Jaw-dropping moment Syrian translator finds anguished message written by his missing relative on wall of Damascus prison

A Syrian man helping to translate the anguished messages scrawled on cell walls by prisoners of the brutal Assad regime made a heart-wrenching discovery — when he found a message written by a missing relative.The jaw-dropping footage shows Mohammad al-Shebli inside one of the Damascus prisons with the Wall Street Journal as he translates the words of despair, hope, and faith scribbled along the walls by those locked away for criticizing ousted President Bashar al-Assad.As he reads the messages and names, al-Shebli freezes momentarily as he comes across a certain name, Abud Abusar Alawi.

“Abud! It’s one of our relatives,” al-Shebli says in utter disbelief as he reads on.Al-Shebli said there was no doubt that the person inside the cell was his relative as the date of his imprisonment matches the day Assad’s forces came to their neighborhood to arrest people.

His conclusion was further backed by the fact that the names of other men that al-Shebli knew from his neighborhood were also written near Alwai’s name.“It’s weird… that I discovered one of my relatives here,” Alawi said.

“I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, but it’s like there’s a key.” It remains unclear if Alawi was among those who died after years of torture inside Assad’s military prisons or if he was among the thousands freed by the Syrian rebel forces when they stormed the jails to free the political prisoners. The freed prisoners are still making their way back across Syria as they try to reunite with their families and pick up where they left off now that Assad’s regime has been toppled.

But it may take years for others to learn of their relatives’ fates as Syrians and humanitarian groups work to recover countless bodies believed to be buried and crushed in at least eight mass grave sites located across the country.One of the mass graves is located just outside Damascus in Al Qutayfah, where the US-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) estimates that at leas...