are two rooms, both with stairs that disappear into brown liquid.
“It’s a pool of acid,” Moustafa declares. “That’s where they threw people.”
It’s not a claim NPR can verify.
Down the hall is a row of metal black doors that open to windowless cells. The cold dark rooms are now empty, but the walls are full.
In one, the Quran is scrawled in tiny lettering so it will fit on the walls.
In the others, the prisoners have etched calendars with every day of the week. Grooves mark each day that’s passed, like someone was counting.
There’s the word mother and a prayer near the once locked exit of one of the cells
“For he who is conscious of God, God will find him a way out.” An arrow points to the door.
When rebels got to this building a few days ago, they say they released a few dozen people held inside.
On this night, it appears there is no one left to find.
But outside the rebels are with a man named Mohamed Sahlan.
He says he walked eight miles from Sednaya Prison, known as “the human slaughterhouse,” on the outskirts of Damascus when the fighters broke them out just a few days ago.
Four years ago he was detained at a checkpoint on the road from Daraa in southwest Syria to Damascus. Soldiers found pictures of the revolutionary flag on his phone and accused him of being a terrorist.
“I would never admit to something that’s not true so he punched me right here,” he says.
He points to his missing teeth where he was hit, his side where he was shot. He says every prisoner in Sednaya had a number. His was 711.
There were days the guards would come and call a few of the numbers out.
“These people would stand and he would just shoot them all in front of us.”
It got so bad that Sahlan lost the will to live.
“I wanted to die. Everyone would rather die than be there,” he said.
As families search for their lost, Sahlan hopes he’ll soon be found.
“All I want to do is see my daughter,” he says.
He doesn’t know if she knows he’s alive. When he was detained his phone was taken with the saved numbers it contained and so much has changed. He’d heard his wife and daughter got asylum outside of Syria so being reunited with his child seems impossible.
“Her name is Sham,” he says. “I think she’s in Canada.”
For some, the search for the disappeared has ended. The lucky ones found their people broken but alive. Others have identified bodies like Mazen al-Hamada’s.
The activist was known around the world for exposing the torture inside Syria’s prisons. He was jailed multiple times for demonstrating against the regime since the start of the uprising. After his release in 2013 he was granted asylum in Europe.
There he recounted the disturbing details of his detention. The clamp used to crush his genitals, the rape, the electric shock, the beatings that broke his ribs. For reasons that still confuse even his closest friends he decided he had to go back to Syria in 2020. He was detained immediately and never heard from again. Now his family and friends know he was killed, likely in the final days of Assad’s rule.
But his killing wouldn’t be hidden.
On this day, in an Assad-free Damascus, he is mourned loudly by hundreds in a funeral procession that starts at the hospital where he was identified and ends at his final resting place.
On the side of the roads, the shops are open, and people watch in tears as al-Hamada’s body is held high above the crowd, draped in the revolutionary flag now the new Syrian flag.
Out of the crowd a man with a mustache, a red baseball cap and a wide smile walks up to us.
“Let me speak to you,” he says.
His name is Abdullah Fadel and he translates books. He was a political prisoner from 1992 through 2000. He describes the way he was tortured with a position Syrians call the “German Chair.” He says his arms and legs were strapped to a chair and then the guards would pull his body back. For some it ended with a snapped spine.
Today that’s over.
“I have never dreamed of having such a day. It’s unbelievable. Beyond my imagination,” he says, looking at the crowd chanting for unity and cursing the Assad regime.
“They want to show that they are one people. They have one aim. One goal,” Fadel says. “This is a symbolic funeral. [Hamada] is a symbol of all the people who died in such a way.”
“Look at the images,” he says and points to the posters people hold above their heads with other faces and names of the missing or killed.
Today they get to be celebrated and mourned. The chants that got Hamada and scores of others killed ring through Damascus.
Transcript:
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Mouaz Moustafa is in Damascus on a mission, looking for Americans who disappeared in Syria under the Assad regime.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: On the night we meet, the Syrian American activist is in a hurry to get on the road.
MOUAZ MOUSTAFA: We have a tip that Austin may be at this building. We believe that he may be in the basement.
L FADEL: How many Americans are you looking for?
MOUSTAFA: I’m looking for six that I know of. There could be more Americans that were detained by Assad. The two that are public is Majd Kamalmaz and Austin Tice.
