His hollow eyes and tears had made him the symbol of the horrors of Assad’s Syria. Unfortunately he did not live to see the regime fall, Mazen al-Hamadaperhaps the most famous of Syrian activists. His body was found in the “human slaughterhouse” of Sednaya. On the corpse, the visible signs of that torture from which he had managed to escape to tell the whole world the darkest side of the rais’ system.
Hamada’s odyssey began during the first years of the Syrian uprising, in 2011 and 2012, when he was arrested several times. After his release in 2014, he was granted political asylum in the Netherlands where he decided to raise public awareness of the government’s rights violations and brutal tactics used in the regime’s prisons. For years he traveled across Europe and the United States, recounting the horrors he witnessed and endured:sexual assaults, electric shocks, and how he was hung from the ceiling with chains that left gouges in his wrists. He was beaten, tortured by guards who broke his ribs by jumping on him, burned with cigarette butts. In 2020, he made the decision that took everyone by surprise, and which we now know cost him his life: to return to Damascus. He said he had received assurances that he was not on the government’s wanted list. But upon his return he was arrested and nothing more was heard of him, one of the many who disappeared under the Assad regime. A silence that lasted until Tuesday, when his body was found in Sednaya prison.
The spread of the news triggered a wave of pain, dismay and celebrations on social media. Maysoun Berkdara Syrian journalist living in Berlin, was celebrating Assad’s fall when she heard about it. “I was live streaming and I started screaming,” she said, quoted by Middle East Eye. “The photo of his tortured body is enough to spark a thousand revolutions. He will forever remain one of Syria’s bravest heroes,” wrote a user on that this world is so dirty. I’m sorry that your eyes have never stopped watering all these years,” he said Celine Kasema Syrian activist. But if the regime can kill the man, it certainly cannot kill the symbol: «Although the voice of Mazen al-Hamada has been silenced, he is still a witness to the regime’s brutality today. His eyes underlined every word he said,” wrote yet another online user.