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.
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.
As Jad spoke in schoolbook English, Fawzi listened and nodded or whispered corrections. Every now and then, he drew on a vape. Majida sat with an immovably serious expression; she told me later that it had been a long time since she was able to let down her guard, or to feel any kind of happiness. Jad sat close to his parents, putting his arm around them for comfort. Occasionally, he stroked their backs or shoulders, as if brushing away imaginary dust.
They told me that Mazen was not their only missing family member. In all, five close relatives, including a nephew and a brother-in-law, were believed dead. That week, they had learned that another of Fawzi’s brothers, imprisoned years before, had died in 2015; a former cellmate of his had brought the news. No one knew where his body was, but the family believed the cellmate’s account. Fawzi had been imprisoned himself, and he knew what happened to men on the inside.
Fawzi explained that he, too, had been a dissident, engaged in anti-government protests. But, as the country descended into civil war, he had made the opposite choice from his brother. While Mazen travelled abroad to draw attention to the rebels’ cause, Fawzi and his family went into internal exile: they found a place to live in a nondescript neighborhood where nobody knew them and remained there for thirteen years, hoping to evade notice and stay alive. For Fawzi, the trip to identify his brother’s body marked the end of a clandestine life. It was the first time he had left his neighborhood since the war began.
When I asked Fawzi how he remembered his brother, he thought for a moment and said, “Mazen had a beautiful soul.” Brightening, as if recalling his brother’s image, he added, “He also had a beautiful smile.”
The two grew up in Deir ez-Zor, the largest city in northeastern Syria, a proud, ancient place on the banks of the Euphrates. There has been a settlement at Deir ez-Zor for at least eleven thousand years, and through the centuries the city has been fought over by a succession of armed invaders. In 1915, it was the last destination for Armenians forced into the desert by the Turks’ genocidal campaign against them. Survivors credited the city’s mayor and its citizens with providing sanctuary; helping people in need is both an Arab custom and a local tradition.
Mazen al-Hamada was born in 1977 into a large and influential clan. There was money to be made in the region—from cotton, wheat, and, more recently, oil—and his father had built a thriving business as a livestock trader, able to comfortably support seventeen children. “Mazen was the youngest, and he was spoiled by our father,” Fawzi said fondly. The family kept homing pigeons, which Mazen loved. As he got older, he was able to indulge a taste in motorcycles and well-tailored clothes.
The Hamada siblings went into middle-class professions, Fawzi told me: “teachers, doctors, and so forth.” Most were also anti-government activists, a family tradition that went back to the time of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. Hafez seized power in 1970, and built a dictatorship that favored his minority Shiite sect, the Alawites. He sustained his power through stringent control of the socialist Baath Party and its military and intelligence apparatuses, and by encouraging a cult of personality. In 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood staged an uprising in the city of Hama. Hafez responded with a merciless campaign that, within a few weeks, destroyed much of the city and killed at least forty thousand civilians.
Fawzi told me wryly that the Assad regime had repeatedly derailed his efforts to build a life. An early job as a lab technician was interrupted by five years of compulsory military service. He’d gone to college to study French, but was imprisoned for taking part in protests; when he was released, four years later, he resolved to do something more practical, so he became a medical researcher. With evident pride, he told me that he had participated in “the fight against AIDS,” as a blood specialist in a screening facility run by the Ministry of Health.
Throughout, Fawzi remained engaged in politics. He joined a reformist party, which eventually merged into a coalition called the National Democratic Rally. After the crushing attacks in Hama, the regime had maintained a state of emergency, which gave it cover to suppress civic freedoms in the name of security. The Rally called to end the emergency, and was swiftly punished; one of the coalition leaders spent eighteen years in solitary confinement. Still, the Hamadas retained hope. Fawzi said that Mazen “grew up listening to his older brothers talk about making Syria a free and democratic country.”
After high school, Mazen studied petroleum engineering, and eventually got a job at Schlumberger, a multinational company that Syria’s government had brought in to drill oil. The business was hugely profitable—at one point, petroleum accounted for a quarter of the government’s revenue—but there was labor unrest at the company, where the workers were trying to organize a union. Mazen took the side of the workers. Fawzi said that government agents threatened him, but he didn’t back down, and the union ultimately won most of its demands.
This was an unusual conflict in a country where dissent had been crushed, and it attracted attention in the international media. It also apparently attracted resentment from Syrian officials, but for the time being Mazen was not persecuted, and he lived comfortably. “Mazen’s income was good,” Fawzi said. “He was generous. He was a very social person and formed a lot of strong friendships. He liked to have a drink and throw parties.” Fawzi recalled the period as a kind of golden age for his brother. In 2000, though, Hafez al-Assad died. His son Bashar took power, and in time proved to be an even more vicious tyrant than his father.
