Damascus, Syria – By the time the red sun slipped beyond the horizon, the playground was empty except for one little girl, nine-year-old Fouziah Alalawi, who stood staring at the bend where her father always appeared to pick her up from school.
It was February 20, 2013, and war had become the background of her childhood: the distant thunder of shelling, the sharp percussion of gunfire, and the sudden quiet that made the adults tense.
That evening, Fouziah was left alone at the school gates. When she walked to her mother’s office, Somayah Alsaaed understood before her daughter spoke. Her husband, Mohammed, 43, had been taken.
The family had already been displaced once from their homes in al-Maliha, the nearby town that had recently fallen under the control of the opposition Free Syrian Army.
But Mohammed, a quiet man with a PhD in rural development, kept the family in Damascus. He believed his work at the Ministry of Agriculture still mattered, staying late tutoring colleagues for free, telling his wife, Somayah, that they would “help Syria’s villages rise”.
Each day, he drove into central Damascus for work, navigating the checkpoints that multiplied as the war crept closer to the family’s new home in Qaboun.
He never spoke politics at the ministry; he had seen what happened to those who did.
The father of four – Fouziah, nine; Omar, six, Ahmed, two; and Asenat, just 11 months old – had wanted to name his youngest daughter Hurriyya, meaning “freedom”, but Somayah begged him not to. Even a name could make a man disappear.
That evening, Somayah called her husband’s number, but it rang once and went dead. A colleague told her over the phone that he had taken a call and left the building.
The family got a taxi to the ministry and demanded to see the CCTV. A security guard, Wissam, said he didn’t know anything. His timesheet showed only that Mohammed had signed in that morning.
Somayah folded it into her bag.
The family never went home again. Somayah had heard of entire families disappearing after one arrest.
Relatives stopped answering her calls, and no one wanted to be linked to her. The family spent their first night on the street.
“You can’t even imagine,” she said. “I had four children, and I was alone. I had no money. All I could do was hug them to protect them.”
She took the children to the flat belonging to Mohammed’s brother. For the next year, they lived carefully in a bare apartment in Harasta, a northern suburb of Damascus, with four mattresses on concrete, no furniture, and no heat.
Each morning, Somayah took the children to her office because it had a heater and a kettle. At night, they slept in their clothes in case they had to run.
Years later, a man calling himself Abu Ali phoned, claiming to be from “Branch 215” – a military intelligence branch that would later be known among survivors as “the Holocaust Branch”.
“Where’s your husband?” he asked.
That night, they fled again, to a mouldy basement flat that worsened the children’s asthma, choosing lower rent so Somayah could keep paying school fees.
Fleeing became routine, but Somayah clung to hope that Mohammed was still alive. “He made me promise,” she said, “that the children must grow up to be good.”
At work, colleagues avoided her. Paranoia had gripped a country where neighbours turned on each other. One whispered that Mohammed was a “terrorist”.
The children grew up telling classmates their father had died of a stroke. Only Omar and Fouziah knew the truth – it was safer that way.