Riham al-Shaar races down the corridors of Al-Mujtahid Hospital in the Syrian capital, Damascus. She weaves through a maze of patients, holding up her phone with a photo displayed on the screen.
“Have you seen him?” she frantically asks everyone she passes. “Where are the prisoners from Sednaya?” she shouts at doctors and nurses.
Her voice echoes through the sterile hallways, where the pungent smell of antiseptic and death lingers – a grim testament to the many corpses brought from the infamous Sednaya Prison, also known as the “Human Slaughterhouse.”
A nurse gestures toward a ward upstairs, where some survivors from Sednaya are rumored to have been taken. Riham’s eyes light up.
“Let’s go!” she shouts to her mother as they rush up the stairs. But when they reach the ward, disappointment hits like a blow. There are no men or women from Sednaya to be found.
Earlier that morning, Riham had seen a video circulating on social media. It showed a frail, emaciated young man lying on a hospital bed in Damascus.
He had been a prisoner at Sednaya, and something about his features reminded her of Ahmad Mohamed al-Sham, her brother who vanished without a trace one summer day in 2012.
Twenty-six-year-old Ahmad had been arrested by Assad’s security forces and transferred from one prison to another before finally ending up in the dreaded Sednaya.
But now, following the regime’s collapse on December 8, the gates of Sednaya had been thrown open. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, 31,000 people were released from Assad’s prisons that day. Out of the 136,000 recorded arrests during Bashar al-Assad’s rule, 105,000 detainees are still missing. No one knows their fate.
In the wake of these events, thousands of relatives are scouring Damascus’ hospitals and abandoned prisons, clinging to hope that they might find some trace of their loved ones.
One day, Ahmad disappeared
It was an ordinary day in June 2012. Ahmad, Riham’s brother, was hanging out with his friends in a neighborhood in Al Kiswah, south of Damascus, when soldiers from Bashar al-Assad’s regime began shouting orders. Without explanation, the young men were arrested, shoved into vehicles, and driven to the nearest police station.
“He was just a regular civilian. He was innocent,” Riham repeats, as if still trying to convince herself.
For two years, Ahmad was shuffled from one prison to another. The family’s attempts to locate him were met with silence and evasive responses.
Then, one day, they received devastating news: Ahmad had been transferred to the notorious Sednaya Prison. The very name sent shivers down their spines.
Sednaya was infamous: a living graveyard where torture, starvation, and mass executions were routine. Few left the prison alive, whether they were criminals, political dissidents, journalists, or civilians like Ahmad.
At Sednaya, however, the family was permitted to visit him.
“I’m fine. But promise me you’ll keep visiting,” Ahmad had told them.
Riham could tell he wasn’t telling the truth. His body was emaciated, his skin bruised, and his face bore the dried blood of recent beatings. His asthma turned every breath into a struggle, and his eyes betrayed a pain he refused to share.
“All we hoped for was that he would be released soon,” Riham recalls.
The family visited as often as they could, but after six years and seven visits, the doors suddenly closed. Applications for visitation permits were denied without explanation. Later, Ahmad was officially listed as missing.
Even after the family lost direct contact with Ahmad, signs of life continued to surface. Former prisoners released from Sednaya reported that Ahmad was still alive. They described his appearance and shared details about his parents that only Ahmad could have known. These accounts became the family’s last flicker of hope.
The search for Ahmed
At Ibn Al-Nafis Hospital, Riham is still frantically searching for the young man she saw in a video. The clip is one of many circulating on social media, showing freed prisoners from Bashar al-Assad’s prisons in hopes of reuniting them with their families.
These former detainees have been brought to hospitals because most of them are in terrible condition. Years of torture, starvation, and suffering have devastated their bodies and minds. Many have lost the ability to speak. Some no longer remember their own names. Others are disconnected from reality entirely.
For relatives like Riham, social media has become a lifeline. It was one such video that brought Riham and her mother to this hospital. Riham is convinced the young man in the footage is her brother.
Outside a closed ward, a swarm of people gathers. They show photos on their phones to the doctors, juxtaposing images of their loved ones with screenshots of the young man from the video.
“That’s my son in there!” shouts one person. “The man in the picture is my brother!” cries another, pushing through the crowd. Arms flail, and the pressure on the hospital doors grows, making it difficult for the doctors to keep the crowd at bay.
Finally, it’s Riham’s turn. She steps into the room where the Saydnaya survivors are being kept. Inside, there are three individuals: an elderly man, a woman in a wheelchair, and a young man lying on a stretcher.
Riham moves straight to the young man. She leans in close to examine his face, but it’s hard to be sure. His cheeks are sunken, his skin pale, and his eyes vacant.
She asks the doctor if she can check the young man’s feet. Ahmad had a distinctive dark spot on one of them. Gently, she lifts the blanket covering him, but there is no mark. Desperately, she searches for another sign: the large scar Ahmad had on his scalp. But when she looks, his head is smooth and unmarked.
The young man is not Ahmad.
“Ahmad is alive”
Riham has now visited every hospital in Damascus multiple times. As the hours stretch on, her steps grow heavier. Her eyes are swollen from crying. The search feels impossible, like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
“No one will tell me where the surviving prisoners are,” she says, taking a deep breath.
From a corner of the emergency ward at Al-Mouwasat Hospital, Dr. Amr leans in and whispers:
“We don’t tell the families,” he confides, “but the truth is that about 60 percent of the prisoners from Sednaya are dead.”
Every single day since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, at least 200 families have shown up at Al-Mouwasat Hospital, Dr. Amr explains. They come clinging to the hope that they might find their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, or spouses among the released. Most know the odds are slim. But how do you tell someone that hope is futile?
“If I tell them their loved ones are likely dead, it breaks them,” Amr says.
For Riham, there is only one possibility: Ahmad is alive. She has never allowed herself to think otherwise.
The days pass, and the energy that carried her through the hospital corridors on the first day is fading. It has been 13 years since she last saw Ahmad. Every day since, she has believed that one day he would return.
In a corner of Damascus, Riham continues to wander, like so many other relatives who refuse to give in to the grim statistics Dr. Amr has shared. Together, they search for a shred of hope, a trace of their loved ones. A fragment of humanity amidst the ruins of the Assad family’s 50-year reign of terror.