Beirut (AP) – Ten -year -old journalist Amer Matar, in search of his younger brother, has identified and changed the course of his life, now focused on investigating and documenting crimes committed by a group of Islamic State in Syria.
His brother, Mohammed Nour Matari, went missing in 2013 in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa when he reported an explosion that hit the headquarters of a rebel group. His burnt camera was found at the scene of the explosion and his family soon found out he was in an Islamic State prison. But there has been no other clue since then.
Muhammad Nuri was among thousands allegedly occupied by the Islamic State, an extremist group that invaded large parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014, where he founded the so-called Islamic Caliphate and brutally tortured the population inside. of many years.
Three years after its defeat in the territory, thousands of people are missing and still unable to exercise the responsibilities of their captors. The families of the missing feel abandoned by a major change in the world as they struggle alone to discover the fate of their loved ones.
“These violations could be crimes against humanity, war crimes and in some cases even genocide,” said a report released by the Syrian Center for Justice and Accountability in Washington on Thursday. “These families have the right to know the truth about the fate of their loved ones.
The human rights group says that from 2013 to 2017, when the Islamic State controlled most of northern and eastern Syria, the militant group arrested thousands of missing people and families continued to live in pain and uncertainty.
In a report titled “Hope: Finding the Missing Victim of ISIS,” the SJAC said approximately 6,000 bodies had been exhumed from dozens of mass graves excavated by the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and removed from buildings destroyed by US airstrikes. . He led a coalition during a military campaign that ultimately defeated IS.
According to the group, this may represent nearly half of the total number of missing people in the northeast, although estimates of missing people vary.
Mohamed Nour Matari became a citizen journalist during the Syrian civil war and was often outside with his camera while covering the conflict. He disappeared on August 13, 2013, while covering up an explosion in Raqqa near the offices of the Ahfad al-Rasul faction, one of IS’s rival rebel groups. He was 21 years old at the time and was making a documentary about Raqqa and its residents in opposition to IS.
Four months later, Raqqa became the capital of the first Syrian province to come under full IS control. When the extremists launched the so -called Declaration of themselves as a Caliphate in June 2014, the city became their de facto capital. The group was led by Matar Patria Raka in fear Organizing several detention centers in different parts of the city, brutally insulting the opponents and even placing the heads of the beheaded victims in the plaza of city of Naim, the Arab “paradise”.
In the report, the SJAC first mentioned the extensive network of detention facilities that were key to the disappearance of the Islamic State. The various wings of the Islamic State security apparatus have systematically used the network of 152 police stations, training camps and secret security prisons to deter kidnapped civilians and members of the opposing armed group, in some cases before the death sentence, or their short execution.
List 33 places of detention in the city of Raqqa alone.
The SJAC says the alleged perpetrators, who may have had the necessary evidence to identify the remains, died in prisons backed by the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces “without a fair trial”. Other former IS members are said to be living in their own countries, where they returned after defeating the group.
“The permanent defeat of the Islamic State cannot be guaranteed to the victims of organizational crimes, including the missing,” the statement read.
Amer Matari, who now lives in Berlin with his parents and siblings, told them at one point that Muhammad Nuri was in the city prison. Some of the former inmates who saw him there provided personal information that only the family knew.
But in 2014, evidence of family life was lost.
Amer Matari has traveled several times to Syria in recent years to seek information about his brother, even to mass graves to retrieve corpses.
The International Commission on Missing Persons has already started collecting DNA samples from missing families, but they are moving slowly and Matari said his family has not yet taken any samples.
Also a journalist, Matari started collecting thousands of IS documents and 3D images of IS detention centers a few years ago. He is now working with activists from Syria, Iraq, Germany, France, Japan and the United States to create a virtual museum on extremists.
He said the goal is to have a platform where families of missing people can find information about their loved ones, where they can virtually walk into prisons, see the names of prisoners, read of documents and witnesses of the mass grave, and provide information to the dead. There, in Syria or Iraq.
When asked if his family had hope, Matari said, “The hardest question is hope. Sometimes I lose hope because logic says there is no hope.”
Asked if he saw Muhammad Nouri’s evidence in his research, Matari said, “My mother asks this every month or every few weeks. Unfortunately, my answer is:” We can’t find anything “.
Source: Huffpost
