People in Syria Lost and Found
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Today on State of the World, people in Syria lost and found.

You're listening to State of the World from NPR, the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. It's Friday, December 13th. I'm Greg Dixon. Countless Syrian families lived through the rule of Bashar al-Assad with uncertainty of the fate of their loved ones. The U.N. estimates over 100,000 people went missing under the Assad regime, often detained or arrested by state officials and never heard from again.

Now that the regime has fallen, the search for the missing is on. NPR's Leila Fadl brings us more from Damascus.

Maraz Mustafa is in Damascus on a mission, looking for Americans who disappeared in Syria under the Assad regime. On the night we meet, the Syrian-American activist is in a hurry to get on the road. We have a tip that Austin may be at this building. We believe that he may be in the basement.

How many Americans are you looking for? 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. 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

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 Mustafa, 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 Mustafa and the rebels begin their search.

They look through abandoned offices, rifle through files. Mustafa searches through a bin of shredded papers. And what are you looking for in these shredded documents? I'm looking for anything about detainees. It's just like looking for a needle in a haystack, though. It's ridiculous. He bangs on any locked door he finds. Anyone there? Anyone there?

Anyone there? 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. They step on their framed portraits. On the wall is a directive from the regime to those who worked at this intelligence facility. 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-ups. In the basement, there are two rooms. Both have stairs that disappear into brown liquid. It's a pool of acid. That's where they threw people. 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 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. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. This is to count how many days he's been in prison, and so he keeps marking it. There's the word mother.

a prayer near the once-locked exit of one of the cells. And he who is God-conscious, God will find him a way out, and it points to the door of the jail cell. 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, Mohamed Sahlan. He tells us he walked for miles from Sidneya prison on the outskirts of Damascus when the fighters broke them out just a few days ago. I walked for 13 kilometers from Sidneya all the way here. 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. I was like, if you execute me, I would never admit to something that's not true. So he punched me right here. He points to his missing teeth where he was punched, his side where he was shot. He says every prisoner in Sidneya had a number. His was 7-11-11.

And every few days, guards would come. He'll call these numbers out, these people will stand, and then they'll just shoot them all in front of us. Did you think you were going to die in Sednaya? I wished that I would die in Sednaya. Everyone in Sednaya would rather die than be there. He doesn't know how to find his family. He's like, all I want to do is see my daughter.

Does she know that you're alive? Does your daughter know you're alive? I have no idea. Her name is Sham. And she's in Canada? That's what I heard, I think. 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.

Outside the Al-Mashtahid 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. I'm a woman.

Her name is Sara Abdulhamid Al-Ami, 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? I didn't find my brothers. I didn't find them. They didn't do anything.

Then she pulls pictures of each one out of her purse. Abdullah, Mohammed, Ibrahim, Ahmed. You know, Al-Sara pulls out her pictures. Everyone around her is pulling their own pictures out of their loved ones. A woman shows me her son on her phone. Another reaches over Al-Ami's shoulder to show me her child's ID. They grab my arm. They beg for help.

Al-Ami wails in the middle. They killed our children, she screams. I want blood for blood. I want soul for soul. Al-Ami 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 Maz and 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 began in 2011. After his release, he got asylum in Europe. I'm going to ask them to bring me to court. I'll take it.

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. They're chanting 1-1-1. The Syrian people is one. We're unified. 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.

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. His name is Abdullah Fadl, and he translates books. 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.

So this procession, what does it mean? This, I know, it's a kind of symbolic funeral. Symbolic in what way? Because people are participating because they want to show that they are one people, they have one aim, one goal. Simply 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

Their parents do not know where are they. In the crowd, people hold posters above their heads graced with the images and names of their missing and killed. There's just names after names. Ali Shahabi. Khalil Maatouk. On the side of the roads, the shops are open, and people watch in tears as Hamad's body is held high above the crowd, draped in the revolutionary flag.

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.

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