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.
In the intervening years, Mustafa became the public face of tens of thousands of families suffering under the constant weight of enforced disappearances in Syria; she is a relentless campaigner intent on making sure the missing are not forgotten.
“I have done everything I could these past years,” she says. “I exhausted myself. I cried, I got angry, I talked to politicians, I protested, and then … someone just opened the door and everyone is free.
“All that stood between me and my father’s prison was just a door that could easily open.”
Almost two months on from the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the filthy cells of Syria’s notorious detention centres lie empty for the first time. But the opening of the country’s prisons has brought solace only to some: the International Commission on Missing Persons estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 people are missing.
Mustafa has returned to Syria and joined thousands of others in searching for traces of loved ones. Posters bearing the faces of the missing line city squares, the corners of Damascus’s winding alleyways and even the ancient walls of the Umayyad mosque compound.
Her own frantic search, ranging from security branches to hospital morgues, has so far yielded only one clue: three documents discussing Ali Mustafa and the friend he was detained with in 2013 were found in the notorious military intelligence detention centre known as branch 215 in Damascus. The information about her father went all the way back to 1995.
Mustafa says the new regime has provided little support and demonstrated little planning for families trying to find out what happened to loved ones kidnapped, tortured and imprisoned by the Assad regime. She says there are rooms full of files still held in the labyrinth of detention centres in Damascas.
“Now, it is said that these places are protected and the new authorities don’t allow people to just go inside. They say they will organise these sites, but I still don’t know how, and they’ve said nothing specific about how they will do this,” she says.
Mustafa has met the chief prosecutor and others from Syria’s caretaker authority, but found herself quickly disappointed by their lack of planning to tackle the issue of missing people.
“Despite the fact they said this is the most important file, frankly I don’t really see any progress, and they’re not speaking to people yet,” she says. “They said they will work on it, but there’s no progress that we know of until now.”
The de facto head of the government, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has met a stream of visitors including Debra Tice, the mother of the US journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria in 2012, but Mustafa bristles at his perceived reluctance to meet the families of the missing.
“In the past month I have been trying so hard to arrange a meeting between al-Sharaa and the families of the disappeared. I was promised many times it would happen but it hasn’t until today,” she says.
Mustafa emphasises her solidarity with Tice’s plight and hopes he is returned to his loved ones alive, but says she balked at Sharaa’s choice to focus on the case of a white American detainee rather than the hundreds of thousands of Syrian families with urgent questions about their missing loved ones.
While she understands meeting Tice is a political decision, Mustafa says it is still a choice to prioritise a non-Syrian detainee over tens of thousands of Syrian ones.
“Unfortunately there is zero clarity from the new government regarding what the families of the disappeared should do to find the truth about their loved ones, to find information or to contact the new government. Al-Sharaa has not spoken directly to the families of the disappeared, which means no work that we know of until today on this huge issue,” she says.
Mustafa says she has already spent weeks picking through a firehose of information that spread across social media: pictures of identity cards and rooms overflowing with filing cabinets and documents, and video of tortured detainees writhing on hospital beds.
“I had to pause every video and repeat it over and over, to see if I can identify my father’s face somewhere,” she says.
Then there were the images from Sednaya prison, an infamous facility once estimated to hold up to 20,000 people where Amnesty International reported that thousands were secretly extrajudicially hanged, showing people rummaging through papers spread across the floor. Mustafa was furious, angry on behalf of thousands of Syrians in exile who she feared could be watching people destroy vital evidence about their loved ones.
“I was scared that one of these documents that has been damaged or destroyed might have the only truth about father, and now I will never know. It’s very sad,” she says.
The International Committee of the Red Cross in Damascus is trying to trace an estimated 35,000 missing people, while a United Nations body set up two years ago to find out the fate of Syria’s missing – but is yet to launch its search – has called on the new Syrian authorities to protect all possible sources of evidence, such as records and mass graves.
But with international organisations caught off-guard by the downfall of the Assad regime and the rush to examine evidence of its crimes, Mustafa says she and other families of the missing feel abandoned.
“Of course Assad is the main perpetrator, but everyone who let us down, allowed this chaos to happen, everyone who had the resources and the mandate and did not use it in the earliest days after his fall, is responsible,” she says.
“I am terrified that I will not have any information ever.”
