Disappeared Across Syria, a grim search for loved ones

The last time Alaa Qasar saw her father, in 2013, he studied her face as if he was trying to memorise it.

- William Christou

The last time Alaa Qasar saw her father, in 2013, he studied her face as if he was trying to memorise it. Moutaz Adnan Qasar had returned to her after his release by Bashar al-Assad's security forces, who had arrested and questioned 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 hard. The next day he was rearrested and was not seen again.

"They told us he would come back to us the next day, but he didn't. They said he was talking to terrorists, but he wasn't talking to anyone. He would just go to work and then come home," said 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 loved ones two weeks after the Assad regime fell and prisons were opened . More than 136,000 Syrians were arrested by the Assad regime after 2011 and held in the many detention centres and prisons where guards attempted to break the will of dissenters through torture and starvation. Most have not been found.

Qasar has spent the past 11 years searching for her father. She spoke to lawyers and security officials but received no information. So-called mediators – middlemen who claimed they could help families find missing loved ones and even secure their release from prison for a fee – dogged her family as they searched. Eventually, she was told her father was being held in Sednaya, known as the “human slaughterhouse ”, one of the most infamous of all of Assad’s prisons.

When rebels swept across the country, freeing prisoners as they went, Qasar watched in disbelief – beginning to hope as they approached Sednaya, just 12 miles from Damascus. Then Assad fled and the rebels opened the gates of the prison , but her father did not appear.