In a dramatic story that reflects the tragedies of the Syrian war years, citizen Muhammad Zakour spent more than 13 years hiding behind a separation wall inside his grandfather’s house in the city of Latakia, isolating himself from the world and from his children who grew up believing that he had died.
According to a report by Al Jazeera, based on the family’s account and local media, the roots of the story go back to Zakour’s arrest twice during the first years of the Syrian conflict. The fear of being arrested for the third time led him to decide to hide from view. He built a separation wall, creating a narrow space behind it that did not exceed one meter in width and three meters in height, using it as a place for sleeping, eating, and praying throughout those years.
No one knew about this hideout except his wife, who alone bore the burden of supporting the family. The wife provided for her husband’s needs of food, water, clothing, and medicine, in addition to secretly consulting doctors based on the symptoms of the disease that he transmitted to her, keeping the secret completely for fear that the children would accidentally reveal his whereabouts.
During the long years of isolation, the conviction of those around Zakur’s death became strong, to the point that his brother residing in Türkiye held a funeral for him. The house was also subjected to a security raid searching for him, as the security personnel asked his daughter about him and she responded with complete ignorance of his whereabouts, without knowing that he was hiding behind the wall near which searches were being conducted. During this period, one of his sons was born and grew up not knowing his father, while the father was monitoring the growth of his children with a voice from behind the wall, indicating that his eldest son was a child when he entered his hideout and became a boy when he left.
This suffering ended with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 8, 2024. At that time, the wife gathered her children to tell them the truth, and after a state of incomprehension and astonishment, the refrigerator that was blocking the hole in the hideout was removed, so Muhammad Zakour appeared in front of his family for the first time in more than a decade, returning from “death” to real life.