Bashar was never intended to lead the country. The heir apparent was his older brother Bassel—a military commander and an accomplished horseman whom the regime’s loyalists sometimes referred to as the Golden Knight. Bashar was an ophthalmology student in London, a weak-chinned introvert who was widely seen as a bit insubstantial. But, in 1994, Bassel died in a high-speed car crash, and Bashar was summoned home to be groomed for power. When his father died, he was made the head of the Baath Party and the head of the armed forces. Though he was only thirty-four, six years too young to be President, the parliament accommodatingly lowered the minimum age.
Bashar ran for office as the sole candidate and was elected to a seven-year term; in the next election, he won with an implausible ninety-eight per cent of the vote. He spoke of building a more equitable Syria, but not much really changed. The Assad clan and its friends remained in control of the security and intelligence agencies, as well as the most lucrative parts of the private sector.
The revolution began with an inexplicable overstep. In 2011, in the southern city of Daraa, a group of teen-age boys were caught painting anti-government graffiti on a wall, and, rather than simply reprimand them, secret police tortured them to death. The news inflamed an already restive populace. Protesters gathered in cities across the country, and Fawzi and Mazen got involved. “There was a soccer game under way in Deir ez-Zor, and our team tried to protest,” Fawzi said. The regime squelched the demonstration, but that only encouraged the local youth to take up the cause.
In the beginning, the rallies in Deir ez-Zor were small, with groups of forty or fifty gathering to shout “Freedom!” and “The Syrians are one!” The protests were held on Friday, the day of prayer, so that people could attend after services. “They lasted only thirty minutes, after which everyone would return home, in order to stay safe,” Fawzi said. But the brothers were working to expand the movement. Mazen recruited protesters, then filmed events; he posted the videos to an online news site that he’d helped create, and sent them on to international television channels.
As local demonstrators coördinated with allies in a nearby neighborhood, the crowds grew. Before long there were protests every day, and demonstrators were staying on the street till evening. Majida attended the rallies, and to her alarm saw that her daughters had sneaked there, too.
Fawzi recalled that the protests in Deir ez-Zor led to a huge event in the central square, in which some twenty thousand people assembled and a statue of Bassel al-Assad was knocked to the ground. Revolutionary slogans spread across the country; people gathered to chant “Get out, Bashar” and sing “Pay your blood for freedom.” The regime was threatened, and its response escalated rapidly: it sent security men to menace and detain protesters, and sometimes ordered snipers to shoot into the crowds. Fawzi was arrested, and by the time he was released the Army had taken over Deir ez-Zor.
Fearing that he would be assassinated, Fawzi fled to Damascus to live in hiding. His instinct proved correct: soon after he left, an Army tank rolled up to the family’s house, and officers emerged to ask where Fawzi was. Majida said that she didn’t know, and when security men returned later she told them the same thing. Eventually, to keep up the ruse, she filed for divorce, claiming that Fawzi had abandoned her.
Mazen was also arrested, twice, and though he was held for only a couple of weeks, it was clear that he had become a target. He followed Fawzi to Damascus, taking care not to let the regime track their interactions. They lived apart, with Mazen staying at the home of one of their sisters, and they avoided cell phones, which could be tapped or traced. They communicated only when they could meet face to face and make certain that they had not been followed.
The political uprising quickly turned into an armed insurrection. As the regime besieged cities where rebels had dug in, the brothers joined an underground relief effort for trapped civilians. In March, 2012, Mazen and two of his nephews were in a café, meeting a contact to organize a shipment of baby formula to Daraa, when regime agents burst in, handcuffed them, and forced them into an S.U.V. “I had no idea where we were going,” Mazen told my colleague Ben Taub in an interview a few years later. “The whole way, they were telling us, ‘We’re going to execute you.’ ”
They were taken to a detention center operated by Air Force intelligence at a sprawling airfield in Mezzeh, on the western outskirts of Damascus. Mazen managed to call Fawzi to get help paying a bribe. “He asked us to send fifty thousand Syrian pounds,” about nine hundred dollars at the time, “which we managed to get to him.” Later, Mazen paid two hundred thousand pounds to his interrogators, in the hope of better treatment.
Paying bribes to Assad’s henchmen was part of the ritual of repression. Relatives were sometimes able to free their loved ones, but often they failed, and had to live with the knowledge that they had helped enrich their tormentors. For Mazen’s family, the bribes were a partial success. He did not escape brutal torture, but he was eventually sent to recuperate at a military hospital in Damascus, and was then allowed to go to a civilian prison. After a few months, he was brought to court, where he gave what may have been his first testimony about his mistreatment: with the judge watching, he took off his shirt to show the evidence of cigarette burns, welts, and broken ribs. The judge, apparently moved, released him.
