Assad’s notorious prisons may have been opened, but Wafa Mustafa and thousands of others feel abandoned in their struggle to find loved ones
When insurgents threw open the doors of Aleppo central prison in northern Syria as they overran the city in December, Wafa Mustafa, 34, watched videos of the scenes from exile in Germany in disbelief. Shocked detainees could be seen running into the night as a decades-long dictatorship built on a network of prisons and torture chambers crumbled.
Mustafa began praying that the insurgents would reach the detention centres in Damascus, where she believed her father, Ali, was being held by the feared intelligence services. He was kidnapped from their home in the Syrian capital more than a decade ago and she has not seen or heard from him since.
