Date: Mar 30, 2019 Source: The Daily Star As Daesh ‘caliphate’ dies, so does hope for the missing Tony Gamal Gabriel| Agence France Presse SHERANE, Syria: The demise of the militant empire that spirited away his teenage son could have been reason to rejoice but, for Abdel-Salam Mohammad, with the fall of Baghouz came a massively crushing disappointment. The eastern Syrian hamlet was Daesh’s (ISIS) last bastion but for the relatives of many missing people it was also one of the last places where their loved ones might have stayed alive. In Abdel-Salam’s Kurdish village of Sherane, many families lost somebody to the militants when they rampaged across the region five years ago and spread their rule of terror in swaths of Iraq and Syria. “We thought: ‘Baghouz will fall, he’s going to come back.’ But he’s still not home,” he said. Kurdish-led forces last week defeated militants defending the last scrap of the “caliphate” in Baghouz, ending Daesh territorial control in the region. Tens of thousands of people, mostly militants surrendering but also some of the civilians they abducted, poured out of the besieged enclave in recent weeks. Sitting in his backyard, Abdel-Salam recounted the fateful day in February 2014 when his 19-year-old son Mohammad left the village and joined a group of 150 people heading to Iraq to look for work. The convoy was stopped at a Daesh roadblock and he never saw his son again. ‘Worse than death’The young men were taken to prison in Raqqa, the city that later became the de facto Syrian capital of Daesh’s self-proclaimed proto-state. Half of them were released nine months later, but not Mohammad. “Up until now, we haven’t had any news,” said Abdel-Salam, wearing a red-and-white headdress and a gray suit jacket worn threadbare at the seams over his traditional gown. When the Syrian Democratic Forces announced the death of the “caliphate” on March 23, a delegation from Sherane visited the Kurdish administration in the nearby city of Ain al-Arab. “They told us there was no information,” Abdel-Salam said. Bereavement hangs like a cloud over Sherane, a farming village nestled in Syria’s Kurdish heartland, surrounded by lush green plains and olive groves. Almost each one of its modest concrete homes is haunted by the ghost of somebody who went missing at the hands of Daesh militants or was killed in battle. “When someone dies, we know they’re gone. But this is worse than death,” the graying father said. According to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Daesh abducted thousands of people in both countries when it overran the region in 2014. Among them are a few well-known cases of foreigners, such as British reporter John Cantlie and Italian Jesuit priest Paolo Dall’Oglio, whose fates remain unknown. Mass gravesNadim Houry from the New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch argued that the creation of an investigative commission should be a priority. “It takes time to build up these mechanisms and to provide answers,” he said. “The right of families to know is clearly enshrined in international law.” Mass graves containing the bodies of thousands of people executed by Daesh have been found in Iraq and Syria but the identification process is slow, costly and complicated. Houry argued the U.S.-led coalition that backed the SDF’s military drive against Daesh should offer support to local initiatives aiming to resolve the cases of the missing. In Sherane, Adnan Ibrahim also saw his hopes of finding his younger brother Hekmat fade last week when the mass evacuations from Baghouz dried up. His brother was returning from his work on a water well drilling in May 2014 when his bus was stopped by the militants near the city of Manbij. Hekmat’s family soon lost any trace of him and his wife took their two children and moved back in with her father. “Every time somebody made it out of Daesh custody, we would go to see them to try to find out,” the 56-year-old said. His elderly mother went to Manbij twice to plead with the militants for her son’s release - in vain. In their home’s courtyard, framed by blue-painted walls, she knelt in prayer and then got up to fetch a picture in which Hekmat, wearing his military uniform, looks sternly at the camera. “We still have hope,” Adnan said, hesitantly. “But it’s not easy.”