Only one of Rabe Alkhdar's brothers came back alive from a Syrian prison.

"My mother was wailing by that time," Rabe, a Syrian refugee now living in the US, recalled in an interview with Business Insider late last month.

"She asked Hassan how he could be sure that his brother had died."

He was describing the moment he said his brother Hassan emerged from one of Syrian President Bashar Assad's most infamous prisons, Tadmor, and told his mother that his brother Hameed had been killed inside.

"He told her that after he was beaten and hung, the guards returned the body and threw it on top of Yunus," Rabe continued. "They left both bodies there for two days. Hassan had to watch his brother lay there dead for two days. We only got Hassan back, and Hameed's death certificate. It's now been three years since we lost him."

Years later, Rabe finds himself 6,000 miles away. After months of harrowing experiences, he sought and found refuge. But in a story typical of the destruction and displacement of the Syrian civil war, Rabe is still waiting to be reunited with his family.

'His name was Yunus'

Two of Rabe's brothers, Hassan and Hameed, were arrested in 2012 for helping to treat protesters injured while demonstrating against the Assad regime, Rabe said. Both had gone to pharmacy school, and they had their own shop in Aleppo where they sold medicine.

Rabe said they were detained for two months in the regime's notorious Tadmor prison in Palmyra, the city that was recently retaken from the Islamic State by Assad's Syrian Arab Army.