From Pakistan to Syria: The purgatory of enforced disappearances

From Pakistan to Syria: The purgatory of enforced disappearances
7 min read

Asim Qureshi

08 January, 2025
sim Qureshi describes the painful limbo of families of those disappeared as many Syrians still await news on the fate of loved ones taken by the Assad regime.
Families of individuals detained by the collapsed Assad regime gathered in front of the historic Hijaz Railway Station to protest & demand information about their loved ones, in Damascus, Syria on December 27, 2024. [GETTY]

This moment is still one of the starkest memories I have in over twenty years of investigating detentions and enforced disappearances in the context of the global War on Terror. It is early 2006, and I am sitting at the kitchen table of a family in Karachi, Pakistan. I am speaking to a woman about the state kidnapping of her husband, but my eyes keep being drawn to her two-year-old daughter sitting at the corner of my peripheral vision. She takes a bite of her lunch, and then after every bite, reaches her spoon out to a picture that is standing upright in front of her. The woman notices my distraction and explains that her daughter is attempting to feed a picture of her father, a man her daughter never had a chance to meet.

That moment has always stayed with me because of what it taught me about the absence of a loved one due to an enforced disappearance. There is a purgatory created, a limbo where the person is and is not detained by any official body, not dead, but also not alive. What would life look like for this two-year-old, forced to create some semblance of a relationship with her father only through what others might tell her of him?

Within a few months, we would find out that the father had been sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and would only be reunited with his family in 2023 – forced to recreate some version of family that had been denied them for so long. There are others, though, who are never given such a chance – they still do not know to this day where their loved ones are.

It was on that trip to Pakistan in 2006 that I met Amina Masood Janjua, whose husband had also been kidnapped in the summer of 2005, and led a national movement for thousands disappeared by the Pakistani security agencies. She brought together families from the North West, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan – in their hundreds and thousands – all with the same question: where are our loved ones?

To this day, Amina has never received any formal explanation as to the fate of her husband, with unsatisfactory claims being made by government agencies that he passed away many years ago – but without being able to identify anything at all. Amina and her children have been forced to endure the state of unknowingness – left with a desperate hope that one day he will come through their door.

The secret system of enforced disappearances established by the US that captured thousands of individuals in Pakistan and Afghanistan after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 resulted in a network of complicity that spread across the world. Robert Baer, a former CIA officer famously was as explaining how they used this network of partners:

“If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.”

Often overlooked, is the role that Syria played in the global War on Terror to partner with the US, UK and Canada in the rendition, detention and torture of individuals. Often presented as being a hostile state to the West, Syria in fact played a central role in the outsourcing of torture – with Western states relying on their Syrian partners to do the things they were not willing to.

 

, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar, Muayyad Nureddin, Ahmad Abou El Maati and the German citizen, Mohammed Haydar Zammar were famously tortured and interrogated during that period. Later, British citizens would also find themselves kept in secret detention and tortured in similar prisons.

Recently, there has been renewed focus on the large prisons of Aleppo and Sednaya since the liberation of Syria from the regime of Bashar al-Assad, however, there were prisons such as that were equally brutal.

Prisoners were confined to dark, subterranean cells that stank of urine and were teeming with mice, cockroaches, and lice. Detainees were provided with meagre resources, excluding even the most basic necessities.

Maher Arar recalled: “There was a small opening in the ceiling, about one foot by two feet with iron bars. Over that was another ceiling, so only a little light came through this. There were cats and rats up there and from time to time the cats peed through the opening into the cell. There were two blankets, two dishes and two bottles. Nothing else. No light.” The blankets, damp from leaking water, soon became rotten and useless. During summer, condensation on the walls made the cells humid, while in winter, temperatures dropped so low that even the cockroaches froze to death on the floors.

The cells, known as ‘graves’ due to their size and the claustrophobic conditions, were either individual or group cells. was held in a five-by-six-metre cell with forty other prisoners, whereas Ahmad endured solitary confinement in a cell less than one metre wide and barely tall enough to stand upright. Space was so limited that detainees could not pray properly, as prostration was impossible.

The Muslim detainees were forbidden from making the call to prayer, and those who did so were beaten. As an act of humiliation, Maher and Ahmad were held down and had their beards, kept for religious reasons, forcibly shaved.

The torture methods employed were barbaric. was whipped with cables, kicked, and forced to jog on injured feet to ensure he could feel the pain. Ahmad was burned with cigarettes, dragged by his hair, and threatened with worse. Many detainees were beaten with thick electrical cables, including on their genitals.

Maher described his skin turning blue for weeks from the beatings. Abdullah was reportedly lashed over 1,000 times in a single session.

Another infamous method was the “tyre.” Detainees were forced into a car tyre, immobilised, and beaten on their heads, bodies, and genitals. , such as the notorious ‘Ahmed’, who had been previously suspended for fatal abuses, were reinstated to continue their terror.

Held in conditions away from any form of due process, these foreign nationals were still able to find their way home, eventually, due to the pressure of international NGOs and foreign governments. The same did not apply for Syrians, many of whom spent decades in the cells of the Assad regime.

The videos of thousands of released prisoners since the liberation of Syria has come as a welcome sight, but there are still hundreds of families left wondering on the fate of their loved ones.

On 30 December 2024, the Syrian activist Wafa Ali Mustafa posted a video from Damascus seeking truth and accountability for her missing father – detained by Assad’s forces in 2013 at the start of the revolution. There is a moment in the video which really captured the horror of enforced disappearances – when she caught herself describing those lost in the system as “who they were” correcting her words to “who they are”. In that correction lies everything we need to know about the evil of such carceral practices of disappearance – it is always in the unknowing.

Wafa is standing alongside dozens of other families with the same question I heard being asked by Amina Masood Janjua in Pakistan twenty years earlier – where are our loved ones? In the video she holds a picture of her father in her arms, and the sight of the picture immediately transported me back to that kitchen table in Karachi – of a little girl attempting to feed her father’s picture – trying to hold on to some semblance of love and connection.

Dr Asim Qureshi is the Research Director of the advocacy group CAGE and has authored a number of books detailing the impact of the global War on Terror.

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