It has been 10 years since Morhaf Safi, a young Syrian man, left home to buy a suit for his wedding and never came back.
Ten years since his family in the capital, Damascus, have had any contact with him. Ten years since his older brother, Abdulsafer, 38, last saw his face.
Then on Tuesday, just days after the stunning overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime, a friend texted Abdulsafer a photo of a mutilated body: a face slashed, mouth twisted, eyes hollow and bruised.
“My friend asked if this was my brother,” Abdulsafer says through tears, clutching the photo on his phone. It was taken inside Harasta, a military hospital in the capital. “We think he died just a few days before the regime’s collapse.”
Abdulsafer was told that at least 35 bodies, all showing signs of torture, had been found in a refrigerated room inside the hospital – including, possibly, that of his beloved brother.
Rebels told reporters they had received a tip from hospital staff about corpses being dumped there, and had subsequently moved the bodies to central Damascus for families to identify.
Outside the morgue, photos of the disfigured bodies are plastered on the walls, and desperate families scour them in the dark using the lights on their mobile phones.
Among the images, friends identify what they believe to be the body of Mazen al-Hamada, one of Syria’s most prominent activists, who became a global voice against the Assad regime’s use of torture after he endured a year of brutal physical, sexual, and psychological abuse in Sednaya.
Released in 2013, and after taking refuge in the Netherlands, he shared his harrowing story with the world. For some inexplicable reason, he decided to return to Damascus in early 2020. He hasn’t been heard from since.
Inside the morgue, people move from body to body, examining remains that litter the floor in various stages of decay. Scribbled on some of the blood-smeared body bags are notes about where the bodies were found and in what circumstances.
“To this day, we don’t know why my brother was imprisoned,” Abdulsafer says as he braces himself to take a look inside. “We knew he was being held in the Political Security Branch, but then he was transferred to another prison and we lost all contact with him.”
Behind him, a woman called Om Hamza, who is searching for her brother and two sons-in-law who have been missing for years, says he is not alone.
“Every household in Syria has three or four missing people,” she adds. “It is our nightmare.”
Desperate relatives have been doing whatever they can – camping in the grounds of Syria’s most notorious prison, as well as searching the halls of overflowing hospitals and morgues – to find those who disappeared during the reign of the now deposed autocrat.
Clutching photos, identification cards, and screenshots of old images, the brothers, mothers and fathers flock to anyone and anywhere that might shed light on their relatives’ whereabouts.
Over half a century of brutal rule by the Assad dynasty, culminating in 13 years of civil war, was marked by mass arrests, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and executions.
No one knows the true scale of the missing, but the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) estimates that there are at least 150,000 people whose fate remains unknown across Syria’s myriad conflicts.
Among them were over 3,500 children, and more than 8,500 women, who remained under arrest or forcibly disappeared by the time Assad was overthrown, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
The head of the rights group, Fadel Abdulghany, broke down in tears on a Turkey-based Syrian television channel on Monday, saying they believe most of the missing people are probably dead.
And so while some families have been reunited, the ICMP has called on the international community to help find the rest.
The global intergovernmental organisation said on Tuesday that it had already collected data from more than 76,200 relatives in Syria, who have officially reported nearly 30,000 missing persons.
Now is the time, the ICMP says, for the world to coordinate in using genetic and database technology to find those who have disappeared.
“For justice to prevail in Syria, steps must be taken now – in the midst of present events – to protect evidence,” the organisation added, imploring that sites of executions and other human rights violations be treated as crime scenes.
“They must be sealed and examined in due course to protect the truth and bring those responsible to justice.”
That, unfortunately, was not the case at Sednaya prison, where angry and desperate families stood before smashed CCTV cameras, broken surveillance screens, and destroyed computer mainframes – all apparently sabotaged by regime guards before they fled.
The isolated prison is nicknamed “slaughterhouse” and “death camp”. Located 30km (19 miles) north of Damascus, it was described by Amnesty International as “the final destination” for peaceful protesters and army defectors.
After a video spread across the country showing rebels storming the prison and freeing inmates on Sunday, families from across Syria used their last bit of fuel to drive to the notorious complex and search for their loved ones.
With nowhere else to go, many are camping on mattresses on the ground outside the gruesome complex, which is covered in sewage and the scant belongings of inmates. Some dig with their hands into the ground or try knocking through walls, searching for underground prisons and secret cells that are rumoured to exist.
“The guards took working screens and storage drives to cover up for Bashar al-Assad and his criminals,” says Wali Subhi Nassar from Aleppo, breaking down in tears. “About a month ago, a soldier informed me that my brother was in Sednaya. Now that soldier has vanished, and all contact with him has been completely cut off.”
As another man tries to comfort him, Wali continues: “We will keep pursuing these criminals until the very end. I didn’t hold hatred for them, nor have I ever carried a weapon in my life, but now I will hunt them down.”
Outside, crowds of desperate families search for clues. “Please, I am trying to find my son Enad, who disappeared 12 years ago,” a woman sobs, grabbing my arm. Another man, Zakaria, himself a former detainee, shouts: “Seven of my family are missing. Their photos are in the records here at the prison – they must be here.”
In the capital’s hospitals, meanwhile, families race from ward to ward, begging staff for any news of those released from prison, chasing reports of prisoners so badly tortured that they have forgotten their names and lost their minds.
The relatives of the missing stream out of a room on the fourth floor, where two men are being treated for gunshot and torture wounds after their release from prisons in Homs and Damascus – only to find that they have already been claimed by their families.
The wife of one of the men – Alaa, a mother of six – says her husband Mohammed, 38, spent two years behind bars for trying to escape military conscription. There, he was tortured and eventually shot in the shoulder as the regime forces fled. He was freed from Sednaya on Sunday.
“They never let me see my husband. They used to torture me every time I asked to see him,” Alaa says tearfully, explaining how an opposition fighter had reached out to her with the news that he had been freed. “When I heard he was released, I started crying along with the children.”
At the nearby Ibn al-Nafees hospital, injured detainee Khalid, also freed from Sednaya after two years, is being taken home by his family. Khalid was so badly beaten and tortured, they say he remembers little of what happened to him, and that he was only located by his relatives because of a picture, taken inside the hospital ward, that was circulated on social media.
Back at the morgue, Abdulsafer finds the body he believes to be his brother – but there is a strange tattoo on one arm, and the face is so disfigured he is not sure. A DNA test is needed to confirm whether it is his sibling. But for now, it gives him a sliver of hope.
“I cannot be sure,” he says. “I just hope it means there is a small chance that he might be alive.”
