LHS alum tours with Syrian survivor
A Lakeside High School alumnus is traveling the country this month to help a former detainee from Syria convey the severity of the plight faced by the Syrian people.
Mouaz Moustafa helped found the Syrian Emergency Task Force in 2012 and has since served as its executive director. Fellow Lakeside alum Natalie Larrison joined the organization as director of outreach in early 2016.
The SETF works in political advocacy for the Syrian people, legal services for victims of the ongoing Syrian Civil War, humanitarian efforts to support Syrian civilians and helping areas form new local governments. The organization helped smuggle a former Syrian Military Police photographer out of the country to expose atrocities committed by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
Moustafa is now touring with a victim of those atrocities. Mazen Al-Hummada is with Moustafa in Washington, D.C., this week to share his experiences as a victim of torture in the Deir ez-Zor Governorate province in eastern Syria.
They began the month with speaking engagements in Northampton, Mass., where the SETF has seen some of its strongest support. The Valley Syria Relief Committee formed in 2013 and later partnered with the SETF to support its various programs.
The Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock hosted Moustafa and Al-Hummada on Oct. 9 and screened the documentary, “Syria’s Disappeared,” in which Al-Hummada is featured. Their appearances have also included screenings of other documentaries, such as “The Truth Smugglers” and “Red Lines,” which followed Moustafa and former SETF field director Razan Shalab-al-Sham in their work on the ground in Syria.
Al-Hummada will speak Thursday from 8:30-10:30 a.m. in the United States Capitol Visitor Center and on Oct. 30 for a 7:30 p.m. screening of “The Truth Smugglers” at the historic Meeting House of the Friends Meeting of Washington. His time in the U.S. includes meetings with members of Congress. They led discussions about Syria on Monday and Tuesday in Chicago.
Many of the SETF’s events are held in partnership with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the organization’s most significant supporters. The museum established a permanent exhibit for the “Caesar File,” a collection of almost 55,000 photographs by the former police photographer
documenting victims of abuse and torture under Assad.
Moustafa is a member of the affiliated Caesar team, which includes volunteers who work to identify victims in Caesar’s photographs. The team was honored last month with the 2017 Nuremberg International Human Rights Award in Germany.
Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are feared dead or still held captive in Assad’s prisons. Even more confirmed citizen casualties have occurred since the conflict began in 2011.
Syria’s population was about 22 million before the war began and more than half of the country has been displaced by the war. Millions of refugees have fled the country as the war now includes a myriad of allies and supporters for both Assad’s regime and the Free Syrian Army of revolutionaries.