On April 7, 2013, three families traveling from Beirut were heading toward Idlib.
It was supposed to be an ordinary journey, one that would end with a family reunion and a new life in Turkey.
Instead, it ended at a checkpoint in Homs.
From that moment on, the car disappeared, The driver disappeared, and everyone inside vanished without a trace.
Nine children were among them:
Ayham Sayed Issa, just eight months old.
Triplets Ahmad, Abdullah, and Ibrahim Kanjo, eight years old.
Ghina Sayed Issa, two years old.
Yathrib Sayed Issa, six.
Abdullah Sayed Issa, eight.
Abdulhadi Sayed Issa, eleven.
Aya Sayed Issa, sixteen.
They disappeared alongside their mothers , and have never been seen again.
Mohammad Kanjo, the father of the triplets, says it was the first disappearance case he had heard of in that area.
He was waiting for his wife and children to arrive in Idlib before continuing together to Turkey — a journey that never happened.
His three children had been born after nine years of waiting.
Kanjo himself had worked for Syria’s Military Industrialization Authority before defecting.
He still remembers the last phone call.
“They told me they were at Al-Zahra checkpoint in Homs… then the line went dead. After that, all the phones were unreachable.”
Later, while searching for answers through the Idlib governor’s office, he discovered other families looking for the same missing convoy.
There, he met Abdulqader Sayed Issa, the father of five missing children, and Haitham Sayed Issa, father of baby Ayham.
That was when the scale of the disappearances became clearer.
Thirteen cars coming from Idlib had vanished in the same area.
All carried Idlib license plates.
None returned.
Kanjo says he later spoke, through the governor’s office, with Wael al-Halqi, Syria’s former prime minister at the time.
According to him, the response was blunt:
“Go look for them with the terrorists. The terrorists took them.”
More than thirteen years later, the families are still searching.
For a document.
A photograph.
A grave.
Mohammad Kanjo ends with words shaped by years of waiting:
“We will keep remembering them until we die.”