The streets of Damascus have been full of celebrations since Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia final Sunday within the face of an sudden insurgent offensive, ending greater than 50 years of his household’s brutal rule over Syria. But at a public funeral for Mazen al-Hamadah – earlier than his disappearance in 2020 probably the most vocal survivors of torture within the regime’s prisons system – the enjoyment gave method to sorrow, because the nation begins to grapple with the truth that most of the estimated 130,000 folks lacking could also be misplaced perpetually.
Thousands of individuals flooded the streets on Thursday, following Hamadah’s physique, wrapped in a conventional white shroud, because it was pushed slowly from a hospital to the Abdulrahman Abu al Ouf mosque for funeral prayers. At a vigil afterwards in close by al-Hijaz sq., hundreds of males, ladies and youngsters cried and hugged one another, many carrying footage of their very own disappeared family members.
The preliminary euphoria of discovering lacking folks alive after rebels broke down jail cell doorways on their astonishing advance to the capital has pale; many anxious households have searched prisons and morgues, and combed via ransacked regime paperwork and information, and have discovered nothing. But even so, such a public outpouring of grief would have been unthinkable lower than every week in the past, when Syria was nonetheless a repressive police state.
Shahed Baraki, 18, sobbed softly as she clutched an image of herself as somewhat woman together with her father, Osama. A paediatrician, he was forcibly disappeared by troopers at a checkpoint in 2012, when Assad’s crackdown on peaceable Arab spring protests started to provide method to a internecine 13-year-long civil battle.
“He was picked up as a result of he was attempting to assist folks in our neighbourhood; he was discovered smuggling drugs. [The regime] instructed us he had died, years later, however we didn’t get again his physique,” Baraki mentioned. “We nonetheless don’t know what occurred. He had kidney illness … we predict they let him die slowly of that.”
Hamadah, who testified to politicians and audiences world wide about his detention and torture throughout the 2011 rebellion, had lengthy been a logo of the crimes the regime dedicated towards its personal folks. But in 2020, he shocked his household and the broader Syrian diaspora by retuning to the nation from his new residence within the Netherlands, a call his brother Amer al-Obaid, 66, mentioned he believed was coerced; the household imagine Hamadah was instructed his family members can be killed if he didn’t cease exposing the regime’s brutality and return to Syria. He was detained on arrival at Damascus airport.
The activist’s destiny remained unknown till Monday, when his physique – as soon as once more bearing indicators of torture – was found in a morgue in Sednaya, probably the most notorious of Assad’s huge community of safety branches, detention centres and prisons. Doctors who examined Hamadah’s corpse mentioned that like many different detainees, he had been killed lately, earlier than his captors fled.
“They knew Mazen would expose them once more, so that they killed him,” Obaid mentioned.
Obaid bid a closing goodbye to his brother on the Najha cemetery on the south-west outskirts of Damascus, the place a number of dozen mourners gathered to witness his burial. Israeli jets, too excessive to see, roared overhead throughout the ceremony; the boring thud of a far-off explosion shook the earth, and fires of unknown origin burned within the distance.
“In some methods, I’m pleased. Mazen went via the cruellest torture conceivable and he died for us,” his older brother mentioned. “Without him, we’d not be respiratory recent air and freedom now.”
For most households with lacking family members, with out even a physique to bury, solutions and closure are nonetheless out of attain. Justice will take years; within the meantime, the search continues.
In the navy cemetery adjoining to the place Hamada was buried on Thursday, Mahmoud Dahlil, 64, parked his automobile and walked via the damaged gates of the huge, Brutalist-style web site, shovel in hand. He wasn’t certain the place to begin, however he knew what he was searching for.
In 2022, it emerged that the navy cemetery had been used to cover an enormous mass grave containing hundreds of our bodies of murdered detainees, in line with a number of males who labored there. Dahlil mentioned he had already regarded everywhere in the metropolis for his 4 cousins, who went lacking in 2012 and 2013. Now it was time, he mentioned, to look below the earth.
“There are most likely graves like this everywhere in the nation,” he mentioned. “We received’t cease till we discover all of them.”
