A Ghastly Search for Loved Ones Who Disappeared in Syria

For over a decade, tens of thousands of people living in Syria would disappear without explanation. They were picked up off the street. Plucked from university classes. Yanked out of stores as they bought groceries, and from taxis on their way home from work.

Relatives were never told what had happened — but they knew. Many of the disappeared had been thrown into President Bashar al-Assad’s vast network of prisons, where they were tortured and killed on an industrial scale.

This article contains graphic images.

Now, with the overthrow of the Assad regime, families of missing Syrians are hoping that they may be reunited with loved ones, or at least learn what happened to them.

On Sunday, they rushed to one of the most notorious prisons in Syria, Sednaya, in search of news. Then on Tuesday, hundreds descended onto the morgue at a hospital in Damascus, where 38 bodies discovered at the prison had been taken.