He risked everything to stand up to Assad, but he was never able to see the regime fall

Time and time again, Mazen Al-Hamada risked everything to help his fellow Syrians.

In the early days of the Arab Spring uprisings, he marched in the streets and called for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime.

For this reason, he was repeatedly arrested and tortured in the country’s notorious prison system.

He fled to the Netherlands in 2013 and spent the next seven years speaking out about the atrocities he endured. He witnessed and endured in prisonHoping to convince world leaders to bring Assad to justice.

Finally, in 2020, he returned home desperate in the hope that he could convince the Syrian authorities to free those still trapped behind bars, including his nephew.

But he was arrested upon arrival at Damascus airport, and his loved ones never saw or heard from him again — until Tuesday, when his family identified his body in the hospital morgue.

On Thursday, hundreds of Syrians took to the streets of Damascus, some for the first time in more than a decade, to attend Hamada’s funeral.

British director Sarah Afshar, Hamada’s friend, said, “I was very touched when I watched the videos. It’s comforting to see people honoring him in this way.” As it happens Host Neil Coxall.

“They’re giving him a hero’s funeral, and that’s what he is. He’s a hero.”

Afshar first met Hamada in the Netherlands in 2016 while researching her documentary about regime repression. The Disappeared in Syria: The Case Against Al-Assad.

She said there were no cameras during the first meeting. They just talked. But she knew right away that she wanted him to be the focal point of her film.

“He was incredibly open, more so than anyone else I talked to,” she said.

“He was willing to make himself vulnerable, at a high price to himself. But the reason he wanted to do that is because he really wanted the whole world to hear his story, to hear about what was happening in these prisons, because he wanted the world to hear the action.”

She said the world had failed him.

For three years after the film’s release in 2017, Hamada traveled the world with Afshar, meeting with policymakers and lobbying for justice for Assad’s victims.

But what they found, she says, is that governments are willing to look the other way and normalize relations with the regime.

“This makes me really angry, and makes Mazen really angry,” she said. “He was, you know, telling people how terrible it was inside these prisons, and the world didn’t do anything about it.”

Why did he come back?

In 2020, Hamada returned to Syria against the wishes of his loved ones.

He has received assurances from the Syrian government that he will be safe. The Washington Post reports. But instead, he was arrested upon his arrival at Damascus airport.

“We can sit here and think, ‘Well, why would he do such a dangerous thing?’ Afshar said. “But the thing is, he really felt like he had done everything he could in the West.”

After Al-Hamada was arrested, it is not clear what happened to him, which is common in Syria. United Nations estimates 100,000 people were lost Over the course of the 14-year war, many of them were subjected to arbitrary arrest or enforced disappearance.

When the rebels ousted Assad this week and began… Opening the country’s prisons Hamada’s loved ones hoped to meet him again.

Instead, they found him dead in a military hospital, his body in a condition that suggested he had been killed only the previous week.

Chanting in the streets

On Thursday, Syrians carried his coffin, wrapped in the Syrian flag, through the streets of Damascus.

The demonstrators, many of them young, chanted outside a mosque as relatives and friends performed funeral prayers inside the mosque: “We will not forget your blood, Mazen.”

Others chanted: “We will take revenge, Bashar. We will bring you before the law.”

Some of the march participants knew Hamada, others did not. Many held up black and white photos and chanted the names of their missing loved ones.

Hamada’s brother, Saeed, told Reuters that when the Assad government fell, he wished that Hamada would be released from prison so that he could see what was happening in Syria.

But now he says his brother is a martyr.

He said, “After his martyrdom, we feel happy because we paid the price for this freedom in blood.”

For some, Thursday’s march and funeral were a symbol of hope in the war-torn country. whose future remains uncertain.

Many participants said they last protested in Damascus about 13 years ago, before Assad’s crackdown on protesters turned the conflict into all-out war.

Muhammad Kulthum (32 years old) said as he walked in the procession with his mother, “I did not imagine going out in a march in any way, shape or form in Damascus.”

Afshar says it would have meant for the world Hamada to see the spirit of the revolution alive again in the streets of Syria.

“I hope and hope that where he rests in peace, he can see how they honor him, what he means to them and to the struggle and campaign for the disappeared, and what is to come – which is the campaign for justice.”