“Following His Disappearance…The Children Suffered Homelessness and Deprivation of Education”

Dirar Mohammed Hamdo, born in 1980, from Kurd Mountains area in Latakia countryside, holds a preparatory certificate and used to be a farmer. He is married with two daughters, they are Rahiq, 12, and Shahid 10 years old, and.

According to Dirar’s wife, who testified[1] to Syrians for Truth and Justice/STJ, that on 3 March 2012, their house was stormed by three vehicles of the Military Security Branch in Marj Khokha village in Latakia countryside. Some elements, dressed in civilian while others in military uniforms, gathered most of the village's young men in the village square, threatened them, intimidated and insulted them, and then they arrested some of them, including Dirar, and took them to the Military Security Branch in Latakia.  It was the last time his family saw him.

Dirar’s family searched for him a lot and paid substantial sums of money up to 600,000 Syrian pounds, equivalent to $3,500, to know his fate. After that his family heard from a worker at the Field Military Court in al Qaboun area located in Damascus city, that he was in Sednaya Military Prison, where he told them that he followed the name of Dirar when he was transferred with a group of detainees to Sednaya Prison, so the family went to the prison to ask about him but found no results as elements in Sednaya Prison denied him being there.  

Later, Dirar’s wife received  a document by an element of the Military Security in Latakia attached with the death certificate of Dirar, dated on 3 April 2014, the document indicates that the date of the death of Dirar is 15 February from 2014, but his wife and family did not believe this document because they didn’t receive the body of Dirar, where they heard from people that many of the detainees’ families had received documents stating that their children had died, and later discovered that they were still Alive.

Dirar’s wife says about the suffering of her and her family because of her husband's disappearance:

"The arrest of my husband in front of my eyes and my children’s left a heartburn and pain in myself that never left me since his arrest. I suffered from emotional deprivation, loneliness and alienation; I was always trying to hide my sorrows and worries from my children and try to compensate for the shortage caused by their father's absence. I had difficulty in raising them and securing their needs, and I was able to enroll them in school only about a year ago, in 2016, because of our moving and instability, until we finally settled in a refugee camp on the Syrian-Turkish border in Kherbet Eljoz, Idlib countryside. I sent my children to school to receive education after a break of more than three years, but we still suffered a lot in the camp. My little daughter had a blood disease and I could not handle it because of the lack of hospitals and medical services there. As a result of our poor financial situation, we had to sell everything in order to meet our basic needs; all we have left are some photos, memories and two orphaned children.”