The streets of Damascus have been filled with celebrations since Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia last Sunday in the face of an unexpected rebel offensive, ending more than 50 years of his family’s brutal rule over Syria. But at a public funeral for Mazen al-Hamadah – before his disappearance in 2020 one of the most vocal survivors of torture in the regime’s prisons system – the joy gave way to sorrow, as the country begins to grapple with the fact that many of the estimated 130,000 people missing may be lost forever.
Thousands of people flooded the streets on Thursday, following Hamadah’s body, wrapped in a traditional white shroud, as it was driven slowly from a hospital to the Abdulrahman Abu al Ouf mosque for funeral prayers. At a vigil afterwards in nearby al-Hijaz square, thousands of men, women and children cried and hugged each other, many carrying pictures of their own disappeared loved ones.
The initial euphoria of finding missing people alive after rebels broke down prison cell doors on their astonishing advance to the capital has faded; many anxious families have searched prisons and morgues, and combed through ransacked regime documents and records, and have found nothing. But even so, such a public outpouring of grief would have been unthinkable less than a week ago, when Syria was still a repressive police state.
Shahed Baraki, 18, sobbed softly as she clutched a picture of herself as a little girl with her father, Osama. A paediatrician, he was forcibly disappeared by soldiers at a checkpoint in 2012, when Assad’s crackdown on peaceful Arab spring protests began to give way to a internecine 13-year-long civil war.
“He was picked up because he was trying to help people in our neighbourhood; he was found smuggling medicine. [The regime] told us he had died, years later, but we did not get back his body,” Baraki said. “We still don’t know what happened. He had kidney disease … we think they let him die slowly of that.”
Hamadah, who testified to politicians and audiences around the world about his detention and torture during the 2011 uprising, had long been a symbol of the crimes the regime committed against its own people. But in 2020, he shocked his family and the wider Syrian diaspora by retuning to the country from his new home in the Netherlands, a decision his brother Amer al-Obaid, 66, said he believed was coerced; the family believe Hamadah was told his loved ones would be killed if he did not stop exposing the regime’s brutality and return to Syria. He was detained on arrival at Damascus airport.
The activist’s fate remained unknown until Monday, when his body – once again bearing signs of torture – was discovered in a morgue in Sednaya, the most infamous of Assad’s vast network of security branches, detention centres and prisons. Doctors who examined Hamadah’s corpse said that like many other detainees, he had been killed recently, before his captors fled.
“They knew Mazen would expose them again, so they killed him,” Obaid said.
Obaid bid a final goodbye to his brother at the Najha cemetery on the south-west outskirts of Damascus, where a few dozen mourners gathered to witness his burial. Israeli jets, too high to see, roared overhead during the ceremony; the dull thud of a far-off explosion shook the earth, and fires of unknown origin burned in the distance.
“In some ways, I am happy. Mazen went through the cruellest torture imaginable and he died for us,” his older brother said. “Without him, we would not be breathing fresh air and freedom now.”
For most families with missing loved ones, without even a body to bury, answers and closure are still out of reach. Justice will take years; in the meantime, the search continues.
In the military cemetery adjacent to where Hamada was buried on Thursday, Mahmoud Dahlil, 64, parked his car and walked through the broken gates of the vast, Brutalist-style site, shovel in hand. He wasn’t sure where to start, but he knew what he was looking for.
In 2022, it emerged that the military cemetery had been used to hide a huge mass grave containing thousands of bodies of murdered detainees, according to several men who worked there. Dahlil said he had already looked all over the city for his four cousins, who went missing in 2012 and 2013. Now it was time, he said, to look under the earth.
“There are probably graves like this all over the country,” he said. “We won’t stop until we find them all.”
