Torture, rape, regular mass executions… What happened to dissenting Syrians at the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s regime?
The Syrian Network for Human Rights (RSDH) recorded, between March 2011 and July this year, 15,102 deaths caused by torture in prisons run by the regime Bashar al-Assad.
According to the same network, cited by , there are even more 100,000 people missing.
Fadel Abdulghany, director of the RSDH, which tracks people who have been “forcibly disappeared,” said all 100,000 missing people “probably died under torture” in prison.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) in 2022 even estimates that more than 100 thousand people died in Syrian prisonsunder torture.
“Sunken eyes, haunted face…”
Mazen al-Hamada was one of the most striking faces of the fight against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. But he did not live to celebrate the fall of the regime.
The activist was found dead in prisonearlier this week, during the release of thousands of political prisoners, following the release of Islamic rebels who took over important cities in Syria and removed President Bashar al-Assad from power, last Sunday.
Those closest say that Hamada was “crushed” by the world’s inaction.
Today, the body of Syrian activist Mazen al-Hamada was found. He was tortured in 2012 before his release and departure from Syria. Mazen disappeared in 2020 after being coerced by the Syrian regime’s embassy in Berlin to return to Syria.
— Samer Daboul (@samerdaboul6)
Hamada was detained and tortured together with tens of thousands of people, after the revolt of 2011 against the Assad regime.
In 2013 he was released and, the following year, he received asylum in the Netherlandshaving begun touring capitals in the West, to show the scars and describe what he had suffered at the hands of the Syrian authorities.
Hamada returned to Syria in 2020it is not known whether it was voluntary or forced by the authorities. What is known is that disappeared as soon as it arrived to the country.
According to The Guardian, there were early indications that it had been detained again by the Syrian State.
The activist was now found dead in Sednaya prison, near Damascus, which is described by Amnesty International as a “human slaughterhouse” and where thousands of people were tortured, raped and killed in regular mass executions.
Rebel forces claimed to have found 40 corpses piled up in the Sednaya morgue with signs of torturewith an image of Hamada among them circulating on the Internet.
Mazen Hamada was once arrested for smuggling baby formula. Later on ,he became a victim of rape and torture. Even after leaving Syria, he suffered a lot in exile. He came back in 2020.
Today his body was found in Sednaya prison
May god grant him jannah— (@moonatsunrise20)
As The Guardian describes, the sunken eyes and the haunted face of Hamada, his tears when describing the depth of the horrors he went through, made him a symbol of the crimes that the Assad regime committed against those who spoke out against him.
“Mazen had suffered tortures so cruel, so unimaginablethat their reports had an almost supernatural weight. When he spoke, it was as if he were looking into the face of death itself, begging the angel of mortality to grant him a little more time,” photographer and director and friend of Hamada, Sakir Khader, told the British newspaper.
He wrote poetry. Was arrested
The Syrian blogger Tal al-Mallouhiarrested in 2009 at age 19, and later convicted of espionage, survived and was released.
After 15 years in Syrian government prisonsTal al-Mallouhi, now 33, still needs time “to realize that he is free, that everything is fine now and that the fear and terror have disappeared”, his mother, Ahd al-Mallouhi, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
At the time of his conviction, the international community mobilized, with France reminding Syria of its international commitments on freedom of expression and the right to a fair trial.
Before being detained in December 2009, just over a year before the start of the war in Syria, the young woman wrote poetry and commented on the social situation.
Accused of working for the US intelligence services (CIA)which her family always denied, was sentenced to 5 years in prison, but authorities never released her at the end of her sentence.
What happened to the dissenting Syrians?
The regime of Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father Hafez in 2000, methodically suppressed any dissenting voice.
Since the start of the war in Syria in 2011, triggered by brutal repression of pro-democracy demonstrations.
The rebels declared Damascus ‘free’ on December 8 of President Bashar al-Assad, after 12 days of an offensive by a coalition led by the Islamist group the Levant Liberation Organization (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS, in Arabic), together with other factions supported by Turkey, to overthrow the regime Syrian.
Faced with the rebel offensive, Assad, who had been in power for 24 years, left the country and .
In power in Syria, the Baas party was, for many Syrians, a symbol of repression, which began in 1970 with the coming to power, through a coup d’état, of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, who led the country until die in 2000.