L FADEL: Kamalmaz is a Syrian American psychotherapist detained in Syria some seven years ago. He was believed to have died in captivity. But a video that recently surfaced showed a man that looked like him unable to speak after his release from one of the prisons, and it renewed the family’s hope that he may be alive. And Austin Tice is a journalist who was taken in Syria in 2012. Authorities believe the regime was holding him. On this night, it is Tice who Moustafa, the founder of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a human rights and aid organization, is looking for. We stop in front of concrete barriers, where rebels now in control of Damascus guard the Air Force Intelligence building. We go inside, and Moustafa and the rebels begin their search.
(SOUNDBITE OF OBJECTS BANGING)
L FADEL: They look through abandoned offices, rifle through files. Moustafa searches through a bin of shredded papers.
And what are you looking for in these shredded documents?
MOUSTAFA: I’m looking down for anything about detainees. It’s just like looking for a needle in the haystack, though – ridiculous.
L FADEL: He bangs on any locked door he finds.
MOUSTAFA: Anyone there?
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
MOUSTAFA: Anyone there?
L FADEL: When he or the rebels see a portrait of the former dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, or his late father, Hafez al-Assad, they tear it down.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAPER TEARING)
L FADEL: They step on their framed portraits.
(SOUNDBITE OF GLASS BREAKING)
L FADEL: On the wall is a directive from the regime to those who worked at this intelligence facility.
MOUSTAFA: It says, do not talk to any international organization or talk to anything outside the country. If anyone gets a hold of you from outside the country, report it directly to your higher-up.
(SOUNDBITE OF OBJECTS BANGING)
L FADEL: In the basement, there are two rooms. Both have stairs that disappear into brown liquid.
MOUSTAFA: It’s a pool of acid. That’s where they threw people.
L FADEL: Now, we don’t know for sure if it’s acid, but a strong chemical smell fills the air. We walk down a hall with a row of black metal doors. They open into windowless cells, where prisoners were once held. The cells are now empty, but the walls are full.
The walls are covered in…
MOUSTAFA: Prayers.
L FADEL: …Writing and prayers.
In one, the Quran is scrawled in tiny lettering so it will fit on the four surfaces. In the others, the prisoners have etched calendars.
MOUSTAFA: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. This is to count how many days he’s been imprisoned, and so he keeps marking it.
L FADEL: There’s the word mother, a prayer near the once-locked exit of one of the cells.
MOUSTAFA: (Non-English language spoken). And he who is God-conscious – God will find him a way out. And it points to the door of the jail cell.
L FADEL: Wow, right at the door.
When rebels got to this building a few days ago, they say they released a few dozen people held inside. On this night, it appears there is no one left to find. But before we get back in the van, the rebels introduce us to a man, Muhammed Sahlan (ph). He tells us he walked for miles from Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus when the fighters broke them out just a few days ago.
MUHAMMED SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: “And I walked for 13 kilometers from Saydnaya all the way here.”
L FADEL: Four years ago, he was detained at a checkpoint on the road from Daraa in southwest Syria to Damascus. Soldiers found pictures of the revolutionary flag on his phone, and they accused him of being a terrorist.
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: “I was like, if you execute – I would never admit to something that’s not true. So he punched me right here.”
L FADEL: He points to his missing teeth, where he was punched, his side, where he was shot. He says every prisoner in Saydnaya had a number. His was 711. And every few days, guards would come.
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: “He’ll call these numbers out. These people will stand, and then they’ll just shoot them all in front of us.”
L FADEL: Did you think you were going to die in Saydnaya?
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: “I wished that I would die in Saydnaya. I could – you know, everyone in Saydnaya would rather die than be there.”
L FADEL: He doesn’t know how to find his family.
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: He’s like, “all I want to do is see my daughter.”
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: Does he – does she know that you’re alive? Does your daughter know that you’re alive?
MOUSTAFA: (Non-English language spoken).
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: “I have no idea now.”
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken) Sham (ph).
MOUSTAFA: Her name is Sham.
L FADEL: And she’s in Canada.
MOUSTAFA: (Non-English language spoken).
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: “That’s what I heard, I think.”