Mazen had spent some fifteen months in custody, but he was extraordinarily lucky. According to Fawzi, the two nephews who were arrested with him couldn’t work the system, so they were sent to Sednaya, which by then had become a virtual death camp. The Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison later estimated that at least thirty thousand people had been executed there between the beginning of the war and 2018—an average of ten every day for nearly a decade. Mazen’s nephews were apparently among them.
The Hamadas, sure that Mazen would inevitably be picked up again, persuaded him to leave the country. He set off on a well-established smugglers’ route. He crossed the border into Turkey, took an inflatable boat across the Mediterranean to the Greek islands, then went on to the European mainland, where borders were porous enough to cross on foot. After several months of travel, he arrived in the Netherlands, where one of his sisters was living.
Mazen was safe in Europe, but the civil war had grown more inflamed. Regional powers were getting involved, and the rebel forces were increasingly divided between secular freedom fighters and Islamist combatants. ISIS had swept into the country in 2014, seizing the city of Raqqa and pronouncing it the capital of a new caliphate. The city became the headquarters of a campaign of death and abuse, which included public executions, videotaped decapitations of foreign hostages, and slave auctions of captive Yazidi girls and women. ISIS soon surrounded Deir ez-Zor, less than eighty miles away, and launched a siege that dragged on for more than three years. The U.N. carried out hundreds of aerial food drops, and nearly half the civilian population was able to flee, but hundreds died, and much of the city was destroyed.
Deir ez-Zor was also heavily bombed by Russian warplanes, which had been called in to help Assad’s troops. Russian planes also repeatedly struck around the rebel-held city of Aleppo, and, after a devastating air raid there in 2018, a deal was reached allowing rebels and their families to evacuate to a safe zone on the Turkish border. Afterward, the Assad regime reassumed control of most of the rest of Syria. By then, citizens had begun fleeing, in a vast exodus that eventually included three million migrants to Turkey and more than nine hundred thousand to Germany.
Perversely, the flow of refugees to the West helped turn public opinion against intervening in the war. It coincided with an upsurge of Islamist terror attacks and a seemingly unstoppable flow of migrants from Afghanistan, Iraq, and parts of Africa. In places like Freiburg, where a group of predominantly Syrian immigrants participated in a gang rape that became a major news story, the influx fuelled security fears and anti-immigrant sentiment. In Europe and the U.S., far-right politicians fulminated that the West was under siege.
Still, as more refugees emerged and related their experience, it was becoming harder for even skeptical observers to deny the atrocities being carried out by Assad’s regime. A year before Hamada fled to Europe, a former Syrian military officer had made the same journey, bringing with him fifty-three thousand digital images of dead people whom it had been his job to photograph in military hospitals in Damascus. The files provided evidence that some eleven thousand prisoners had been tortured to death or executed in the city’s intelligence prisons—including the one in which Mazen had been held.
The officer remained anonymous, identifying himself only as Caesar, but experts quickly verified his photographs—documentary proof of systematic brutality. The images ultimately formed the basis for a presentation delivered in the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, and the United Nations, put together by the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based agency that sought to raise awareness about the regime.
The S.E.T.F.’s director, a Syrian American named Mouaz Moustafa, met Mazen in 2015, on a trip to the Netherlands. “He had been in touch and told me he knew who Caesar was and that he could help identify some of the people in his photographs,” Moustafa recalled, on a recent Zoom call from Washington, D.C.
Moustafa was cautious at first, but Mazen impressed him as sincere, and his information was detailed and credible. “He had survived this ordeal that no one should ever have to endure,” Moustafa said. “It was scary.” The two met with Stephen Rapp, who was then the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, at a hotel near Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. In the meeting, Mazen explained that he had been treated for his injuries in the military hospitals where Caesar had taken photographs.
Mazen began working with the S.E.T.F. “He became like family, really,” Moustafa said. As the organization travelled with the evidentiary trove of Caesar’s photographs, Mazen gave it a human face. He was a charismatic presence: dapper, engaging, and ebullient when he wasn’t talking about torture. Moustafa organized meetings with a long list of policymakers. On just one morning in 2017, they met with Senators Marco Rubio, Richard Blumenthal, and John Boozman, as well as staffers on the Appropriations Committee. Natalie Larrison, the S.E.T.F.’s Arkansas-based director for humanitarian projects, recalled recently, “We spent days together in Congress, where he spoke to everyone, and he had everyone in tears. He was the most effective speaker we had on behalf of the Syrian experience.”
