Bittersweet Return for Syrians with Killed, Missing Relatives 

Syrian activist and former refugee Wafa Mustafa shows a picture of her missing father Ali on her phone after attending a demonstration in Damascus on January 1, 2025. (AFP)
Syrian activist and former refugee Wafa Mustafa shows a picture of her missing father Ali on her phone after attending a demonstration in Damascus on January 1, 2025. (AFP)
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Bittersweet Return for Syrians with Killed, Missing Relatives 

Syrian activist and former refugee Wafa Mustafa shows a picture of her missing father Ali on her phone after attending a demonstration in Damascus on January 1, 2025. (AFP)
Syrian activist and former refugee Wafa Mustafa shows a picture of her missing father Ali on her phone after attending a demonstration in Damascus on January 1, 2025. (AFP)

Wafa Mustafa had long dreamed of returning to Syria but the absence of her father tarnished her homecoming more than a decade after he disappeared in Bashar al-Assad's jails.

Her father Ali, an activist, is among the tens of thousands killed or missing in Syria's notorious prison system, and whose relatives have flocked home in search of answers after Assad's toppling last month by opposition forces.

"From December 8 until today, I have not felt any joy," said Mustafa, 35, who returned from Berlin.

"I thought that once I got to Syria, everything would be better, but in reality everything here is so very painful," she said. "I walk down the street and remember that I had passed by that same corner with my dad" years before.

Since reaching Damascus she has scoured defunct security service branches, prisons, morgues and hospitals, hoping to glean any information about her long-lost father.

"You can see the fatigue on people's faces" everywhere, said Mustafa, who works as a communications manager for the Syria Campaign, a rights group.

In 2021, she was invited to testify at the United Nations about the fate of Syria's disappeared.

The opposition who toppled Assad freed thousands of detainees nearly 14 years into a civil war that killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.

Mustafa returned to Branch 215, one of Syria's most notorious prisons run by military intelligence, where she herself had been detained simply for participating in pro-democracy protests in 2011.

She found documents there mentioning her father. "That's already a start," Mustafa said.

Now, she "wants the truth" and plans to continue searching for answers in Syria.

"I only dream of a grave, of having a place to go to in the morning to talk to my father," she said. "Graves have become our biggest dream".

- A demand for justice -

In Damascus, Mustafa took part in a protest demanding justice for the disappeared and answers about their fate.

Youssef Sammawi, 29, was there too. He held up a picture of his cousin, whose arrest and beating in 2012 prompted Sammawi to flee for Germany.

A few years later, he identified his cousin's corpse among the 55,000 images by a former military photographer codenamed "Caesar", who defected and made the images public.

The photos taken between 2011 and 2013, authenticated by experts, show thousands of bodies tortured and starved to death in Syrian prisons.

"The joy I felt gave way to pain when I returned home, without being able to see my cousin," Sammawi said.

He said his uncle had also been arrested and then executed after he went to see his son in the hospital.

"When I returned, it was the first time I truly realized that they were no longer there," he said with sadness in his voice.

"My relatives had gotten used to their absence, but not me," he added. "We demand that justice be served, to alleviate our suffering."

While Assad's fall allowed many to end their exile and seek answers, others are hesitant.

Fadwa Mahmoud, 70, told AFP she has had no news of her son and her husband, both opponents of the Assad government arrested upon arrival at Damascus airport in 2012.

She fled to Germany a year later and co-founded the Families For Freedom human rights group.

She said she has no plans to return to Syria just yet.

"No one really knows what might happen, so I prefer to stay cautious," she said.

Mahmoud said she was disappointed that Syria's new authorities, who pledged justice for victims of atrocities under Assad's rule, "are not yet taking these cases seriously".

She said Syria's new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa "has yet to do anything for missing Syrians", yet "met Austin Tice's mother two hours" after she arrived in the Syrian capital.

Tice is an American journalist missing in Syria since 2012.

Sharaa "did not respond" to requests from relatives of missing Syrians to meet him, Mahmoud said.

"The revolution would not have succeeded without the sacrifices of our detainees," she said.



Scotland Awaits Famous Son as Trump Visits Mother’s Homeland 

A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)
A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)
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Scotland Awaits Famous Son as Trump Visits Mother’s Homeland 

A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)
A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)

Donald Trump will fly into Scotland on Friday for a private visit to the land where his mother was born and spent her childhood on the remote Isle of Lewis.

"It's great to be home, this was the home of my mother," he said when he arrived on his last visit in 2023.

Born Mary Anne MacLeod, Trump's mum emigrated to the United States when she was 18. She then met and married Fred Trump, kickstarting the family's meteoric rise that has led their son, Donald, all the way to the White House.

During his visit the current US president, who is six months into his second term, plans to officially open his latest golf course in northeastern Aberdeen -- making him the owner of three such links in Scotland.

Although Donald Trump has talked openly about his father Fred -- a self-made millionaire and property developer whose own father emigrated from Germany -- he remains more discreet about his mother, who died in 2000 at the age of 88.

She was born in 1912 on Lewis, the largest island in the Outer Hebrides in northwest Scotland, and grew up in the small town of Tong.

Trump visited the humble family home in 2008, pausing for a photo in front of the two-storey house. He has cousins who still live in the house, which has been modernized since Mary Anne MacLeod's time but remains modest, standing just around 200 meters (650 feet) from the sea.

Its slate roof and grey walls are a world away from Trump's luxury Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, or his gold-adorned apartment in Trump Tower, New York.

According to the British press, which based its reports on local documents, Trump's grandfather was a fisherman.

MacLeod was the 10th and last child of the family, and her first language was Gaelic before she learnt English at school.

Life was tough on Lewis after World War I, which claimed the lives of many of the island's young men. Following in the footsteps of her older sister, and so many other Scots over the decades, she decided to emigrate to the United States.

MacLeod boarded the SS Transylvania from Glasgow in 1930, bound for New York.

- Pink Rolls-Royce -

On her immigration papers she wrote she was a "domestic" when asked about her profession. One of Trump's sisters recalled that MacLeod had worked as a nanny in a wealthy family.

But a few years later her life turned around when she reportedly met Fred Trump at an evening dance. They were married in 1936 in Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, and MacLeod became a US citizen in 1942.

As Fred Trump built and expanded his property empire in the city by constructing middle-class homes in districts such as Queens and Brooklyn, Mary Anne devoted herself to charitable works.

"Even in old age, rich and respected and with her hair arranged in a dynamic orange swirl, she would drive a rose-colored Rolls-Royce to collect coins from laundry machines in apartment blocks that belonged to the Trumps," the Times wrote this month.

Photos of her hobnobbing with New York high society show her with her blonde hair swept up in a bun, reminiscent of her son's distinctive side-swept coiffure.

She was "a great beauty", Donald Trump has gushed in one of his rare comments about his mother, adding she was also "one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known".

And on X he has pointed to "great advice from my mother: 'Trust in God and be true to yourself'".

In 2018 then-British prime minister Theresa May presented Trump with his family tree tracing his Scottish ancestors.

Less than 20,000 people live on Lewis, and MacLeod is a common surname.

Residents tell how Mary Anne MacLeod regularly returned to her roots until her death, while one of the president's sisters won over the locals by making a large donation to a retirement home.

But Donald Trump has not impressed everyone in Scotland, and protests against his visit are planned on Saturday in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

Earlier this year in April a banner fluttered from a shop in the port of Stornoway, the island's largest town. "Shame on you Donald John," it proclaimed.

Local authorities have asked for the banner to be taken down, but it is due to tour the island this summer with residents invited to sign it.