Every night for the past 13 years, Rana Aankir has dreamt of her son Raed, his delicate drooping eyes smiling at her as he walks out of the family’s front door in Homs.
In her dreams, he wears the same red sweatshirt he threw over his shoulders before running off to a protest, something she learned only weeks later when he never came home.
Raed was just 16 years old when state security forces swept him up in their crackdown on the popular uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s regime that morphed into a brutal civil war. Over the years, his mother sold most of her belongings to bribe officials for information on which of the regime’s vast network of prisons he was in. It took six years before she learned he was in the most notorious of all: Saydnaya.