Mazen’s appearances were also effective in raising the profile of the S.E.T.F., and he agreed to an endless series of appearances. There were trips to Boston and Chicago, media interviews, and talks at universities, churches, and high schools. In Europe, he met with politicians and members of the European Parliament, relating over and over what he had endured. In 2017, Sara Afshar, a British filmmaker, released a documentary called “Syria’s Disappeared,” which brought Mazen’s story to audiences worldwide. In the film, he sits with Afshar in a kitchen and reënacts his torture, almost physically reliving the experience, until he begins to weep before the camera.
Larrison said that Mazen was still suffering the effects of years of torment. “He was fun and lively to be with, but there was a lot of up and down,” she told me. “He got really excited listening to Syrian revolutionary songs and recalling happy family moments, but also shared heartbreaking things that were taking place in his home town.” She remembered a moment when Mazen heard that the farm where his family kept pigeons had been destroyed by bombing. “That really broke his heart,” she said.
In the Netherlands, the government gave Mazen asylum and found him an apartment. Sakir Khader, a young Palestinian Dutch photographer who befriended him, recalled that Mazen would make him tea, and they would go to the beach together. “He was traumatized, but he was always funny. He would say things in his Deir ez-Zor accent.” Khader laughed, remembering, “He’d say, ‘We’re going to go back and we’re going to fuck Bashar al-Assad.’ ”
Still, Mazen was increasingly unsettled. Between his trips to offer testimony, the Dutch state offered to pay him for community service, including gardening work. The arrangement proved unviable. Khader said, “It wasn’t the humiliation of it that bothered him—it was that he hadn’t recovered from what they had done to him in Syria. He was paranoid. He thought people were looking to harm him. He couldn’t work! His home was his safe place.” He went to a therapist, but it seemed to have little effect. “It was like he was still there in Syria—death was in his eyes,” Khader said. “His body was here, but his soul was not. It had gone long ago.”
One afternoon in Damascus, I visited one of Assad’s most notorious prisons: Branch 251 of the Syrian General Intelligence Directorate. The facility, known as Al-Khatib, sits incongruously at the edge of a community park in a predominantly Christian neighborhood. The park is surrounded by small apartment buildings and middle-class amenities: there is a tailor’s shop and a small café, and not far away is a florist, a dog-groomer, a snooker club, and a gym. To create a prison there, the regime had seized two apartment buildings, closed off the streets with iron gates, and then converted the park into an open-air garage and refuelling spot for vehicles. Residents of the other buildings were free to come and go, as long as they identified themselves to the perimeter guards.
On my visit, a handful of long-haired rebels were watching over the entrance. One led me down into the dark maw of an underground cellblock, which connected the two buildings. There was a tiny cell, its walls painted deep red and carved with graffiti, where prisoners who were to be executed were kept. Next to it was an identical cell, painted black. If you were put in the black cell, the guard said, you would never leave it alive. He pointed out blindfolds, handcuffs, and torture instruments that had been left lying around. There was a tool that seemed purpose-built for stabbing—about a foot long, with a curved handle and a steel blade filed into the shape of a talon. Not far away was a box of metal spikes.
Outside, several elderly men sat in the sunlight, having tea with the rebel guards. They lived in the neighborhood, they said, waving to nearby apartment buildings. I asked if they had ever been inside Al-Khatib, and they shook their heads. “Not until Assad left, the other day,” one said. Did they know what went on inside? They shook their heads again.
One of the men was a widower in his seventies, retired from running a chemical-dye business. He invited me for coffee in his living room, a pleasant space with framed family portraits and side tables set with embroidered doilies. He had got a good deal on the place, he explained: he had been able to buy a big apartment, with a balcony overlooking the park, for much less than it would have cost elsewhere. I noted that one of the living-room windows looked out at the upper floors of Al-Khatib, about twenty feet away. What was it like living next door to a place like that, I asked? He fell silent a moment, then said, “Sometimes we would hear screams.” He brayed strangely, imitating the noise. “It was not nice,” he said. “But otherwise our lives were normal.”
Officials in the U.S. and Europe seemed no less able to set aside the evidence of abuses. In 2012, President Barack Obama announced that if Assad used chemical weapons against his people it would represent a “red line” that would have “enormous consequences.” The next year, Assad used nerve gas in civilian areas of Damascus, and there was no retaliation. Instead, the U.S. government went on to negotiate several ceasefire deals with the regime and its Russian allies—accords that calmed the fighting but left Assad in power.
