<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/07/syria-grief-mingles-with-joy-as-loved-ones-released-from-assad-prisons>
"Moammar Ali has been searching for his older brother for 39 years.
In 1986, Syrian soldiers arrested the university student Ali Hassan al-Ali,
then 18, at a checkpoint in north Lebanon. Moammar has not heard from him
since.
He spent the next three decades visiting different security branches in Syria,
where he would receive conflicting information on the whereabouts of his
brother.
“There was no place in Syria we didn’t visit. We went around the whole country
asking what happened to him. One day they would admit they had him in prison,
the next day they would deny it,” Ali, a resident of Akkar, north Lebanon,
said.
The last information Ali received about his brother was that he was being held
in a military security branch in Damascus on charges of political agitation.
Then, Syria’s revolution and subsequent civil war began and Ali no longer
received any updates on his brother’s status.
Until Thursday night, when Ali’s phone started to buzz. Friends, relatives and
family members began sending him the same picture: a bedraggled man in his late
50s, standing dazed in front of the Hama central prison in north Syria.
“They said he resembled me. I told them: ‘this is my brother!’ The feeling …
it’s indescribable. Imagine that I haven’t seen him for 39 years and then all
of a sudden his picture is sent to you, how would you feel?” Ali said.
His brother, who entered prison as an 18-year-old, was now 57. “He has come out
of prison as an old man.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
