AMMAN/BEIRUT: A Jordanian man has returned to his home country after spending 38 years in Syrian jails, an official said on Tuesday, after the fall of president Bashar Al-Assad ended an agonizing wait for his family. The man, named as Osama Bashir Hassan Al-Bataynah, was found in Syria “unconscious and suffering from memory loss”, Jordanian Foreign Ministry Soufian Al-Kodat told AFP.

Kodat said the man’s relatives reported his disappearance in 1986, when he was just 18, and that he had been in jail ever since. “He was transferred from Damascus to the Jaber border crossing (with Jordan) where he was handed over to border guards,” added Kodat, saying the man had been reunited with his family on Tuesday morning.

The rebels who swept Assad from power on Sunday also opened the prisons and released thousands of detainees. Civil society groups had long accused Assad of presiding over a brutal regime of arbitrary arrests, torture and murder in prisons. Many foreigners were being held, including Suheil Hamawi from Lebanon who returned to his country on Monday after being locked up for 33 years.

In the northern Lebanon town of Chekka, Hamawi received a heartfelt welcome.

“Today I feel like I can breathe again. The best thing in this world is freedom,” Hamawi, 61, told AFP, visibly tearing up from joy. Hamawi’s release gave renewed hope to hundreds of families in Lebanon who have demanded to know the fate of thousands of prisoners believed to have disappeared at the hands of Syrian troops who entered Lebanon shortly after the outbreak of the 1975-1990 civil war.

Hamawi said he was moved from one prison to another, even spending time in the notorious Saydnaya facility where he wrote poetry, before ending up in a jail in the coastal Latakia region. His love for his wife Josephine Homsi and for his son fueled him during his time in prison. “I was far away but she was my source of strength, the other was my son,” he said.

Homsi was overjoyed to be reunited with her husband. “Thirty-three years ago, they came to this house, knocked on our door one evening and told my husband: We need to talk to you. Then he disappeared for 11 years,” Homsi said. After she managed to track him down, she spent more than a decade visiting him in Syrian prisons, she said, hoping they would one day be reunited.

Rights groups say thousands of men, women and children disappeared at the hands of Hafez Al-Assad, Bashar’s late father, during Lebanon’s civil war. Hamawi’s twin Nicolas told AFP seeing his long-lost brother had given him a new sense of purpose. “Today, we’ve been reborn,” he said, adding the pair now felt “truly like twins” again. “My brother is more than a hero. He endured life in prison, and today he has returned to live in freedom like he has been longing to for 33 years,” he said.

For three decades, Syria was a dominant military and political force in Lebanon, before withdrawing its troops in 2005 under international pressure after the assassination of Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafic Hariri. “I waited a lot, I suffered a lot, but I achieved freedom,” Hamawi said.

The Arab Organization for Human Rights in Jordan said Tuesday there were still 236 Jordanians detained in Syria. Amnesty International has documented thousands of killings at Saydnaya prison, whose name has become synonymous with the worst atrocities of Assad’s rule, and dubbed it a “human slaughterhouse”. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated in 2022 that more than 100,000 people had died in the jails since the start of an uprising in 2011 that led to the civil war. – AFP