After each meeting with officials, Mazen hoped that someone would finally take decisive action against Assad. Congress eventually passed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which called for sanctions against those who aided the regime or its allies—but this did little to change the reality on the ground. When the U.S. finally deployed troops, it was to protect its own interests. Obama sent soldiers to fight alongside Kurdish rebels to destroy ISIS strongholds. Later, President Donald Trump assigned the military to protect oil fields.
Mazen found the enduring impunity of the regime increasingly difficult to comprehend. Stephen Rapp recalled bumping into him outside the White House, after yet another meeting. “I could see that he wasn’t happy,” he said. Larrison added, “Every time he told his story, it hurt him, but he didn’t hold back. He was worn out afterward, but there was also an anger growing in him because of the inaction and empty promises.”
At some point in 2018, Mazen began to succumb to a breakdown. Fawzi learned about it from their sister in the Netherlands. “She called us and said that Mazen was in bad shape, depressed, just staying in his room and smoking,” he recalled. “I spoke with him, and Mazen acknowledged his despair. I told him that the international community would take its time but in the end it would do something. I told him, ‘Take care of yourself. Go to therapy.’ He went twice and then he got worse—he said it wasn’t working. He asked for money. We sent him five thousand dollars so he could go back to the therapist. But he didn’t go.”
Mazen became increasingly bitter and antisocial. Friends say that he used drugs and behaved erratically, staying awake for days on end and growing alarmingly thin. In social-media posts and in conversation, he spoke furiously about Westerners and their allies the Kurds. When Khader expressed concern, Mazen sent him a chiding message: “Don’t bring up psychological issues with me. I’ll heal in my country.” One day in 2018, Khader recalled, “he told me to fuck off.” He had asked Mazen to participate in a documentary about the difficulties that refugees faced in the Netherlands. Mazen refused, saying, “Everyone wants to use me.” After that, Khader said, he called many times to repair the relationship, but Mazen remained angry.
Late that year, Mazen sent Khader another message, announcing that he was planning to return to Syria. He wanted to go home—to listen to prayers in the mosque and eat a meal with his family. Khader didn’t know what to do. “I let him say whatever he said, because I didn’t want to bother him, and he said he didn’t want anyone around him.”
Soon afterward, Khader went to Syria himself, to document the war as a photojournalist. After a few months, he travelled on to Iraq. In early 2020, before the two men could reconnect, Khader heard that Mazen had followed through on his pledge.
Mazen’s loved ones still struggle to understand why he went back to Syria, when he must have known that the regime would kill him. The stories that they recount differ in details, but they share a basic trajectory. Mazen lost his apartment in the Netherlands, and, after a rootless period, he went to stay with his nephew Ziad, who lived in Krefeld, a town across the German border. When he arrived, he was dishevelled and acting strangely; he said that he’d been robbed of his laptop and his money.
While he was in Germany, he visited the Syrian Embassy in Berlin—perhaps several times. On one visit, he secured an expedited passport. When he came home and showed it off, Ziad was so horrified that he and his wife secretly ran it through their washing machine, to make it impossible to use. Mazen was increasingly despondent. At times, he set out pictures of Obama and other Western leaders and argued with them. He talked obsessively about a guard who had tortured him, and one day he led Ziad into the bathroom to reveal a terrible consequence of his imprisonment: his genitals were mangled, leaving him unable to have children. “I have no future,” he said.
Not long afterward, he disappeared and set off for Syria. He must have been given a new passport—which his family and friends cite as evidence that the Assad regime lured him to Damascus. “It was clear they wanted Mazen back,” Mouaz Moustafa said. Mazen’s supporters speak of times that he was seen with a woman who was known to work at the Embassy. Moustafa believes that he encountered a group of expats in Berlin who were linked to Assad’s intelligence apparatus, and that they promised him he could play a key part in ending the war. “Mazen had acquired some delusions of grandeur,” he said. “They used his delusions to convince him to go back to Damascus, and they told him, ‘They’ll roll out the red carpet for you.’ ”
Another Syrian exile in Germany told me that she, too, believed Assad’s agents had persuaded Mazen to make the trip, but she suggested that hubris was not his only motivation. When he told her of his plan, she recalled, she begged him not to go, but he said that he was worried about his family: the regime had threatened to arrest one of his sisters.
At the Berlin airport, according to an account posted online and then deleted, Mazen ran into an acquaintance and disclosed his plans. (The account noted that he was accompanied by the woman linked to the Syrian Embassy.) As word spread that Mazen was heading to Syria, alarmed phone calls went back and forth among his friends and relatives. Soon after his plane touched down in Damascus, Ziad reached him on his cell phone. He recalls that Mazen seemed to have realized that he had made a mistake. “Pray for me, nephew,” he said, sounding frightened. “I’m waiting in the transit lounge, and then I’ll fly to Sudan.” Before the call ended, Ziad heard voices warning Mazen to watch what he said.
