In 1985, at the height of the Lebanese civil war, an 18-year-old new conscript in the Lebanese Army was due back home on leave. But instead of making his way to his native Tashaa, a remote village of Muslim and Christian farmers in the mountains of Akkar governorate, Ali Hassan Ali disappeared.
Ali was last seen at a checkpoint manned by occupying Syrian Army personnel. His family still isn't sure what happened that day, all those years ago, only that he vanished, like so many other people at Syrian checkpoints during that period, and never came home.
Thirty-nine years later, and after unknown horrors most likely inflicted upon him, an old man resembling Ali walked out on Thursday, dazed, into the sunlight, emerging with hundreds of other now freed inmates from the Hama Central Prison in Syria.
Ali’s family in Akkar say it’s their long-lost relative.
“I knew in my heart it was him. A brother knows,” his younger brother Muammar tells Middle East Eye from Ali’s childhood home in Akkar.
In videos captured of his release, after rebel forces took control of the city, the man believed to be Ali walked out looking thin, weary and donning a scraggly grey beard.
Muammar said a local journalist keeping him in touch with Ali noticed signs of memory loss.
But, to his family’s shock, he is alive.
Muammar Ali holds a photo of the man he believes is his kidnapped brother Ali (Raged Waked/MEE)
After all, Ali’s other brother Ismail had faced a very different fate in the days following the disappearance. Hoping to access news of Ali, Ismael joined the Bashar al-Assad-aligned Arab Democratic Party in Lebanon's Tripoli. But party members allegedly killed him over a weapons-theft dispute in 1986, just months after Ali vanished, Muammar tells MEE.
Behind him, Muammar’s toddler sons watch Arabic cartoons on the TV. Muhammar drags a hushed finger across his throat. “Those people slaughtered Ismail.”
Muammar was himself a child at the time, just 12 years old and too young to fully understand all of what happened to his brothers.
“I stayed up all night last night on the phone, people congratulating me and journalists reaching out,” Muammar smiles on Saturday morning. He sits on the same sofa where he first received WhatsApp messages from friends sharing videos of Ali. “I barely slept!”
Meanwhile, a few neighbours from the village file in to offer congratulations and drink coffee: elderly Adib Younes, who knew Ali decades ago, and Maria, too young to have ever known him.
“I’m so happy for them,” she says, nonetheless.
To Damascus
Ali’s apparent freedom came as part of a surprise, lightning offensive led in large part by Syrian fighters from the hardline Islamist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham group, until last week based in northwestern Syria’s Idlib governorate.
The fighters stormed Aleppo then Homs and Hama, while rebels in southern Syria’s Daraa and Sweida, as well as in eastern Syria, wrested control of their home cities.
'Syrian prisons, especially Sednaya, were very known for being human slaughterhouses, places where torture was systematic, persistent'
- Wadih al-Asmar, Lebanese Centre for Human Rights
As part of the blitz, rebels freed prisoners from Assad’s network of known torture facilities - including Hama Central Prison.
By Sunday morning, the rebels had taken Damascus. Assad was gone, ending half a century of dictatorship.
But last week, still languishing in Assad’s prisons, inmates had no inkling at all of what was coming. With no cell phone of his own, Ali has no direct contact with his family here in Akkar. Instead, he speaks with them via local journalists and others in Hama who have provided him with shelter, food, and clothes, Muammar said.
“One of them said it seemed like Ali may have lost some of his memory,” he added, from the trauma of nearly four decades in prison.
In another stunning development on Sunday, rebels reached the Assad regime’s notorious Sednaya prison complex, dubbed the “Human Slaughterhouse” by a damning 2017 Amnesty International report that found evidence of widespread killing and torture.
Reports emerged on Sunday of Syrian and perhaps some Lebanese citizens emerging from Sednaya and other prisons after decades in the dark - including a man named Charbel Khoury, originally from the Lebanese town of Deir al-Ahmar.
A local official from Deir al-Ahmar told MEE that Khoury had been kidnapped near Beirut in the 1980s as a young, newly minted Lebanese Army conscript - like Ali. Family members did not respond at the time of publication to confirm whether he was still alive in Syria.
Videos also emerged on Monday of Suheil al-Hamoui, another longtime Lebanese prisoner in Syria, returning home to his town of Chekka in north Lebanon.
Townspeople carried him through a crowd playing music and banging drums. Local official Ludi Masaad, who was present at the welcome procession, confirmed to MEE the news of Hamoui's return, which reportedly came after 33 years imprisoned in Syria.
