A Syrian man helping to translate the anguished messages scrawled on cell walls by prisoners of the brutal Assad regime made a heart-wrenching discovery — when he found a message written by a missing relative.
The jaw-dropping footage shows Mohammad al-Shebli inside one of the Damascus prisons with the Wall Street Journal as he translates the words of despair, hope, and faith scribbled along the walls by those locked away for criticizing ousted President Bashar al-Assad.
As he reads the messages and names, al-Shebli freezes momentarily as he comes across a certain name, Abud Abusar Alawi.
“Abud! It’s one of our relatives,” al-Shebli says in utter disbelief as he reads on.
Al-Shebli said there was no doubt that the person inside the cell was his relative as the date of his imprisonment matches the day Assad’s forces came to their neighborhood to arrest people.
His conclusion was further backed by the fact that the names of other men that al-Shebli knew from his neighborhood were also written near Alwai’s name.
“It’s weird… that I discovered one of my relatives here,” Alawi said. “I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, but it’s like there’s a key.”
It remains unclear if Alawi was among those who died after years of torture inside Assad’s military prisons or if he was among the thousands freed by the Syrian rebel forces when they stormed the jails to free the political prisoners.
The freed prisoners are still making their way back across Syria as they try to reunite with their families and pick up where they left off now that Assad’s regime has been toppled.
But it may take years for others to learn of their relatives’ fates as Syrians and humanitarian groups work to recover countless bodies believed to be buried and crushed in at least eight mass grave sites located across the country.
One of the mass graves is located just outside Damascus in Al Qutayfah, where the US-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) estimates that at least 100,000 bodies are buried along a network of trenches.
The grim discovery is believed to be one of the largest mass graves in modern history, and its true count could rival that of the Stalin-era mass grave in Ukraine, where more than 200,000 executed political prisoners were buried.
The bodies being discovered across Syria are likely among the more than 150,000 people who have disappeared under the Assad regime, whose administration regularly arrested and tortured dissenters and threw them into prisons never to be seen again, according to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).
The true number of the missing during the years of the bloody civil war and after has yet to be independently verified.