At the Damascus airport, Mazen made a few last frantic calls. He reached Natalie Larrison, of the S.E.T.F., but all she could make out was the word “Damascus” in Arabic, and then the connection cut off. Before dawn, according to Fawzi, Mazen called one of their sisters, asking her to bring him money at the airport—perhaps to pay a bribe and perhaps to buy a ticket for another flight. The sister felt that it was unsafe to travel at that hour, so she went at daybreak and asked after Mazen. By then, he had been arrested and taken to the Air Force-intelligence prison. No one saw him again until his body showed up in the military morgue, five years later.
One of the surreal legacies of the war is the juxtaposition of neighborhoods that were pulverized by fighting and others that were left unscathed. Regime strongholds—such as the Old City and the area of parks and ministries that sits below Assad’s hilltop palace—remain nearly pristine. The poorer, predominantly Sunni Muslim suburbs where the armed resistance against Assad took root are now largely reduced to collapsed concrete slabs, twisted rebar, and dust.
In Damascus, an accountant named Omar pointed out his apartment. It was in a comfortable residential building that, to one direction, faced a tree-lined park and streets set with cafés and restaurants. To the other, across a swath of scrubland dotted with auto-repair shops and small farms, was Jobar, a neighborhood of concrete apartment blocks. A mostly Sunni area, it was taken over by rebels early in the war and became the site of several exceptionally fierce battles, including some in which the regime deployed sarin gas. Now Jobar is a landscape of flattened buildings that evoke Dresden in the Second World War—or, perhaps, contemporary Gaza. During the fighting, bullets fired from the Jobar side occasionally hit Omar’s building. But his apartment wasn’t damaged, he explained; it was on the safe side.
When Fawzi picked a place to live in Damascus, he surveyed the city’s neighborhoods carefully. He settled on Jaramana, a lower-middle-class area with a bustling shopping district flanked by rows of drab residential streets. Jaramana has residents from many sects, but the majority belong to the Druze faith, whose leaders had kept their community out of the protest movement and had thus been allowed to police themselves. As the war raged on, the neighborhood remained essentially untouched.
A year after Fawzi arrived, Majida and their children made their way to the capital, too. For about a year, they lived separately; only after they were sure that they were not under surveillance did they move in together. Once reunited, they paid the rent in cash and kept to themselves, careful to avoid any hint that they were associated with the rebellion. To disguise their family name, Fawzi adhered to the Arab custom of calling himself after his eldest son, becoming Abu Jad—“father of Jad.” He dressed habitually in a blue jacket, which connoted a connection to Air Force intelligence. Jad said that his mother and two sisters went without hijabs, “free style,” to enhance the impression that they were connected to the secular regime. “The neighbors didn’t bother us, because they were afraid we would take them to prison.” He added, with a laugh, that not even their downstairs neighbor, a military officer, suspected their real identity. Fawzi, listening in, smiled slyly and nodded.
When the family arrived in Jaramana, Jad was about eleven, and his sisters were a few years older. They quickly grasped the rules of their situation. “Our school friends didn’t visit us—we knew not to bring anyone home,” he said. “I understood that I couldn’t have fights or call attention to myself.” He often woke up at night to find his father smoking and whispering into a computer microphone, talking via a secure connection with old comrades. Sometimes Fawzi met with them in person, but he went furtively—“like a mouse,” he said—keeping to side streets and travelling on foot, to avoid vehicle checkpoints.
They lived frugally, off the family’s savings, and Majida helped make ends meet by tutoring students in Arabic. Sometimes they sang folk songs from Deir ez-Zor, with Jad accompanying them on the oud. To keep from being heard, they shut the door, drew curtains over the windows, and had what Jad called “a quiet party for our nearest and dearest.”
Still, it pained Fawzi that his brother couldn’t be with them. About a year after Mazen returned to Syria, a fellow-activist wrote on social media that he had died of torture at the Air Force-intelligence prison. Fawzi didn’t want to believe the claim, and he was reassured when a former inmate posted a video a few months later claiming to have seen Mazen. The inmate said that he was being tortured to make him go on television and recant his accusations, but that he had refused. Soon, another released prisoner confirmed that Mazen was alive. He added that he was very courageous, but also mentally unbalanced because of the harshness of his treatment; along with the torture, his jailers were subjecting him to a starvation diet.
