On Wednesday, January 1, Yassin al-Haj Saleh returned, for the first time since his exile, to Douma (Eastern Ghouta). It was there that 11 years and 22 days before, on December 9, 2013, his wife, political activist Samira al-Khalil, was abducted together with the Syrian revolutionary icon and lawyer Razan Zaitouneh, her husband, Wael Hamada, and the poet Nazem Hamadi. The apartment where they had been hiding from the start of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, and where they had been documenting the atrocities of the regime and the rebels, is now inhabited by a family.

"If they are alive, we want them released. If they were killed, which unfortunately we can't rule out, we want the whole truth about what happened. I hope we won't have to wait too long for legal procedures to be launched to give them and ourselves justice. That would have a symbolic value for the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared in our country," declared the 63-year-old writer – one of the greatest Syrian thinkers of his generation – speaking before some 50 young activists and former fellow detainees.

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