The search for Syria’s missing

The day began like any other. Mohamad al-Sheikh, then aged 14, walked to school with his father in their home town of Moudamiah al-Sham, near Damascus. He had his lessons, chatted with friends, went home and watched some television while his mother prepared dinner. When Mohamad’s father, Ahmad, didn’t come home from his work as a business relationship manager for a local branch of the Swiss transnational Nestlé, they began to worry. Ahmad would always ring if he was running late, but that evening the family heard nothing. ‘Both my mother and I had a terrible feeling,’ remembers Mohamad. ‘We went outside and saw two cars at the end of our road. Then we heard gunshots and I was sent inside the house.’ Neighbours later told them they had seen security agents bundle Ahmad into one of the cars. It was 7 May 2012 and the last time Mohamad saw his father alive.

It is a bitter truth that this kind of story is heartbreakingly common in Syria. Since the revolution began in March 2011, more than 130,000 people are believed to be missing. There are a number of reasons people disappear. Combatants and civilians are missing as casualties of war. Others have been kidnapped and detained, or executed and buried in mass graves. Still more have been lost along the migrant routes. The majority, tens of thousands of people, are thought to have