Wafa Mustafa’s fight for truth for Syria’s disappeared

As a child in Syria, Wafa Mustafa remembers her father filling their home with the music of Umm Kulthum and asking her to write down the lyrics of a favourite song, “Aghadan Alqak” – “Will I meet you tomorrow?” In 2013, armed men seized her father, Ali, from a Damascus apartment; he was driven away and never seen again.

Mustafa was 23, and since then she has been waiting for answers. The scale of such disappearances is vast: the Syrian Network for Human Rights records more than 177,000 people forcibly disappeared between 2011 and 2025, many taken to notorious prisons where they were tortured or killed.

Even after the fall of the Assad regime and the arrival of a new ruler, Ahmad al-Sharaa, Mustafa’s mission remains unchanged: to press for truth, justice and remembrance for those who vanished. Mustafa has made that fight the subject of a new documentary short, Maybe Tomorrow, co-directed with childhood friend Waad Al-Kateab, co-director of For Sama.

Syria, Damascus

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