"We are not disgraceful!"

“My message to people is that they should know that we are not the cause of their suffering, we are not the cause of the war they are going through, and we are not disgraceful, we sacrificed ourselves for the sake of a free Syria,” says Hoda Amhan (36 years old), a former detainee and wife of a current detainee by the Syrian regime, Youssef Amhan (44 year old).

Huda was an employee in the office of the Minister of Industry and her husband worked in the Damascus leadership. In the third month of 2012, her husband was arrested, when their daughter was only two years and four months old. The story did not end here, as Hoda was summoned to the investigation in April 2015, and the reason was that her husband mentioned her in his report as a source of information since she works in the minister's office.

After 16 days of arrest and torture, she was able to get out and spend six months in house arrest, after she had paid a large sum of money.

After that, she tried to free her husband or to investigate his news, but like many families of detainees, she waited for years. She visited him in 2014, in Sednaya prison, and when she tried to visit him again, she was told that he was no longer there and after leaving the detention she started looking for him again, the answer was "Forget this name, and forget this case." The regime has always wanted to make oblivion possible and normal when it comes to its crimes against humanity.

Hoda turned to her husband's family to help her and her daughter, but she was denied, "We don't want a former detainee in our house." Hoda had to drag her sadness and disappointments from one place to another with her daughter, until she returned to Jisr al-Shughur, the place where she was born in northern Syria. 

She tried to find a job, but it was not easy, as she was surrounded by looks of shame, given that female detainees are subjected to sexual assaults in prisons, something they pay for, even if they are not raped, which Hoda confirms. Instead of helping them and creating a nurturing environment that helps them stand back on their feet again, society works to destroy them when they return to it, as if the experience of detention alone was not enough.

In the end, Huda decided to return to her studies and continue her civil work in the file of detainees. She asserts over and over again that this file is the cause she will never abandon …"To live with my daughter in peace, to see a free Syria and prisons empty of innocents," is Hoda's answer when we asked her about her dreams.

Huda recounts her suffering inside and outside the prison while waiting for her husband. Her voice trembles a lot as she sends him a message through "Rozana", saying: "I did everything to help, but I couldn't, and he knows," and she adds: "I wish you freedom and salvation."

"When Syria returns, you will return, my son."

" Two questions and we will return him, uncle,” thus said members of the “Islamic State” organisation to Abu Issa on the night of 15 April, 2014. Two questions turned into an inexhaustible agony to the Khalaf al-Ghazi family, who waited until this moment for the return of the 17-year-old boy after the bats took away. Issa has become a man now, we don't know what he looks like, "but he certainly has not changed," his father tells Rozana.

"I did not leave Syria, I did not leave Raqqa, I am staying here until he comes back and finds me." Despite this long path of disappointments, the family still clings to the hope that Issa is still alive, "If they had killed him, they would have brought me his body. Hiding the human blood is forbidden in Islam," the father consoles himself.

Issa was a relief activist in Raqqa and a volunteer in the "Red Crescent", he was helping the wounded, civilians and refugees.

ISIS has chosen an ambitious young man who is loved and respected by everyone. One week before he went to the baccalaureate exam in Qamishli with his mother, when he was busy with books and papers, tracing days resembling his innocence and dreams, ISIS soldiers came and put him in the car and locked the door...

His father traced every ray of hope, news about his son without following him, stressing that he, his wife and three daughters, did not lose hope and never stopped waiting.

They were told that Issa al-Saghir is now in a secret prison whose details are known only to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and they were told that he is at the University of Mosul, and then that the ISIS will not abandon him because he is an intelligent young man who knows about technology and computers, and benefits the organisation’s projects.

The father recounts the details of the years of oppression, noting that it is "the memory of Raqqa and its governor," and then added "metaphorically: "I experienced everything the region went through, I know its streets and its grief, I know it's stories, it is my cause just as the freedom of Issa is my cause."

On Khalaf's Facebook page, documenting his long pain, his letters to his son are heart-breaking, one of which he wrote, "When Syria returns, you will return, my son."

He works with a group of families on an association that follows up cases of the forcibly disappeared, and tries to communicate with the concerned authorities to demand their freedom, such as the United Nations and the State Court. He affirms that there is no freedom for these young men and women and for all Syrians, except through a political solution in Syria, until the injustice ends, and jasmine reappears.