Wafa Mustafa
Details
Media
Syria’s South Dares Again The New Arab Podcast Sep 15, 2023
UN creates body to find missing persons in Syria The World Jun 30, 2023
Families of tens of thousands missing in Syria draw some hope from new UN push to find loved ones AP News Jun 30, 2023
Syria: Is it safe for refugees to return? Al Jazeera The Stream Jun 21, 2023
Assad’s regime took my father. Normalizing relations feels like an attempt to rewrite history The Guardian May 18, 2023
Gone but not forgotten: Syria’s missing persons BBC documentary Jan 4, 2022
Wafa Mustafa: the woman fighting to find her father – and all of Syria’s disappeared The Guardian Jul 14, 2021
Briefing to the UN Security Council by Wafa Mustafa Jul 23, 2020
Wafa Mustafa (@wafamustafa9) is a Syrian activist, journalist, and advocate for Syria’s detained and forcibly disappeared. She fled Syria following her father Ali’s forced disappearance by the Assad regime in 2013 and has kept him in the forefront of her campaigns since.
Wafa co-founded Free Syria’s Disappeared @FSDCampaign coalition in 2023. She is a 2023 non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and at Refugees International.
Free Syria’s Disappeared is a coalition of survivors of detention, families of Syria’s disappeared, and human rights activists working for the freedom and safety of all Syria’s detainees and forcibly disappeared. It includes the Action For Sama campaign and Families for Freedom, which among things has pressed for establishment of an international mechanism to release detainees and reveal the fate of the missing.
Wafa addressed the United Nations Security Council in 2020, calling for the large-scale unilateral release of all people held in prisons and unofficial detention centres in Syria during the pandemic. She urged the Security Council to pressure the Syrian authorities and other actors to immediately release the names of people held in all places of detention, as well as their locations and situations; to cease torture and other mistreatment; and to allow detainees routine contact with their families. In the cases of where detainees have died, she said families must be informed of the causes and given access to burial sites.
Her advocacy focuses on the impact of detention and enforced disappearance on families and women, the rights of refugees, and the urgency of international justice and accountability for the crimes of the Assad regime. She campaigns against the forced return of refugees to Syria and normalized international relations with the Assad regime.