“My name is Tal Al Mallohi”

The fate of a 19-year-old Syrian blogger remains unknown some nine months after her arrest by the authorities.  Tal al-Mallohi, 19 has been detained since December last year and both the reason for her arrest and her whereabouts remain unknown.

She was supposed to be hanging out with her classmates or preparing for school exams. Instead, in December, security officials summoned Tal to question her about a piece she had written. A few days later, they came to her parents’ house and confiscated her personal computer, according to Syrian human rights groups.

She wrote a blog, which featured pieces about the duty of oppressed citizens to reject the life of subjugation and fight for their rights or about the Palestinians’ right to return to their homeland, but her last posting was last September.

Since then, Mallohi has been held incommunicado and a Facebook group demanding her release has gathered more than 650 members. Human rights activists say that her daring poems and opinion pieces posted on her personal blog attracted the attention of Syrian officials.

The young blogger’s mother recently sent a plea to the Syrian president, Bashar Al-Assad, to uncover the fate of her daughter. In her open letter, Tala’s mother said that she had tried all official and non-official channels to know why and where her daughter was being held –but in vain.

“Mr President, I cannot describe the effect of this tragedy on my whole family and the intensity of our suffering,” she wrote in a letter posted on September 1 on the website of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights operating from London.

In one of her blog entries, Tal wrote;

“My brother in humanity… I’d like you to live in peace… O wise men of this world, only you could restore stability to this frightened world… Give us safety and security to become eternal in our hearts.”

What in the world could justify that a young girl who calls for the freedom? What if not fear that those calls may be heard? That her words may give birth to hundreds, thousands of other Tals? From beyond the sea, I call on the Syrian government to free Tal, and all the prisoners held without charges for daring speak up, and call on all the bloggers to join the campaign (click here for links toward petitions and names of blogs involved in the campaign).

Amoona E.

Latest piece of poetry written by Tal Al Mallohi on September 26th, 2009, and called القدس سيدة المدائن