‘I watched every video to see my father’s face’: the woman who became the voice of Syria’s missing on why she isn’t giving up hope

Wafa Mustafa holds a picture of her father. In the chaos after Bashar al-Assad’s fall she fears key documents on prisoners’ details may have been lost. Photograph: Ahmad Al-haj Ebraheem

When insurgents threw open the doors of Aleppo central prison in northern Syria as they overran the city in December, Wafa Mustafa, 34, watched videos of the scenes from exile in Germany in disbelief. Shocked detainees could be seen running into the night as a decades-long dictatorship built on a network of prisons and torture chambers crumbled.

Mustafa began praying that the insurgents would reach the detention centres in Damascus, where she believed her father, Ali, was being held by the feared intelligence services. He was kidnapped from their home in the Syrian capital more than a decade ago and she has not seen or heard from him since.