Though Mazen would not survive to describe his last imprisonment, other former inmates have emerged to tell of similar experiences. On the morning after Assad’s escape from Damascus, in the underground dungeon of a fearsome prison known as the Palestine Branch, a twenty-seven-year-old farmer’s son named Motasem Kattan awoke to shouts and the clattering of iron doors. Frightened by the tumult, he curled up in a corner of his cell, as guards had instructed him to do. When people opened his door and told him, “Assad’s gone, you’re free!” he refused to move. If the guards had seen him leave his corner, they would have beaten him severely.
Eventually, he was led out, shaking with fear and struggling to walk. A woman and an old man propped him between them and half carried him up the stairs. The woman, who had been searching for a loved one, wept when she saw how terrified Motasem was. His body was emaciated, and he had rashes and open wounds on his legs. She and the old man led Motasem outside the prison walls and onto the edge of a highway. They asked if he knew someone they could call, and he gave them his father’s phone number. Motasem’s father was astonished to get the call. His son had been in prison for fifteen months, and the family assumed that he was dead.
A week later, I visited Motasem at his family’s home, a cinder-block structure on a dusty street in the suburb of Douma. He was still in disbelief, his eyes unnaturally wide and unblinking. His mother gave me a message in improvised sign language: she nodded to him, touched her heart, and then held out two fingers. She had another son who was dead and a brother who was still missing.
Despite Motasem’s ordeal, he brought me back to the Palestine Branch. He wanted to walk its hallways again and, much as Mazen al-Hamada had, reveal the places where he had been brutalized. For an hour, he reënacted the process that had followed his arrest. There was the room where his name was written in a ledger, and the spot where he was forced to strip to his underpants and stand with his face against a dirty wall. There was the place where he was fingerprinted and given a number to replace his name. There was the cell in which he was held: a windowless, gray-painted room about twenty feet by fifty feet, with nothing in it but a tiny toilet cubicle in one corner. A hundred and forty other men were kept inside.
The prisoners were packed so tightly that they were forced to sit hunched up during the day and to sleep pressed together at night. They were given small amounts of water and bread, occasionally supplemented by a bit of bean soup or bones from chickens that the guards had eaten. The guards prohibited them from speaking. A camera was placed above the door, like a glass eye, and if an infraction was detected the prisoner was taken away for punishment—handcuffed and beaten, as Mazen had been, or forced into a rubber tire and lashed with a leather belt or a plastic hose. Motasem smiled to show that he was missing one of his front teeth. He said that he had lost it early, when one of his tormentors punched him in the mouth.
Motasem traversed the prison, reliving his debasement, even throwing himself on the filthy floor. Gesturing at the hole in the cell floor where the men had defecated, he explained that, because the prisoners could not speak, they had to ask to relieve themselves by writing on the wall, with pencils improvised from tinfoil. A designated cell leader approved who went and for how long. The same system applied to bathing: every three weeks, they were permitted a few minutes to clean themselves in the toilet cubicle, with a half litre of water. Once, he recalled, two inmates had begged for more drinking water, and the guards told them to drink from the latrine. The men had spent the next few days dying of cholera; Motasem held one of them in his arms as he died.
Upstairs, in the prison’s administrative area, Motasem pointed out where he was compelled to sign confessions prepared for him—admitting that he had been a member of an armed rebel group, that he was a traitor, and that he had killed a government official. He was then taken into an office where a gray-haired officer politely read out the crimes that he had confessed to. When he came to the admission of killing an official, Motasem gently protested, saying he had not done that. The officer closed his file and said that he would be punished for lying. He called a guard, who took Motasem away to solitary confinement. On the way, a prisoner who acted as an orderly told him that people sent to that cell never got out. At that point, Motasem said, he gave up, and from then until his release he was only awaiting death.
Motasem’s father, who had come with us and stood watching throughout the tour, spoke for the first time. “I didn’t know,” he said softly, tears streaming down his face.
When I visited the Mezzeh prison, where Mazen was held twice, the guards posted by Assad’s regime had been replaced by a handful of rebels. They lounged in chairs near the entrance gate, basking in the winter sun. Around them, the ground was strewn with the detritus of the old regime: uniforms, bullet casings, boots, defaced Assad posters. On an airstrip, the hangars stood empty, but some still contained crates of live Russian munitions. Outside were the charred wrecks of helicopters that Israel, in its ongoing campaign to destroy Syria’s military capability, had blasted in the past few days. Tanks and armored personnel carriers were parked haphazardly where fleeing soldiers had deserted them. Stray cats followed us around, mewling from hunger.
