Syrian activist whose suffering became a symbol of Assad’s brutality found dead in Sednaya prison | Syria

As he spoke to lawmakers and in lecture halls around the world, Mazen al-Hamada’s face told the story of brutal torture at the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The discovery of the Syrian activist’s body in the notorious Sednaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus brought with it the news that he never lived to see his demise.

Hamada’s sunken eyes and haunted face, as well as his tears as he described the depth of the horror he experienced, made him a symbol of the crimes committed by the Assad regime against those who spoke out against it.

After the uprising against Assad’s rule in 2011, Hamada was arrested and tortured along with tens of thousands of people.

“Mazen had endured tortures so cruel, so unimaginable, that his retellings had an almost unearthly weight. When he spoke, it was as if he was staring death itself in the eye and asking the angel of mortality for a little more time,” wrote Hamada’s friend, photographer and director Sakir Khader.

He said he had become “one of the most important witnesses against Assad’s regime.”

Following the fall of Assad, details are now emerging about the industrial scale of the detention and torture facilities operated by the Syrian state.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) recorded 15,102 deaths from torture in regime-run prisons between March 2011 and July this year. It said 100,000 more people were missing and believed to be incarcerated, and some could be found now that prison inmates have been released.

Fadel Abdulghany, the head of the SNHR, which tracks people who have been “forcibly disappeared”, collapsed on live television this week when he said that all 100,000 people had probably “died under torture” in prison.

Hamada was released in 2013 and received asylum in the Netherlands in 2014. He then began touring Western capitals, moving audiences to tears as he showed them his scars and described what he had endured at the hands of Syrian authorities.

In the documentary “Syria’s Disappeared,” he cried on camera as he said, “The law will hold them accountable. “I will not rest until I bring them to justice and get justice.”

However, his friends and supporters suspected that Hamada was overwhelmed by the world’s inability to act. Sara Afshar, the director of Syria’s Disappeared, shared a picture of him receiving a standing ovation for his statement. “He moved people and spoke over and over again. Why didn’t the world act? Why?” she asked.

Then in early 2020, in a decision that frightened and confused his friends and rocked the community of dissident exiles, Hamada disappeared after he apparently decided to return to Syria.

That someone who had experienced Syria’s worst torture chambers would choose to return led many to believe he had been duped by elements of the Assad regime to prevent him from speaking out.

“Assad bears the main blame, but the Dutch government shares responsibility for his death,” said Khader, who believed the Dutch asylum system had failed his friend.

He claimed that Dutch authorities overlooked Hamada’s suffering and stopped supporting him. “He saw returning to Damascus as his only option,” Khader said.

The Dutch Foreign Ministry detailed Hamada’s case in a report on Syria a year later, saying he had “returned to Syria” and his whereabouts were unknown, but did not comment on the reasons that led him to leave the country. The Netherlands was among the countries that announced this week that they would stop processing Syrian asylum and residency applications.

Hamada disappeared shortly after arriving in Damascus amid indications that he had been re-arrested by the state. His friends, family and supporters had hoped he could be found alive and released along with thousands of others from the sprawling prison system.

But the discovery of his body showed that Hamada had died at the hands of those he had once escaped, in Sednaya, a place seen as the epitome of the cruelty of Assad’s prison system. The prison has been described by Amnesty International as a “human slaughterhouse,” a place where thousands were tortured, raped and killed in regular mass executions.

Rebel forces said they found 40 bodies piled up in the Sednaya mortuary that showed signs of torture, including an image that Hamada circulated online.

The discovery of his body suggested that he was probably killed by insurgents shortly before the prison inmates were liberated. Khader described his friend’s suffering as “the unimaginable agony of a man who had risen from the dead to fight again, only to be condemned to a slow death in the West.”