Lebanese prisoners of Assad
It is still too early to know the full scope of what Ali experienced in the prison system of President Hafez al-Assad - and later his son Bashar - these past 39 years.
That time almost certainly included torture and abuse. In a 2016 documentary, “Tadmor”, former Lebanese detainees of the Assad regime re-enacted their time in the notorious, now-defect Tadmor prison, located deep in the central Syrian desert.
'There are prisoners who have lost their memory; some of them don’t even remember who they are'
- Wadih al-Asmar, Lebanese Centre for Human Rights
“They stuff you inside a tyre, and then beat you back and forth,” one of the men recalls in the film. That’s the “dullab,” or “tyre” method - one amongst many specialised forms of torture.
Others recall whips, false executions, underfeeding and verbal abuse.
An estimated 17,000 Lebanese citizens were kidnapped or forcibly disappeared during the 1975-1990 civil war, including hundreds who were thought to have ended up as arbitrary detainees in Syria’s notorious prison system, according to Human Rights Watch.
“In general, Syrian prisons, especially Sednaya, were very known for being human slaughterhouses, places where torture was systematic, persistent,” said Wadih al-Asmar, head of the Lebanese Centre for Human Rights. “And for a lot of families it’s double torture because they have no idea if their sons are alive or dead.”
The Lebanese government, amid lingering sensitivities over civil war-era crimes by various militias, has long assured the public and families that there are no Lebanese political prisoners remaining in Syria, Asmar added.
Nevertheless, his group has for decades worked to document the existence of such detainees, eventually compiling a list of 623 men whose families believe their loved ones were forcibly disappeared into Assad’s prisons.
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There could be more - some families refused to list their loved ones before Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005, fearing repercussions for speaking up. Ali’s name was not on the list of 623.
It is not yet clear whether Ali is on a separate list of names drawn up by the International Red Cross, which documents forced disappearance.
All that means it’s still far too soon to know how many Lebanese prisoners might still be alive amongst the thousands of people freed this week from Assad’s former prisons, says Ammar Aboud from the Lebanese group ACT for the Disappeared.
“There are rumours, there are names [circulating online], but without contact it’s difficult to confirm identities,” Aboud told MEE. “We know that, of course, they are there. But as for exact numbers, or when they first went missing, we don’t know yet.”
He and Asmar both say that such cases likely require DNA testing in order to confirm the identities of suspected Lebanese citizens now freed from Syrian prison.
“Unfortunately, that’s because there are prisoners who have lost their memory; some of them don’t even remember who they are,” Asmar said.
‘I know he’s still alive’
Nonetheless, Muammar, is holding onto hope, and onto his newfound joy.
For decades, all Ali’s family had of him were little sepia tinted photos: him as a tween in a 1970s suit and tie, him as a teenager, wearing a windbreaker and the slightest moustache. That was the most recent image Muammar could hold onto.
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And so he rarely spoke of Ali. His wife, Halima, says she knew about her husband’s long-missing brother, but that he hardly gave her any details. “I understood,” she said.
Now, after all this time without answers, there is a sudden happiness at finding out Ali could today be alive.
But there are also the quieter traumas of his disappearance still rippling across the generations he left behind in Akkar.
“For the rest of her life, my mother kept saying: ‘I know he’s still alive,’” Muammar said, sipping coffee Saturday morning in his living room. Their mother passed away several years ago.
Nothing is left of Ali’s childhood and teenage years; no old clothes or toys, no books or military boots from his brief stint in the army, that could have hinted at what he hoped for in life.
“It’s all gone,” Muammar says. Only their modest, concrete childhood home is left, stacked with firewood in a wintry corner of the northern Lebanon mountains.
One of Muammar's sons, Jihad, is a lanky 15-year-old who bears a strong resemblance to the old portraits of Ali as a teenager. He’s just three years younger than Ali was when he vanished.
'For the rest of her life, my mother kept saying: ‘I know he’s still alive’'
- Muammar Ali
“My dad is super strict with me, more than my friends’ dads,” Jihad said. “After sunset I have to tell him where I am. My friends never have to do that.”
Muammar still doesn’t know how Ali will now get back home, with only one crossing point still open between Lebanon and Syria. His family tells Middle East Eye that Lebanon’s security services have yet to reach out to offer assistance.
Asmar, from the Lebanese Centre for Human Rights, said his group is now working to create a mechanism that will help families of suspected Lebanese prisoners now released from Syria get in touch with their loved ones, as well as confirm such cases.
For now Muammar and his loved ones wait in their family home for his return to his childhood home.
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