The interior of the prison was like others I’d seen: rows of windowless cells, some with Quranic verses dabbed carefully on the walls with green soap. Outside the cellblocks were the guards’ rooms, full of broken chairs, yellowing computers, and empty cigarette packs. A rebel with his face hidden by a balaclava showed me a gold-painted bust of Assad, which he kicked across the room, cursing viciously. In a cellblock for female detainees, he pointed out bras and women’s clothing and some children’s toys. “They even kept children here,” he said in disgust. A shelf in a hallway held boxes of medicine. He picked one up and shoved it in front of my face. It was used to provide forced abortions, he said; the guards had habitually raped women who were held there. “They were pigs,” he spat.
The guards seemed to have made no effort to hide their abuses. In Mezzeh and the other prisons I visited, there were troves of documents, fastidiously cataloguing the workings of the penal system. Papers with official seals were strewn around floors and left on desks. Some contained records of surveillance operations and transcripts of interrogations. Others bore the names of prisoners, the orders for their arrest, and the crimes that they were accused of committing. In the Palestine Branch, I came across a huge pile of photographs taken of prisoners after interrogation. For many, it was likely the last image of them before they died.
In mid-January, the Hamadas helped circulate a petition calling to protect the evidence that remains at the detention centers. “Their walls are like notebooks and witnesses, telling the stories of the suffering of our sons and daughters,” they wrote. There is some precedent for a war-crimes inquiry. In 2019, two former Syrian military officers who had worked at Al-Khatib were arrested in Germany and tried for murdering dozens of detainees. One was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity; the other received a shorter sentence for complicity.
Stephen Rapp, the former Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, travelled to Damascus after Assad fled. He toured mass graves that he had previously seen only in satellite photos and visited prisons where the abuses he helped reveal were committed. He also met with members of the new government, who just days before had been Islamist rebels. Rapp told me the officials had assured him that prosecuting members of the old regime was a top priority. “They emphasized to me their intention in setting up courts to seek justice for their victims, including Mazen, and that their trials would be a mix of Islamic Sharia and international law,” he said.
Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, maintains that he wants to create an electoral democracy, one that respects all the country’s sects and ethnic groups. But many observers are concerned that Sharaa—a former member of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda—is merely trying to cultivate support from the West before asserting a more radical agenda, as the Taliban did after the U.S. evacuated Afghanistan. A senior diplomat who is active in the region told me that he worries Sharaa will be unable to “control his base.” He spoke of reports of revenge killings around the country, particularly against the Alawite community.
Still, Mazen’s supporters hope that his death will help bring about democracy. “The blood of my family and that shed by other Syrians has paid the price for our freedom,” Fawzi told me.
A few days after I visited the Hamadas’ home, they met me in Tishreen Park, a landscaped hillside of trees and lawns that merge into the foothills of the mountains around Damascus. On the nearest summit was Assad’s former palace, a hard-lined modernist block.
The Hamadas were bundled up against the cold, and looked wary. We strolled for a few minutes and then found a bench to sit on. A couple of men who had set up a brazier sold us paper cups of steaming tea.
With a wan smile, Fawzi told me that he had not been to Tishreen Park since before the war. This was the third time he had left Jaramana in thirteen years. The previous two had been to identify his brother’s body and to bury him, so this was the first excursion that did not have to do with death.
Majida spoke up to describe her daughters’ accomplishments. The younger one was living in Germany, where she worked as a dentist and helped women in a public health clinic. The elder daughter was in Beirut, studying for a master’s degree in democracy and international law. Soon, Majida said, she would leave Syria to visit them both.
As we spoke, Jad said he wanted me to know that his full name was Jad Fawzi al-Hamada, and that he was proud of his father. Fawzi had remained in Syria throughout the war, despite the dangers. “He decided to stay as long as revolutionary change was needed,” Jad said, noting that his father’s political party had offered to get him out of the country a year into the war but that he had declined. Fawzi added something, and Jad translated: “We will have freedom in Syria, or we will die here.”
I asked Fawzi what he wanted to do with his newly restored freedom. “We will not be free until we have held Assad and his people to account for what they have done,” he said. “After that, I will leave politics and all this hard stuff and have a free man’s life, without headaches,” he laughed. He quoted the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “We love life whenever we can.”
Majida said it was also important that, in the new Syria, girls and women be raised as “free persons, with a full knowledge of what democracy means.” She grew expansive and said, “We miss the old times when the family would sing, with Jad playing the oud and the girls singing.” Glancing fondly at his wife, Fawzi said, “Majida used to sing, too, and has a beautiful voice, especially when she sang the songs of Fairuz.” Majida protested, “I haven’t sung for a long time. But maybe I will again.”
The sun sank over Assad’s palace, and the evening chill began to reach us. Eventually, we stood to leave. As we walked, Majida looked past the edge of the park into the city, with its patchwork of dreadful wounds and small signs of recovery. She smiled a bit and said, “Today is the first time in years I have felt that our country is beautiful.” ♦
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