Shafaq News- Damascus/ Qamishli
Two Kurdish detainees returned to their families in Qamishli after seven years in a prison run by the Turkish-backed Ahrar Al-Sharqiya faction, with their relatives receiving no information about their fate during that period.
One of the released men, Azad Othman, told Shafaq News that Syrian authorities freed him and Mohammed Alaa Ibrahim in Aleppo before transferring them through the Syrian Democratic Forces’ (SDF) liaison department to Al-Hasakah and then Qamishli.
Their detention began in October 2019, on the second day of the Turkish-led offensive on Sari Kani/ Ras Al-Ain and Gire Spi/ Tal Abyad. Othman explained that he and Ibrahim were transporting medicine to Al-Tabqah when Ahrar Al-Sharqiya fighters stopped them, killed the two drivers travelling with them, and took the pair to a security prison in Suluk, where they spent the next seven years in a small cell, isolated from their families, other prisoners, and the outside world.
“I met my youngest daughter, Munawwar, for the first time after my release,” Othman, a father of three, recalled. “She was born while I was in detention. I had never seen her face or even heard her voice.”
“After being away since 2019, I also struggled to recognize some of my relatives, even my eldest daughter, who is now 11; so much had changed while I was gone.”
Ibrahim, meanwhile, returned hoping to reunite with both parents, only to learn after reaching Qamishli that his father had died while he was imprisoned.
“I was always afraid for my parents because they were both ill,” he told Shafaq News, describing the pain of discovering that the reunion he had imagined for years would never happen. He recalled winters of severe cold and summers of extreme heat inside the dark cell, where speaking with guards or other detainees was prohibited.
Ahrar Al-Sharqiya operates within the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. The US Treasury sanctioned the faction and its leader, Ahmad Ihsan Fayyad Al-Hayes, known as Abu Hatem Shaqra, on July 28, 2021, citing killings, abductions, torture, property seizures, and the recruitment of former ISIS members.
The faction has also been linked to the October 12, 2019 killing of Kurdish politician Hevrin Khalaf on the M4 highway near the area where Othman and Ibrahim were captured. The United Nations said her death was a “possible war crime.”
Kurdish families have continued pressing Damascus and the SDF to disclose the fate of detainees and missing civilians. Under a January 30 agreement, the two sides opened discussions on abductees, prisoners, and missing persons, while Syrian authorities had released more than 1,200 SDF detainees by June 4.
Read more: Syria’s Kurds protest in Qamishli demanding fate of missing SDF members
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