A few days after the Syrian dictator Bashar al -Assad fled in exile, in December, an elderly woman sat on the sidewalk outside a morgue in Damascus. Her head was wrapped in a scarf, shook back and forth and tied her hands, crying about what she lost in front of the Assad regime. “Help me,” I called. “Take my children. Where are they?”
I went up a crowd of people with caution around her. They were not looking for the children of women, but rather a mourning for other victims of Assad. They were gathering for an hour or more – a few family members in the beginning, but eventually hundreds of friends and sympathizers. Finally, a coffin was moved from the morgue and placed on the surface of a small bus, which contained a picture of the deceased installed on the front bumper.
In recent days, the same image has risen around the streets of Damascus. They were dressed on the walls and electric columns, and they depict a thin man in his forties, with a childish face, high bones, and consuming eyes, staring directly in the camera with an expression that does not know fear. The man, Mazen Al -Hamada, is a martyr by the rebels who took off the lion after thirteen years of civil war. One of the activists told me: “Mazen is the icon of the revolution.” “We will know our children about it.”
Hamada was not a fighter. The rebellion was served by announcing the bloody facts to treat the lion for its people. His work as a activist had landed in prison several times, including a long time, starting in 2020, he did not appear from him. After the rebels rose to the city, his body was discovered in the morgue of a military hospital, along with the victims of forty other victims of the regime. The criminal investigative judge found that Hamada died because of the “pain shock”. In other words, he was tortured to death.
During the rule of Assad, the automatic corpse of the prisoners said routinely that “the patient died when his heart stopped,” and he moved in the details of torture. Hamada was closely known for this torment, and during the war he traveled to Europe and the United States and has been certified by the fortified constellations. In his appearance, he narrated how it was hung from the tied handcuffs to metal bars and beating; How his ribs were broken when torture jumped on his back; How to put his penis in a clamp and pressure until he is afraid to cut; How to repeat the guards again and repeatedly with a metal column. As Hamada spoke, he sometimes cried frankly. Videos of the testimony qualified to watch. He pointed out that he saw others died from a similar treatment, and pledged to see his torture brought justice, if the last thing he did before his death.
A few other Syrians who left the country dared to talk about their experiences; Most of them fear that their relatives will be arrested in the homeland. Hamada, the least cautious, spent six years to tell the world what happened inside the political prison network in Assad. Then, in 2020, he returned to Damascus, for reasons whose loved ones are still discussing. Within hours of arrival, he was arrested, and he disappeared in the same prisons that he talked abroad.
Hundreds of friends and supporters gathered Hamada in Damascus.
During the memorial, his coffin was secured on the truck and wrapped in the Syrian flag – and not those that were suspended from the Assad Palace but a previous version, with three red stars, which were revived as a logo of the revolution. The truck withdrew to the street, followed the crowd, muttered. A few buildings, the mosque, where the hands were printed with the same image of Hamada’s face hanging alongside the distorted posters of government officials. While the men were carrying the coffin over the stairs to the mosque, the chanting grew in a louder voice: “Mazen, be in peace – we will continue the conflict.” While the cleric of the prayers described to the martyr recited, the new mourners arrived, crying while chanting and carrying pictures of their missing relatives.
When the sarcophagus was returned to the street, the procession moved to the walled old city, in the heart of Damascus. Currently, the mourners filled the street, and the mood was distorted: people chanted and shouted, and some shots fired in the air. Download a lot of phones and photograph them walking. This was the first time in thirteen years, as they managed to celebrate a splinter without arrest, or even expelled them by snipers. Hamada, from paradoxes, some of his citizens presented the first freedom.
In the Al -Hijaz Square, the procession ended, and the truck took out the body of Hamada outside the edge of the city to the Naja cemetery, which extends across an acre of lands circulating near Damascus Airport. It was an uncomfortable place for the happy people to visit it, but the city’s main cemetery has been occupied long ago. On the edge of its survivor, the regime sent the owners of the land to dug huge incisions on the ground: unlimited mass graves, dug for the acceptance of the lion’s victims.
The volume of bloodshed in Syria, and the suppression of the regime, is unique among modern conflicts. The war is believed to have killed six hundred and twenty thousand people, out of 22 million people. Fourteen million others were forced from their homes and fled to safety, either inside Syria or abroad. Up to one hundred and fifty thousand people disappeared, and it is assumed that they died at the hands of the lion and the port. Most likely ended in mass graves.
The missing families did not have information about their loved ones. In the strange terror of the Syrian regime of terrorism, it was widely believed that just inquiring about detainees could increase their ill -treatment and even rush their death. During the hours that followed Assad’s flight to exile, the guards in his prisons abandoned their jobs and poured prisoners. Some Syrians have been reunited with their long -time relatives. Most of them were not.
For more than a week, people have camp on Sednaya, a notorious prison on the outskirts of Damascus, and hunting for a “red prison” under the ground. Some holes dug, and even exploded through concrete, in a feverish search for relatives who may still be in the dark below. The red prison seemed to be a legend born of desperate hope, and it was most likely. In the end, underground rooms were not found with men alive in Sednaya, or anywhere else in Syria.
Mazen Al -Hamada’s relatives taught his death in a more exciting way: photos of the military morgue that was distributed on social media. Eight days after the fall of Damascus, I visited the family of his brother Fawzi in their home, a simple and comfortable apartment furnished with brown sofas and warmth of the old gas heater. Her only decoration was a framed image of Mazran, the same image that was on the tools of the hands.
“Well, it’s the Renaissance and I am a man, I am a Renaissance man. But, yes, I mainly sell cheese.”
Cartoon from Will Santino
Hamdas – Fawzi; His wife Majida; And their adult son, Jad – was still wearing the clothes of black mourners, but they were hospitable, as they presented small cups of bitter coffee and dates stuffed with nuts. Fawzi, a thin man with glasses, was almost veiled and almost unheard. Some English spoke but he preferred to allow JAD, an open young man with a tail tail, explained.
They told me that when seriously looked at the photos from the morgue, he saw a yellow face, freezing in a terrifying Ricettos, and he was afraid that his uncle would be. He transferred his phone to Fawzi, who got to know immediately on the face. The next day, traveled to the morgue. Mazen was undoubtedly; There were two freckles on his right cheek and a scar on one eyebrow. After they knew the body, the doctor told them, with their tremendous sadness, that Mazen had most likely died for more than ten days; It was still alive when the rebels began to advance themselves towards the capital.
