Noura, a child born just months after her father's arrest, had no idea that his fate had been sealed inside the dungeons of the most terrifying prison in modern Syrian history, the prisons of Hafez al-Assad.
Mohamad Mamoun Khairo Shalabi, a graduate of the Arabic Language Department and a young man in the prime of his life, was arrested from his workplace at the "Islamic Library" in the Halbouni district of central Damascus on December 6, 1980.
He had not been married long when he was forcibly disappeared, leaving behind a pregnant wife, an unfinished book, and his dignity trampled under the hooves of the security services. Five years passed, during which Shalabi's fate remained unknown, until his name recently appeared on leaked lists published by Zaman al-Wasl, confirming that the Syrian regime carried out mass executions of hundreds of detainees in the Tadmur prison in the historic city of Palmyra between 1980 and 1985.
Shalabi's was number 400 on the list, and it turned out he was executed during the years his family lived in hope of his return.
His only daughter, Noura, who never saw her father, says, "I was still in my mother's womb when they kidnapped him. He was a groom, an Arabic literature graduate, whose only crime was his thoughts and his place of work. Only today did I learn that they executed him in Palmyra... May God accept him as a martyr."
Shalabi's story is one of thousands that remain forgotten, searching for postponed justice and a document that dots the i's and crosses the t's of forgotten crimes.
Zaman Al Wasl
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