The International Court of Justice’s first hearings on torture in Syria

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Arabic on 9 December, 2018] Five years. Sixty months. 260 weeks. 1,826 days. Sammour, I must have thought a thousand times about what I would do if I found myself face to face with the monsters who abducted you. I’d abduct their souls, in a nutshell; those dead souls that subsist by ruining life and restlessly spreading…

Earlier this year, between the summer and fall, I spent several months in Turkey following up on the case of the “Douma Four” activists—Samira al-Khalil (my wife), Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hamade, and Nazem Hammadi—who were abducted and disappeared in Douma, east of Damascus, in December 2013. My aim was to interview as many as possible of the people forcibly displaced from Douma and Eastern Ghouta…

[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Arabic on 13 August, 2018] Recent weeks have seen thousands of Syrian families notified of the deaths of missing relatives in Assad regime custody. In one sense, this is nothing new, in terms of the regime’s long-established strategy of arresting and murdering its opponents. The clear spike in cases, however, with horrifying numbers reached in the past…

While social media was invaluable in the early days of Syria’s revolution, hopes that it alone could topple the regime proved ill-founded.

The fifth in a series of letters written by Yassin al-Haj Saleh to his missing wife, Samira al-Khalil, who was kidnapped in Douma in December 2013.