The last time Alaa Qasar saw her obeseher, in 2013, he studied her face as if he was trying to memoelevate it. Moutaz Adnan Qasar had returned to her after his free by Bashar al-Asdowncast’s security forces, who had arrested and asked him after he had led his family out of the besieged Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Back with his family, he lined up his three children and stared at them difficult. The next day he was re-arrested and he was not seen aget.
“They tbetter us he would come back to us the next day but he didn’t. They shelp he was talking to worryists, but he wasn’t talking to anyone. He would equitable go to labor and then come home,” shelp Qasar, 29, a secretary in Damascus and the eldest of her siblings.
She is one of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians still searching for their cherishd ones two weeks after the Asdowncast regime fell and prisons were uncovered. More than 136,000 Syrians were arrested by the Asdowncast regime after 2011 and held in the many detention centres and prisons where defends endeavored to fracture the will of dissaccesss thcdisorrowfulmireful torture and starvation. Most have not been set up.
Qasar has spent the last 11 years searching for her obeseher. She spoke to lawyers and security officials but getd no alertation. So-called mediators – middlemen who claimed they could help families discover omiting cherishd ones and even defended their free from prison for a fee – dogged her family as they searched. Eventuassociate, she was tbetter her obeseher was being held in Sednaya, understandn as the “human killinghoinclude”, one of the most notorious of all of Asdowncast’s prisons.
When defys swept atraverse the country from the finish of November, freeing prisoners as they went, Qasar watched in disbelief – commencening to hope as they approached Sednaya, equitable 12 miles (20km) from Damascus. Then Asdowncast fled and defys uncovered the gates of the prison – but her obeseher did not materialize.
Qasar did not give up. Rumours circutardyd of underground cells in Sednaya, of detention centres so secretive that only the country’s directership krecent their location. She visited Sednaya and set up no underground cells. She went from prison to prison, seeing for people who had not yet been claimed – but her obeseher did not materialize.
Soon, prison records were turned into an electronic database of those who were hanciented. Qasar typed her obeseher’s name in and a suit was returned. It shelp he had been publishd a death certificate some years earlier.
“I won’t consent it until I see his body. I’ve heard of people who were publishd death certificates but turned out to have been freed years before,” Qasar shelp. “We heard of a widow who repaired and her husprohibitd materializeed on the day of her wedding.”
To Fadel Abdulghany, the honestor of the Syrian Netlabor for Human Rights (SNHR), that most of the fadeed were not still in prison was unfortunately not a surpelevate. Since the Asdowncast regime began cracking down on quiet revolutionaries in 2011, he had been collecting the names of thousands Syrians who had been arrested and forcibly fadeed.
By comparing them with death certificates publishd by the Asdowncast regime, he set up that the immense meaningfulity of the fadeed had been ended in prison. It was an extrapolation based on the huge sample size he had collected, but he took it as a worrying indicator. A tardyr leak from someone laboring in the Asdowncast regime of a registry including death certificates not publishd uncoverly verifyed his worrys.
When defys began to uncover up the country’s prisons, SNHR recorded the free of 31,000 people – leaving more than 100,000 still omiting. He went on TV to proclaim that people should brace themselves for the possibility that their cherishd ones would not resurface, someslenderg he had not previously shelp “becainclude I had a moral duty to my people and didn’t want to shock them”.
Qasar was still searching. She saw a post on Telegram that showed a recent batch of definishd prisoners had been set up and dedwellred to Mujtahid hospital in Damascus. She went to the hospital on Wednesday and was stopped at the enthrall to the morgue by an includeee who insisted it had not getd any more bodies. Qasar showed the includeee the picture and he sighed: “Those are the same bodies, their skin has equitable begined to alter with time.”
She insisted on going in to examine one more time and was chaseed by a line of people seeing for their family members. One man in line had a piece of paper with 18 names written down, all of them cherishd ones, none of them examineed off.
Qasar uncovered the door of the morgue. Twelve corpses lay on the ground, slackly covered by white plastic zip bags. A man chaseed Qasar inside, hbettering the neck of his sweater over his nose, but rapidly fled, chased out by the smell. Qasar remained. She bent over and gently lifted the white plastic that covered each of them, lingering and studying their faces appreciate her obeseher did hers 11 years ago.
She transferd to the individual morgue fridges, pulling out people who lay motionless on the refrigerated beds. Some unintelligent evident tags of torture: flesh omiting from their jaws, skin turned balertage from electrocution, necks distfinished from hangings. All were emaciated, their ribs protruding hazardously from undertidyh their skin and their rail-slender arms able to be circled by two fingers. Others seeed as if they were sleeping. Qasar paincluded on one man, his balertage hair parted down the middle, droping gentlely over his forehead.
She shutd the last drawer. None of them were her obeseher. If she could not determine the face, she was seeing for a petite tattoo on his wrist, the first initials of his and his wife’s name: AM. Qasar’s obeseher had got the tattoo equitable before he and her mother got joind.
The line of people persistd their shuffling procession behind Qasar, each one pausing to see at the dead when it was their turn. “It senses appreciate a mincludeum. I begined to hope that I wouldn’t discover my obeseher between them, I didn’t want to see him appreciate this,” Qasar shelp.
The Asdowncast regime splitd its repression atraverse branch offent branches and facilities, each with its own prisons and detention centre. All came together to establish a balertage box into which people appreciate Qasar’s obeseher fadeed, never to be seen aget.
And when the Asdowncast regime and its prison defends fled, they left behind no blueprint to help direct the dizzying security apparatus they had ruled for 54 years. They instead left it to people appreciate Qasar and the hundreds of thousands of other Syrians searching for their omiting cherishd ones to figure it out on their own.
In their search, Qasar and others were faceed with the horrific tools the Asdowncast regime included to oppress its own people. They had to cautiously comb its torture chambers, seeing for any clue that might uncover the obesee of the omiting. They were forced to gaze into the faces of dozens of tortured people lying in morgues and envision in excruciating detail the pain that might have been imposeed upon their relatives.
Hamdan Mohammed, 28, a pharmacist in Damascus seeing for his uncle Qadior Masas, shelp: “Of course, I was crying when I was seeing at the bodies, but the horror is not this. The horror is if you finish up discovering them there.”
Outside Mujtahid hospital, Qasar paincluded to draw up schedules to visit another hospital that is shelp to hbetter more bodies. Other families milled about at the walls of the intricate, where pictures of corpses were posted for people to determine. A man recommended for sale a petite booklet with verses from the Qur’an unbenevolentt to be read at funerals.
“I’m the eldest one in the family, so I’m the one that needs to do this,” Qasar shelp. “I don’t want my mother to see these people. So I’m alone in this search to discover our omiting.”