L FADEL: Sahlan is free but still lost to his family. And on the other side, thousands of Syrian families are looking for their Sahlan. Some 157,000 people are estimated to have been detained by the Assad regime since the start of the uprising against him. That was met with violence and turned into civil war. That’s according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Now Syrians are coming to the capital from across the country to look. They’re posting flyers, scouring the prisons, the city’s hospitals, the morgues.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILD CRYING)
L FADEL: Outside the Al-Mujtahid Hospital in central Damascus, a crowd gathers where pictures of the corpses from the morgue are displayed.
They basically taped up pictures of the dead, disfigured bodies they found. And that crowd you hear is here looking at those pictures to try to figure out if any of these people are their loved ones – their missing loved ones.
Some of the dead have no eyes. Some are black and blue. There are close-ups of identifying markers – tattoos, birthmarks. I see a young woman at the front of the crowd examining every image closely.
SARA ABDELHAMID AL-AMMI: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: Her name is Sara Abdelhamid al-Ammi (ph), and she’s 23. She’s looking for four of her brothers – all accused of terrorism, all taken on the way to work.
Did you find anything here?
AL-AMMI: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
L FADEL: “I didn’t find my brothers. I didn’t find them. And they didn’t do anything.”
AL-AMMI: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
L FADEL: And she pulls pictures of each one out of her purse.
AL-AMMI: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
L FADEL: Abdullah (ph), Muhammed (ph), Ibrahim (ph), Ahmed (ph).
AL-AMMI: (Crying).
L FADEL: And, you know, as Sara pulls out her pictures, everyone around her is pulling their own pictures out of their loved ones.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: A woman shows me her son on her phone. Another reaches over al-Ammi’s shoulder to show me her child’s ID. They grab my arm. They beg for help. Al-Ammi wails in the middle.
AL-AMMI: (Shouting in non-English language).
L FADEL: “They killed our children,” she screams. “I want blood for blood. I want soul for soul.”
AL-AMMI: (Shouting in non-English language).
(SOUNDBITE OF HORN HONKING)
L FADEL: Al-Ammi has no closure and will continue looking. But for others, the search is over. The lucky ones found their people broken but alive. Others identified bodies like Mazen Hamada’s (ph). The activist was known around the world for exposing the torture inside Syria’s prisons. He was jailed multiple times for demonstrating against the regime since the start of the uprising began in 2011. After his release, he got asylum in Europe.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MAZEN HAMADA: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: In a 2017 documentary, Hamada said he wouldn’t rest until there was justice, and he recounted the details of his detention – and we should warn you, they are graphic and disturbing – the clamp used to crush his genitals, the rape, the electric shock, the beatings that broke his ribs. And for reasons that still confuse even his closest friends, he decided he had to go back to Syria in 2020. He was detained immediately and never heard from again. Now we know he was killed, likely in the final days of Assad’s rule.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
JAD ABDIN, BYLINE: They’re chanting, “one, one, one, the Syrian people is one. We’re unifying.”
L FADEL: Our producer, Jad Abdin, translates the chants there. On this day in an Assad-free Damascus, Hamada is mourned loudly by hundreds in a funeral procession that starts at this hospital and ends at his final resting place.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
L FADEL: Out of the crowd, a man with a mustache, a red baseball cap and a wide smile walks up to us.
ABDULLAH FADEL: Let me speak to you.
L FADEL: His name is Abdullah Fadel, and he translates books.
A FADEL: I myself spent nine years in prison between 1992 until 2000. I have never dreamed of having such a day – never. It’s unbelievable, beyond my imagination.
L FADEL: So this procession, what does it mean?
A FADEL: This – I know it’s a kind of symbolic funeral.
L FADEL: Symbolic in what way?
A FADEL: Because people are participating because they want to show that they are one people. They have one aim, one goal. Symbolic because this guy is a symbol of all the people who died in such a way, not only he himself. You see – you look at the images. Most of them are killed. Their parents do not know where are they.
L FADEL: In the crowd, people hold posters above their heads graced with the images and names of their missing and killed.
Sharabi Hunawe (ph). There’s just names after names – Adi Shahabi (ph), Fadeel Maatouk (ph).
On the side of the roads, the shops are open, and people watch in tears as Hamada’s body is held high above the crowd, draped in the revolutionary flag.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
L FADEL: On this day, chants like this one ring through Damascus, cursing the Assad family and calling for a united Syria – the same chants that got people like Hamada killed and tens of thousands disappeared.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
(SOUNDBITE OF PORTICO QUARTET’S “WINDING SNAKE”)