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When Syrian rebels made surprise advances across the country and started to free prisoners, many families in neighbouring Lebanon felt a spark of hope that they too would soon know the fate of their loved ones.

Lebanese citizens were among the thousands of prisoners who were freed as former Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime fell. Many had been held in jail for decades.

As videos emerged of freed prisoners, Lebanese social media was flooded with black and white pictures of young men who had disappeared decades ago as their families looked for any type of leads on their whereabouts. 

According to Lebanese authorities, more than 700 Lebanese citizens were imprisoned in Syria.

The first prisoner returned to Lebanon on 8 December, the day the Assad regime fell. Since then, only about 10 others have returned to their homes in Lebanon, Raymond Sweidan, a member of the Committee for Lebanese Prisoners in Syria told ������.

Suheil Hamawi, a merchant from the coastal town of Chekka in north Lebanon returned to his country with a hero’s welcome. “I have no words to describe my happiness, I’m also glad he came back to us in good health…now we want to put the past behind us for good,” his wife Josephine Homsi told TNA.

Hamawi was kidnapped by Syrian intelligence officers at the end of 1992, never to return or be heard from again. “Our journey to find him began once we realised he was kidnapped,” Homsi said.

Around 17 years into her quest to find her husband, Josephine finally discovered that he was being held in Syria but was kept in the dark about the reason. 

Hamawi was transferred to different prisons throughout his 33 years in Syria under the brutal Assad regime and was at one point held in the infamous Saydnaya prison - also known as the “human slaughterhouse” - in Damascus, eventually ending up in a prison in the coastal province of Latakia. 

It was in 2008 when Josephine was first able to visit him in Syria, and would continue to do so every year. 

Left to their own devices, any type of information regarding prisoners in Syria was hard to come by, and not many families were granted the opportunity to even visit their relatives. 

Elie Wehbe disappeared more than three decades ago at the age of 34, and to this day his family doesn’t have definite information on where he was even held.

A soldier of the Lebanese Armed Forces, Wehbe was a first adjutant with the intelligence unit. 

The last his family heard from him was on 13 October 1990, the day the Syrian army stormed the presidential palace in Lebanon and ousted then Prime Minister Michel Aoun, at the time heading one of two rival governments existing simultaneously in war-torn Lebanon, marking the end of the 15-year civil war.

“He had gotten a call from the [Lebanese] army command to vacate his position when the Syrians came,” Ghada Sfeir, Wehbe’s niece, told TNA. “But I guess it was too late.”

Wehbe’s family found out that he hadn’t died in battle and was taken to Syria, with a resident from a border town saying they had seen him. Throughout the 1990s, Wehbe’s mother, after being tipped off about her son’s whereabouts, had visited the Mezzeh prison near Damascus multiple times, and each time she would be told there was no one by the name of Elie Wehbe there. 

“The [Lebanese] army considers a soldier dead if they remain disappeared for 10 years and hold a funeral in their honour,” Sfeir said. 

Wehbe’s sister wept as she saw the news about freed prisoners across Syria on her television screen. “After all this time we have hope again,” Sfeir said.

Syria’s occupation of Lebanon began with its intervention a year into the 1975-1990 civil war and lasted until 2005 when national and international pressure for their withdrawal intensified after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

During the almost three-decade occupation, Syria exerted significant military and political influence over Lebanon as security and intelligence officers enjoyed the freedom to suppress and persecute any kind of opposition.

“The instruments of coercion of the [Syrian] security forces during the occupation were absolutely in total disregard for human life and dignity. It was typical of authoritarian regimes,” political analyst Hilal Khashan told TNA.

Almost two decades into his imprisonment, Hamawi was finally informed by Syrian authorities as to the reason he was being held: he was a member of the Lebanese Forces (LF), a Christian political party that was also a militant group during Lebanon’s civil war and opposed Syria's presence in Lebanon.

Over the years, some Lebanese prisoners have been released from Syrian prisons in waves, and each time the Syrian regime would claim that no other Lebanese citizens were being held anymore.

Former President Michel Aoun, originally a staunch opponent of the Syrian presence in Lebanon, which led to his exile to France, claimed there were no Lebanese prisoners left in Syria after a conciliatory visit to Damascus in 2008.

According to Sweidan, successive governments and initiatives have done little to address the issue of Lebanese prisoners over the years, with conflicts of interest emerging for those allied with the Syrian regime.

“The [Lebanese political] system is not interested in public good. For many Lebanese politicians, making it into office during the Syrian occupation depended on playing nice to the Syrian regime and appeasing them,” Khashan said.

Last week, the Lebanese caretaker government intensified efforts to coordinate among different groups working on the issue of Lebanese prisoners in Syria, but the main obstacle is the absence of a formal institution in Syria that can cooperate and provide information at this stage, according to Sweidan.

As a former prisoner, Sweidan was released in 1998 along with his brother after being subjected to different types of torture in Syria’s brutal prison system.

“There is a great possibility that most of them [Lebanese prisoners] are dead unfortunately,” he said, referring to the mass graves and bags of body parts still being discovered near prisons in Syria. 

“But we will keep working now more than ever, until we have answers for every family.”

Houshig Kaymakamian is a journalist covering Lebanon and the Middle East