Few could bear to look long at his face, with its sunken, sorrowful eyes so full of pain — but when Mazen al-Hamada spoke, you could not help but listen. He spoke to audiences across the West, in lecture theatres and parliaments, bearing witness to the darkness of the Assad regime in low, urgent tones. Sometimes, he showed them his wrists, scarred by the chains from which he hung until he lost consciousness.
He would speak of the beatings and the rapes he and others suffered , his haunted eyes reddening at the memory. Hamada was one of the last casualties of the year uprising against Bashar al-Assad, tortured to death by a vindictive regime in its death throes just hours before the advancing rebels flung open the doors of the infamous Sednaya prison where he was held. Tens of thousands were tortured to death by the Assad regime over the course of the rebellion. The others, all believed to have been inmates at Sednaya , died either of starvation or asphyxia, most likely after suffocating in its overcrowded cells.
It is probable, the doctors concluded, that he died on Friday, less than 48 hours before Assad fled the country. We do know he suffered. From the morgue at the hospital, through the streets of Damascus to the Hejaz Railway station, the crowd carried his coffin, chanting his name, lauding his courage and regretting how poignantly close he had come to rescue.
Nor was it just those with missing relatives who joined the procession. So, too, did political prisoners of all generations who had also survived torture, not just under the regime of Bashar al Assad, but under that of his equally dictatorial father Hafez, who seized power in a coup in and ruled until his death in I never imagined I would live to see such a thing happening in Syria.
Around Mr Fadel was a gaggle of other former political prisoners from the same era, including Shireen Alsbini, a former journalist who made the mistake of taking Bashar al-Assad at his word when, after he took power in , he pledged to allow freedom of expression. After she and her sister wrote critical pieces about the regime they were both dragged from their homes in the middle of the night, still in their nightdresses. During two years in custody, they were beaten by men and women alike.
