Syrian man hid behind wall for 13 years to escape Assad forces

A Syrian man has described spending more than a decade hidden inside a tiny space behind a wall in his family's home to escape Bashar al-Assad's security forces, while his children were told he was dead and lived metres away, unaware their father could hear them.

Mohammed Zakour, from the coastal province of Latakia, said he remained concealed for more than 13 years after being arrested and tortured by Syria's notorious Political Security branch following the outbreak of the country's uprising in 2011.

Zakour's extraordinary account emerged in Syrian media this week, more than a year after the fall of the Assad regime finally allowed him to leave his hiding place.

He told Syrian outlet Jusoor News that he had participated in the early anti-Assad protests and helped demonstrators evade security forces before he was arrested.

Zakour said he spent around three months in detention, where he was tortured and witnessed other prisoners die.

After his release, security forces continued searching for him, according to his account. He initially moved between the homes of friends, but the danger posed to those sheltering him eventually became too great.

Zakour secretly returned to a family property and created a hiding place behind a wall using around 100 concrete blocks, sealing himself inside a cavity reportedly measuring roughly one metre wide and three metres high.

His wife became his only reliable connection to the outside world.

She brought him food, water, clothes and other necessities through an opening. When he became ill, Zakour would describe his symptoms to her and she would obtain medicine for him.

To almost everyone else, including his five children, Zakour was dead.

His family maintained the fiction because they feared that even an accidental remark by one of the children could alert security forces to his whereabouts. Reports said word of his death eventually spread beyond the immediate family, with his brother in Turkey even holding a mourning gathering for him.

For his children, their father was gone. In reality, he was metres away, listening to them through a wall.

Zakour remained inside as they grew up, eating, sleeping and praying in the confined space while relying on openings above for ventilation.

The danger was not limited to discovery by Assad's forces.

When the devastating February 2023 earthquake struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, killing tens of thousands of people and destroying buildings across the region, Zakour remained in his hiding place despite the possibility that the structure around him could collapse.

He reportedly told his wife that if he died there, she should seal the opening and leave the space as his grave.

It was not until 8 December 2024, when rebel forces entered Damascus and Assad fled Syria, that Zakour realised the circumstances that had driven him behind the wall had finally changed.

He said he heard people outside chanting "Allahu Akbar" in the early hours of the morning and asked his wife what was happening.

"The regime has fallen," she told him, according to his account.

His children were then told that the father they had mourned was alive - and had been hidden on the other side of the wall.

Zakour finally emerged into a country transformed from the one he had disappeared from more than a decade earlier.

His account is among the more extraordinary personal stories to emerge since the collapse of the Assad regime exposed further details of the lengths Syrians went to evade a security apparatus responsible for widespread arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and torture.

But for Zakour, survival came at the cost of almost his entire youth behind a wall.

"My whole youth was lost in the hole," he said.