The Face of the Syrian Revolution

In today’s newsletter, Jon Lee Anderson reports from Damascus on shocking new evidence about the Syrian police state. Plus:

For years, as the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad maintained his brutal grip on the country, a former political prisoner named Mazen al-Hamada emerged as a spokesman for the regime’s victims, having escaped to the West and testified widely of the unspeakable treatment that he and his fellow-prisoners had endured. But, after seemingly suffering a mental break, Hamada returned to Syria in 2020 and was promptly arrested by the government, never to be seen alive again. After rebels liberated Damascus, in December, Hamada’s body was discovered in the morgue of a military hospital. A coroner had found that he had died of “the shock of pain.”

In remarkable reporting from Syria, beginning in the days following Assad’s ouster, Jon Lee Anderson details how Hamada became a martyr of the revolution, and documents the experiences of former captives returning to the places of their confinement, where Assad’s prison guards fleeing their posts had left behind evidence of mass human-rights violations and of the scope of the state’s system of violence. Read or listen to the story »

Further reading: Ben Taub met with Hamada in 2016, in a hotel room near Amsterdam, where they discussed the activist’s efforts in the lead-up to the revolution.

P.S. How does a skyscraper get tagged six hundred feet up? In this week’s Talk of the Town, Jake Offenhartz follows a pair of graffiti artists as they show off their rock-climbing training. And, for more on the public art form, read this classic piece by Calvin Tomkins, from 1984, about how graffiti conquered the world. 🧗