My son Muhammad Wais is a victim of his traits and affiliation. With the start of the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, while we were following the news with interest, he was following it silently. We did not know how much his emotional attachment to and enthusiasm for current events was, especially after the end of the Egyptian revolution and the appearance of Egyptian youth on television talking about their experience in moving the street through coordination and communication rooms on the Internet. With the start of the movement in Damascus and Daraa, it seemed to me that he was seeking to participate in it, as if he was waiting eagirly for the movement to reach Aleppo, where we live. He was following the news, discussing and asking about all the details. Muhammad was fond of literature and poetry, fond of media and stardom, and he excelled in his studies. He was also marked by excessive sensitivity towards scenes of violence committed by the regime against young people, which made the spirit of challenge and rejection of injustice grow in him. The demonstrations in Aleppo began strongly with the beginning of 2012; At that time, Muhammad was a student in the third secondary school, the scientific section. I began to notice his frequent absence from home, especially in the evenings. Later I knew that he was participating in the demonstrations, like many of the youth of his generation. However, I learned later that he is an important figure of the neighborhood in which we lived, the Ashrafieh neighborhood, for he had joined one of the youth coordinations. I started putting pressure on him under the pretext that exams were approaching, telling him to give priority to study more in order to pass his exams and get the best grades. His constant answers were: “I will pass and get good grades. Rest assured!”. I knew that his activities increased, and that he became in danger, for the regime’s shabiha kidnapped him, stabbed him in the back with a knife, and threatened him with physical liquidation if he went on organizating the demonstrations and demanding to overthrow the regime. Because of my profession as a lawyer and as a defender of the detainees of the demonstrations in Kobani and Aleppo, Muhammad came several times to my office, accompanied by the detainees’ families, to authorize me to defend his detained friends. After the exams were over and before the results were released, and due to the situation in Aleppo – where killings, kidnappings and chaos were common – I moved to “Kobani” and took him immediately to “Hawler” in Iraqi Kurdistan to keep him away from the death he was challenging. Exam results were released and his scores qualified him to enter the Faculty of Engineering, Production Department. I enrolled him in the college and at the same time sent a copy of the documents for enrollment in Hawler as well. He stayed there for seven months working during the day in constructions, despite his soft body, as he did not own manual labor machines throughout his life, and at the same time he kept in touch with the movement in Syria. He was working for the revolution, especially in the media field, where he participated in the event and shared posts on the social media pages. His pulse was there, in all the uprising Syrian regions. His health and psychological condition worsened, so he decided to return to Syria. In the fourth month of 2013, he returned to Kobani after the armed factions had taken control of some neighborhoods of Aleppo. He began writing some reports on the events for Kurdish channels. Then, he traveled to Aleppo, where he began working in the field of relief and media coverage of some events. I asked him to leave Aleppo to Turkey. I had decided at that time to travel to Europe after obtaining a passport for me and him. He traveled to Turkey and settled in Gaziantep. There, he received an invitation from the Ministry of Information of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to participate in a workshop for young media professionals. I was in Aleppo at the time. We made a conversation on phone, and I asked him to wait, because the road from Kobani to Hawler passed exclusively through the city of Raqqa, which was controlled by ISIS and other factions. He wanted to arrive on time, so he traveled from Kobani to Raqqa on August 25, 2013. We were told by the bus driver who was picking him up him that ISIS had arrested all the bus passengers in the village of Khirbet Hadla in Raqqa governorate. After several hours of interrogation, all of them were released, except for my son Muhammad Weis. He was carrying his mobile phone and laptop, which seemed to be enough evidences in the organization possession to accuse him of what they wanted. The next day, I traveled to Al-Raqqa; I remained there for fifteen days, during which I communicated with the factions, committees, and civil councils, but in vain. We followed mediations and social figures and those who were close to them and deal with them. We offered sums of money and asked acquaintances and friends to help, but to no avail. After ISIS took control of Al-Raqqa completely, defeating the other factions, Muhammad’s mother went several times to review the organization’s Emirs, agents and tribal councils, but to no avail. In 2014, ISIS and PYD signed an agreement to exchange prisoners, and we learned at that time that those prisoners were brought to Manbij. His mother traveled to Manbij and asked them if they had him, they answered he had been liquidated. Despite all our efforts to know about his fate, we have not received any definitive information. Days, months, and years began to dig into our hearts and devour our souls and bodies. We no longer feel the meaning of life, we have become prisoners in the jail of waiting and hope which weakens with the passage of time and the continuation of the eight-year absence. Today is the eighth anniversary of the absence of my son Muhammad in the prisons of darkness.
