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
Letter from Damascus
A Witness in Assad’s Dungeons
Mazen al-Hamada fled Syria to reveal the regime’s crimes. Then, mysteriously, he went back.
By Jon Lee Anderson
January 27, 2025
A blackandwhite photograph of a person with their head against the wall.
Hamada spent years describing to Western officials the torment that he and countless others—including Motasem Kattan, above—had endured in Syrian prisons. Since the regime fell, the evidence of a ruthless police state has grown overwhelming.Photographs by Moises Saman / Magnum for The New Yorker
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Afew 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.”
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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.
