You think you know what grief feels like. You lose someone, you bury them, you cry, and eventually, the sharp edges dull into a heavy ache. But there is a different kind of torture that doesn't let you heal. It is the absolute agony of not knowing.
Since the civil conflict kicked off in Syria back in 2011, more than 177,000 people have simply vanished. They weren't killed in airstrikes. They didn't flee on rafts across the Mediterranean. They were taken. Plucked from apartments, streets, and cafes by security forces and armed militias, leaving behind families who are frozen in time.
Activists call it the "violence of waiting." It is a psychological purgatory where you can't move on because there's no body to bury, yet you can't stop fighting because there's a tiny, agonizing sliver of hope that they might still be breathing in some underground cell.
A new 40-minute documentary short called Maybe Tomorrow, directed by Syrian activist Wafa Mustafa and BAFTA-winning filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab (For Sama), tackles this exact nightmare head-on. Premiering at the Sheffield DocFest, the film isn't just another dry human rights report filled with sterile statistics. It's a raw look at what happens when a state decides to make its own citizens evaporate.
The Haunting Melody of Enforced Disappearances
When Wafa Mustafa was a kid growing up in Syria, her father, Ali, used to blast the music of legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum around the house. He wanted his daughter to love music as much as he did. One afternoon, he asked her to write down the lyrics of a song she loved. To impress him, she picked a track titled "Aghadan Alqak"—which means "Will I meet you tomorrow?"
The lyrics are about an agonizing wait for a loved one who is gone. Wafa reflects on that moment now with a sense of dread. It feels like she accidentally predicted her own future.
In 2013, as pro-democracy protests gripped Damascus, armed men stormed an apartment and dragged Ali Mustafa away. Wafa was 23 years old. That was the last time anyone saw or heard from him.
For over a decade, Wafa has lived in exile in Berlin, carrying the weight of that missing father. Her struggle isn't rare. The Syrian network for human rights has logged tens of thousands of these exact cases. The state weaponized disappearance to terrify the population into submission. If you protest, you don't just go to jail; you cease to exist. Your family gets broken, left to guess whether you're being tortured, starved, or if you died years ago.
Moving Past the Fall of Assad
The political landscape shifted dramatically with the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. The country is now under a new transitional government led by Ahmad al-Sharaa. For many casual observers outside the Middle East, the collapse of the old dictatorship felt like a closing chapter. People assumed the prisons would open, the truth would come out, and everyone would go home.
But reality is a lot messier.
Maybe Tomorrow documents this massive pivot point. The film tracks Wafa's efforts starting in 2020, back when she was staging solitary vigils outside German courtrooms in Koblenz during the historic trials of Syrian intelligence officers. It then follows her journey back toward Syria after Assad's fall.
What she found isn't a clean victory. The physical regime crumbled, but the bureaucratic and chaotic wreckage left behind means finding a missing person is like looking for a single grain of sand in a desert. Mass graves are being uncovered, old military intelligence archives are disorganized or destroyed, and the new authorities are dealing with a country in total collapse.
The struggle shifted from fighting a dictator to fighting time, chaos, and institutional amnesia. Wafa’s mother points out a terrifying truth in the film: human minds block out trauma to survive. People are starting to forget details. That's why documenting everything right now is so urgent.
Owning the Narrative Without Corporate Polish
What makes Maybe Tomorrow different from standard Western journalism pieces about the Syrian crisis is its collaborative DNA. Waad Al-Kateab realized while traveling the world that victims need to be the ones holding the camera.
Instead of treating Wafa as a tragic subject to be interviewed by a detached journalist, Al-Kateab insisted that Wafa co-direct the project. Wafa filmed large portions of her own life, turning the camera on herself in moments of quiet isolation in Berlin or during chaotic transitions in the Middle East. It plays like a condensed, highly intimate cinematic memoir.
It shows the messy reality of global activism. You see the contrast between Wafa giving speeches at United Nations summits in expensive rooms and the stark, painful silence of her apartment where she stares at old photos of her dad.
There's an incredibly dangerous trap in this kind of work, and Al-Kateab doesn't sugarcoat it. Hope can destroy you. If you spend 13 years believing your father will walk through the door tomorrow, you aren't really living. But if you stop believing, it feels like an act of betrayal.
Wafa puts it bluntly in the film: she isn't looking for a comforting lie. She wants the truth. Even if someone tells her he is dead, she can't just accept it verbally. Without proof, there's nothing to accept.
Why the Fight for Syria’s Missing Matters Right Now
It's easy for people living outside conflict zones to suffer from empathy fatigue. You see the headlines about Syria for fifteen years, and your brain just tunes it out. But the issue of enforced disappearances isn't a historical footnote. It's a live, bleeding wound.
The international community has a terrible track record of letting regimes get away with this. From the "dirty wars" in Argentina and Chile to modern conflicts, making political opponents disappear is the ultimate playbook for authoritarian survival. If the world moves on from Syria without forcing accountability for the 177,000 missing citizens, it sends a green light to every other dictator on the planet.
Wafa’s activism has never been just about her own family. She’s fighting to establish a precedent. The goal of the documentary isn't to win film awards or generate polite applause at festivals; it's a weapon to force international bodies and the new Syrian leadership to keep the search alive.
Practical Steps to Support the Search for Justice
If you want to move beyond passive consumption and actually do something about the crisis of enforced disappearances, the path forward requires supporting organizations that do the grinding, unglamorous legal work.
- Support Grassroots Documentation Groups: Organizations like the Syrian Network for Human Rights and the Violations Documentation Center are the ones archiving names, dates, and witness testimonies to build future legal cases.
- Amplify Family-Led Coalitions: Look into groups like the Caesar Families Association or Families for Freedom. These are campaigns run directly by the mothers, wives, and daughters of the disappeared who refuse to let the international community forget their relatives.
- Demand Transparency in Transitional Justice: Keep pressure on international human rights bodies to ensure that any diplomatic re-engagement with the new Syrian administration is strictly conditioned on the full investigation of detention centers and the excavation of mass graves.
The fight isn't just about finding survivors anymore. It's about proving these people existed, that their lives mattered, and that a state cannot erase a human being without facing consequences. Ali Mustafa wasn't just a number on a human rights spreadsheet. He was a guy who loved music, who challenged his daughter to write down poetry, and who believed a better country was possible. He deserves a name, a record, and an answer.
