Mohamad Alian, 8/2/2025
Translated by Ayman El Hakim
In the documents of the assassins and the notebooks of the executioners, in the archives of the air force intelligence services, his number was: 9077.
A number on his forehead, a number in their records, a number in the endless lists of the dead.
But he wasn't just a number... he was my father, Khaled Alian.
He was a simple man who loved life, had goodness in
his heart and always had a smile on his face. He was not a politician, he did
not carry a weapon, but the identity of the city of Darayya
was a charge in itself.
He was in a country ruled by a criminal, and in a
country where your religion and your city determine your destiny.
In 2012, they arrested him for the first time. They
took him from us, for no reason, without a trial, without explanation. Maybe it
was just a report that earned him a few pounds, and my father's share amounted
to moaning.
When he came back months later, he was no longer the
same man.
He would look into the distance, as if he could see
something that we could not. He would wander and think a lot, as if he had
never really left there, as if his soul were trapped within the walls of the
cells. He would try to become himself again, he would try to laugh with us, but
something was broken in him, and we could not fix it.
Before his body had fully recovered from this arrest,
they arrested him again months later, in 2013, in a market in Damascus, after
we had fled Daraya, escaping the massacres, without asking him a single
question, without giving us the opportunity to say goodbye.
We waited for him for a long time... day after day,
month after month, for two whole years, dreaming of the moment when he would
return, arrive from afar, smile at us, open the door and say: I'm late.
But the doors that take loved ones away to Syria never
bring them back.
He went out and never came back, as if the earth had
swallowed him up. We had no certainty, no death to mourn, no life to look
forward to, only a deadly void and infinite possibilities.
We waited for him for two years, but he didn't wait...
He died after only a fortnight, as it was written on his forehead.
He died there, between the cold walls, in the sunless
cells, under the merciless whips, under their bloodthirsty fists. He did not
die a natural death, but a death caused by criminal hands, hands that do not
consider human beings as anything other than a number to be erased after they
have played their part in the whirlwind of torture and the game of death.
He died in Assad's prisons, like tens or hundreds of
thousands of others whose mass graves are still being discovered, at the hands
of the assassins who ruled Syria with fire and prisons.
When Caesar's photos were released in 2015, I saw
him... I saw my father for the first time after all these years.
But he was no longer the man I knew, no longer with
his voice, no longer with his gait, no longer with his laughter.
He was a body lying in the dirt among the piles of
corpses, in dusty clothes, with a face and a body exhausted by torture, with
his number on his forehead, waiting for those around him to take him to the
cemetery.
I saw him in the photo, and I couldn't leave him
there, I couldn't let that photo be his end, so I tried to change the scene
with a trembling hand.
I needed to see him in a photo worthy of him, in a
kinder place, in the sunlight he had never seen before his death, on green
grass, in a clean shroud. I wanted to apologize to him for the cruelty he had
suffered.
But I didn't do it to escape reality or to avoid
remembering the pain of that image, but because I firmly believe that God
changed the scene for him and for all those who had spent time with him from
the first moment into something more beautiful.
He honored them and took away their pain when their
soul left their body.
