AL-LUBBAN ASH-SHARQIYA: Following the ouster of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad over the weekend, a Palestinian family who had lost contact with a relative since 1982 discovered that he might have been imprisoned in Syrian jails all along.

“We never stopped searching for him”, Saber Daraghmeh told AFP from the home that his brother Sabri has never returned to since his disappearance at age 24. “My father and I went to Lebanon and Syria in 1983 and looked for him, but we found no trace”, Daraghmeh said from Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya village north of Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) had told the family at the time that Sabri had been killed by Israelis after he went missing in 1982. But after Syrian rebels blitzed through the cities of Aleppo and Hama unopposed and freed prisoners from government jails, Palestinians from Nablus called Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya’s city council.

They told them they had heard news that a man in his 70s named Sabri Yousef Daraghmeh, from Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya, had been released from prison in Syria. Unable to reach Sabri or to confirm reports of his liberation, the Daraghmehs can only hope that their relative will eventually contact them directly.

They fear, however, that after being possibly imprisoned for more than 40 years Sabri might not be “in his right mind” and “so he might find it difficult to contact us,” Daraghmeh said. Several cousins from a branch of the family living in Jordan, and therefore freer to move across borders, flew to Syria in search of Sabri.

An official from the Palestinian ministry of foreign affairs told AFP that 114 families have asked it for help locating relatives missing in Syria since the first government jails were opened. But despite Damascus embassy employees searching around hospitals and public spaces, the lack of authorities or central registry for prisoners complicates their task.

Palestinian ambassador to Syria Samir al-Rifai told AFP that dozens of Palestinians were arrested by Syrian security forces on charges of belonging to armed opposition groups. But in the 1980s, he said, thousands of Palestinians were jailed for belonging to the PLO, which Assad’s father Hafez sought to control at the time.

The exact number of Palestinians who remained in jail since that era is unknown. According an estimate from to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in 2022, more than 100,000 people died in Syrian prisons, often under torture, just since the 2011 uprising that sparked Syria’s civil war.

Many Palestinians whose hopes have been rekindled by the liberation of thousands of prisoners since Assad’s fall have taken to social media with photos of their missing relatives in the hope of obtaining information about them.

Now, four decades after a mourning ceremony was held for him in his village, Sabri’s family hopes he will find the way to his family home. – AFP