DAMASCUS — I stood in front of the memorial in Marjeh Square, in the center of Damascus, where the walls are covered with pictures of the missing and forcibly disappeared people. The pictures on the walls line up like tattoos on the city’s memory.
Amid the crowd of pictures and faces, I began to search for the features of an old friend who disappeared when he was heading to the Faculty of Media 13 years ago. He never returned. I stared at the pictures, hoping to find a thread of hope or a trace that would tell me something about him.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
I found nothing but helplessness weighing down my gaze and the city’s memory with it.
I was about to leave. As I was moving away from the wall, a woman in her 50s approached. She was carrying a picture of a young man, around 20, that she had placed in a dilapidated wooden frame. She looked at me with tired eyes and whispered, “I swear, you look like my son.”
I stood silent in front of her, like a statue. The woman was one of hundreds of mothers who had gathered in the square, searching for an answer about the fate of their sons.
“They took our children alive, so bring them back to us alive. I will not hang my son’s picture here, I will keep it in my heart,” said the woman, with watery eyes and a broken voice.
Her features summed up years of oppression, her voice echoed every Syrian mother standing on the edge between hope and despair.
Around us, the square was crowded with hundreds of families. They came to Damascus looking for their missing relatives after the era of Assad family rule had abruptly come to an end. The walls of the memorial were silent and a witness to their pain. There were pictures and contact information for any eventual communication.
Nothing in that square is told but the stories of the missing who were buried in prison or the grave, or forgotten forever.
Prison tragedies
A discussion broadcast a few weeks ago by Fadel Abdul Ghani, director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, concluded with this cold truth, saying, “All the forcibly disappeared people who have not been found yet were killed by the Syrian regime in prisons.”
The regime did not provide details to their families about the locations of the bodies. It’s only the bitter truth: death was their fate.
On December 8, regime forces emerged from their strongholds like empty ghosts. Six decades of Ba’ath Party rule and more than half a century of Assad family tyranny had ended. The regime had fallen. But freedom came too late for those who were waiting in the cells.
Sednaya horror
The demands have changed in the days following the liberation. The call, “release the detainees,” was no longer enough. It turned into a cry demanding the truth. Decades of oppression and bloodshed left behind wounds that would not heal, and a nation searching for its memory.
The woman told me that her son was in Sednaya prison, a national symbol of horror. Established in 1987, it became a site of systematic torture and mass executions. This mother described her only visit to the prison in 2018 when she became sure that her son was held there.
After 61 years of Ba’ath rule and 53 years of Assad family control, the regime left behind a legacy of pain and blood. Documents revealed after the country’s liberation exposed systematic repression that 136,614 people were detained since 2011, of whom 96,321 were forcibly disappeared.
The numbers are as dry as autumn leaves, but they carry names, stories, lives.
Wounds that don’t heal
Over the past few days, I have visited 10 detention facilities, seven mass graves and Syria’s central military court. I have seen the documents revealing the crimes. All the horrors that we have talked about in the past were less than what we found.
Death is the symbol of prisons like the notorious Palestine Branch, known for its Military Intelligence Unit 291 and Tadmor Prison.
I couldn’t answer her. World failed me.
In the Palestine Branch, the detainees were trapped in narrow, dark cells. There, they were electrocuted and starved until they confessed things they never did. As for Tadmor, an isolated prison in the desert, detainees were executed in the field, amid screams that only the sand could hear.
Hard truth
The woman turned to another young man standing next to me. She repeated what she’d said to me: “I swear, you look like my son.”
Before bidding me farewell, and heading to another young man, she asked simply, “Can you tell me how to find my son?”
I couldn’t answer her. Words failed me. I was silent. Only my own watery eyes offered the truth she couldn’t bear to hear.
