In the days following the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, Syrians have crowded his regime’s notorious detention facilities in a desperate search for loved ones who were jailed or forcibly disappeared. Thousands of prisoners have now been freed, many after decades of incarceration in brutal conditions. Yet many more of the missing have yet to be found, and hopes are fading with each passing hour. Nearly half a million people were killed during Syria’s 13-year civil war, and up to 100,000 of those victims may have died in government-run prisons, according to UK-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Mazen al-Hamada After five decades of Assad family dictatorship was swept away in the last two weeks, one prisoner story has been shared online perhaps more than any other, that of Mazen al-Hamada. When an uprising against Assad’s iron-fisted rule erupted in spring 2011, al-Hamada was among the first…
