A Witness in Assad’s Dungeons

A few days after the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled into exile, in December, an elderly woman sat on the sidewalk outside a morgue in Damascus. Her head wrapped in a scarf, she rocked back and forth and clasped her hands, wailing about what she had lost to Assad’s regime. “Help me,” she called. “They took my sons. Where are they?”

A crowd of people stepped gingerly around her. They were there not to search for the woman’s sons but to mourn another of Assad’s victims. They had been gathering for an hour or more—a few family members at first, but eventually hundreds of friends and sympathizers. Finally, a coffin was carried from the morgue and placed on the roof of a minivan, which had a photograph of the deceased fixed to the front bumper.

In recent days, the same image had gone up around the streets of Damascus. Plastered on walls and electrical poles, it depicted a slender man in his forties, with a gaunt, boyish face, high cheekbones, and all-consuming eyes, staring straight at the camera with a fearless expression. The man, Mazen al-Hamada, is regarded as a martyr by the rebels who deposed Assad after thirteen scourging years of civil war. “Mazen is an icon of the revolution,” one activist told me. “We will teach our children about him.”

Hamada was not a fighter. He served the rebellion by proclaiming the bloody facts of Assad’s treatment of his own people. His work as an activist had landed him in prison several times, including a final stint, starting in 2020, from which he did not emerge. After the rebels surged into the city, his body was discovered in the morgue of a military hospital, along with those of forty other victims of the regime. A coroner found that Hamada had died of “the shock of pain.” In other words, he had been tortured to death.

During Assad’s rule, official autopsies of prisoners routinely said that “the patient died when his heart stopped,” eliding the specifics of torture. Hamada knew about these torments intimately, and during the war he travelled to Europe and the United States and gave searing testimony about Assad’s dungeons. In his appearances, he recounted how he was hung from handcuffs hooked to metal bars and beaten; how his ribs were broken when a torturer jumped on his back; how his penis was placed in a clamp and squeezed until he feared that it would be severed; how guards repeatedly sodomized him with a metal pole. As Hamada spoke, he sometimes wept openly; videos of the testimony are excruciating to watch. He noted that he had witnessed others die from similar treatment, and vowed to see his torturers brought to justice, if it was the last thing he did before he died.

Few other Syrians who made it out of the country dared to speak of their experiences; most feared that their relatives back home would also be arrested. Hamada, less cautious, spent six years telling the world what happened inside Assad’s network of political prisons. Then, in 2020, he returned to Damascus, for reasons that his loved ones are still debating. Within hours of his arrival, he was detained, and vanished into the same prisons he had spoken of abroad.

During his memorial, his coffin was secured on the van and draped in the Syrian flag—not the one that hung from Assad’s palace but an earlier version, with three red stars, that had been revived as an emblem of the revolution. The van pulled into the street, and the crowd followed, muttering lamentations. A few blocks away was a mosque, where handbills printed with the same image of Hamada’s face hung alongside defaced posters of government officials. As men carried the coffin up the stairs to the mosque, the chanting grew louder: “Mazen, be at peace—we will continue the struggle.” While a cleric recited the prescribed prayers for a martyr, new mourners arrived, weeping and chanting and holding up photographs of their own lost relatives.

When the coffin was brought back into the street, the procession moved on toward the walled Old City, at the heart of Damascus. By now, mourners filled the street, and the mood was cathartic: people chanted and yelled, and a few fired shots into the air. Many held up phones and filmed as they walked. It was the first time in thirteen years that they had been able to celebrate a dissident without being arrested, or even fired on by snipers. Hamada’s death, paradoxically, had provided some of his countrymen with a first breath of freedom.

At Al-Hijaz Square, the procession came to an end, and the van took Hamada’s body out past the edge of town to the Najha cemetery, which sprawls across acres of rolling land near the Damascus airport. It was an inconvenient place for mourners to visit, but the city’s main cemetery had long since been filled up. At the edge of Najha, the regime had sent earthmovers to excavate huge slits in the ground: unmarked mass graves, dug to accept Assad’s victims.

The scale of Syria’s bloodshed, and of the regime’s repression, is unique among modern conflicts. The war is thought to have killed an appalling six hundred and twenty thousand people, from a population of twenty-two million. Fourteen million more were forced from their homes and fled to safety, either inside Syria or abroad. As many as a hundred and fifty thousand people disappeared, and presumably died at the hands of Assad’s torturers and executioners. Most probably ended up in mass graves.

The families of the missing usually had no information about their loved ones. In the peculiar horror of the Syrian system of terror, it was widely believed that merely inquiring about detainees could worsen their mistreatment and even hasten their death. During the hours after Assad fled into exile, though, the guards at his prisons abandoned their posts, and inmates poured out. A few Syrians were reunited with their long-lost relatives. Most were not.

For more than a week, bereft people camped out on the grounds of Sednaya, a notorious prison on the outskirts of Damascus, and hunted for a rumored underground “red prison.” Some dug holes, and even blasted through concrete, in a frantic search for relatives who might still be held in the darkness below. The red prison seemed like a myth born of desperate hope, and most likely it was. In the end, no underground chambers with men alive in them were found at Sednaya, or anywhere else in Syria.

Mazen al-Hamada’s relatives learned of his death in a more prosaic way: photographs from the military morgue circulated on social media. Eight days after the fall of Damascus, I visited his brother Fawzi’s family at their home, a simple but comfortable apartment furnished with brown sofas and warmed by an old-fashioned gas heater. Its only adornment was a framed picture of Mazen, the same one that had been on the handbills.

“Well, it’s the Renaissance and I’m a man, ergo I’m a Renaissance man. But, yes, I mainly sell cheese.”

Cartoon by Will Santino

The Hamadas—Fawzi; his wife, Majida; and their adult son, Jad—were still dressed in black mourners’ clothes, but they were hospitable, offering small cups of bitter coffee and dates stuffed with walnuts. Fawzi, a thin man with glasses and stubble, had a veiled, inward manner and an almost inaudible voice. He spoke some English but preferred to let Jad, an open-faced young man with a tidy ponytail, interpret.

They told me that, when Jad had first looked at the photographs from the morgue, he saw a man with a yellowed face, frozen in a horrifying rictus, and feared that it was his uncle. He passed his phone to Fawzi, who immediately recognized the face. The next day, they travelled to the morgue. It was Mazen, without question; there were two telltale freckles on his right cheek and a scar on one eyebrow. After they identified the body, a doctor told them, to their immense sadness, that Mazen had likely died no more than ten days before; he had still been alive when the rebels began their triumphant advance toward the capital.