LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Mouaz Moustafa is in Damascus on a mission, looking for Americans who disappeared in Syria under the Assad regime.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: On the night we meet, the Syrian American activist is in a hurry to get on the road.
MOUAZ MOUSTAFA: We have a tip that Austin may be at this building. We believe that he may be in the basement.
L FADEL: How many Americans are you looking for?
MOUSTAFA: 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.
L FADEL: 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 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 Moustafa, 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 Moustafa and the rebels begin their search.
(SOUNDBITE OF OBJECTS BANGING)
L FADEL: They look through abandoned offices, rifle through files. Moustafa searches through a bin of shredded papers.
And what are you looking for in these shredded documents?
MOUSTAFA: I'm looking down for anything about detainees. It's just like looking for a needle in the haystack, though - ridiculous.
L FADEL: He bangs on any locked door he finds.
MOUSTAFA: Anyone there?
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
MOUSTAFA: Anyone there?
L FADEL: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAPER TEARING)
L FADEL: They step on their framed portraits.
(SOUNDBITE OF GLASS BREAKING)
L FADEL: On the wall is a directive from the regime to those who worked at this intelligence facility.
MOUSTAFA: 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-up.
(SOUNDBITE OF OBJECTS BANGING)
L FADEL: In the basement, there are two rooms. Both have stairs that disappear into brown liquid.
MOUSTAFA: It's a pool of acid. That's where they threw people.
L FADEL: 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...
MOUSTAFA: Prayers.
L FADEL: ...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.
MOUSTAFA: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. This is to count how many days he's been imprisoned, and so he keeps marking it.
L FADEL: There's the word mother, a prayer near the once-locked exit of one of the cells.
MOUSTAFA: (Non-English language spoken). And he who is God-conscious - God will find him a way out. And it points to the door of the jail cell.
L FADEL: 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, Muhammed Sahlan (ph). He tells us he walked for miles from Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus when the fighters broke them out just a few days ago.
MUHAMMED SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: "And I walked for 13 kilometers from Saydnaya all the way here."
L FADEL: 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.
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: "I was like, if you execute - I would never admit to something that's not true. So he punched me right here."
L FADEL: He points to his missing teeth, where he was punched, his side, where he was shot. He says every prisoner in Saydnaya had a number. His was 711. And every few days, guards would come.
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: "He'll call these numbers out. These people will stand, and then they'll just shoot them all in front of us."
L FADEL: Did you think you were going to die in Saydnaya?
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: "I wished that I would die in Saydnaya. I could - you know, everyone in Saydnaya would rather die than be there."
L FADEL: He doesn't know how to find his family.
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: He's like, "all I want to do is see my daughter."
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: Does he - does she know that you're alive? Does your daughter know that you're alive?
MOUSTAFA: (Non-English language spoken).
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: "I have no idea now."
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken) Sham (ph).
MOUSTAFA: Her name is Sham.
L FADEL: And she's in Canada.
MOUSTAFA: (Non-English language spoken).
SAHLAN: (Non-English language spoken).
MOUSTAFA: "That's what I heard, I think."
L FADEL: 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILD CRYING)
L FADEL: Outside the Al-Mujtahid 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.
SARA ABDELHAMID AL-AMMI: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: Her name is Sara Abdelhamid al-Ammi (ph), 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 here?
AL-AMMI: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
L FADEL: "I didn't find my brothers. I didn't find them. And they didn't do anything."
AL-AMMI: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
L FADEL: And she pulls pictures of each one out of her purse.
AL-AMMI: (Non-English language spoken, crying).
L FADEL: Abdullah (ph), Muhammed (ph), Ibrahim (ph), Ahmed (ph).
AL-AMMI: (Crying).
L FADEL: And, you know, as Sara pulls out her pictures, everyone around her is pulling their own pictures out of their loved ones.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: A woman shows me her son on her phone. Another reaches over al-Ammi's shoulder to show me her child's ID. They grab my arm. They beg for help. Al-Ammi wails in the middle.
AL-AMMI: (Shouting in non-English language).
L FADEL: "They killed our children," she screams. "I want blood for blood. I want soul for soul."
AL-AMMI: (Shouting in non-English language).
(SOUNDBITE OF HORN HONKING)
L FADEL: Al-Ammi 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 Mazen Hamada's (ph). 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MAZEN HAMADA: (Non-English language spoken).
L FADEL: 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.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
JAD ABDIN, BYLINE: They're chanting, "one, one, one, the Syrian people is one. We're unifying."
L FADEL: 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.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
L FADEL: Out of the crowd, a man with a mustache, a red baseball cap and a wide smile walks up to us.
ABDULLAH FADEL: Let me speak to you.
L FADEL: His name is Abdullah Fadel, and he translates books.
A FADEL: 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.
L FADEL: So this procession, what does it mean?
A FADEL: This - I know it's a kind of symbolic funeral.
L FADEL: Symbolic in what way?
A FADEL: Because people are participating because they want to show that they are one people. They have one aim, one goal. Symbolic 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 killed. Their parents do not know where are they.
L FADEL: In the crowd, people hold posters above their heads graced with the images and names of their missing and killed.
Sharabi Hunawe (ph). There's just names after names - Adi Shahabi (ph), Fadeel Maatouk (ph).
On the side of the roads, the shops are open, and people watch in tears as Hamada's body is held high above the crowd, draped in the revolutionary flag.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
L FADEL: 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.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Chanting in non-English language).
(SOUNDBITE OF PORTICO QUARTET'S "WINDING SNAKE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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