Early one morning in December, Hamza Alramdoun knocked on his parental home in Homs for the first time in thirteen years. The sun had just risen and the Syrian rebel had fought all night to liberate his hometown from the Assad regime. He was exhausted and had lost five friends in battle, but couldn’t wait to get home.
“My old neighbor Somer opened the door,” says Hamza (30) a few days later in the pizza parlor Chill & Grill in the center of Homs. He has wild curls and wears a black leather jacket and red Adidas sneakers. “We went to school together before the revolution. But I immediately saw the hatred in his eyes.”
Somer supports the Assad regime, Hamza says, and according to him even worked for military intelligence. “He just stole our house after we fled.” For security reasons NRC did not visit Somer for rebuttal, but the practice that Hamza describes was widespread during the war.
He picks up his phone and shows a video. It shows him standing in front of his house with a Kalashnikov. There are portraits on the wall in honor of those who died shabihaa Syrian term for Assad’s henchmen who fought in pro-regime militias. Hamza rips the portraits off the wall and screams at the top of his lungs. “This is my house!” he shouts. “This is my neighborhood! I’m back!”
Hamza said he avoided a physical confrontation with his old neighbor. “I told him to hurry up and left,” he says. “I trust that the leaders of liberation will bring justice.”
But how do you start in a country that has been awash with war crimes for decades? Who decides who is guilty? And how do you find the balance between the justice that victims crave and the stability that devastated and impoverished Syria needs?
Rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa must find answers to these questions. He must navigate between two extremes. If the government acts too harshly against the old regime remnants, it could lead to uncontrolled violence, because many rebels are hungry for revenge and many Assad loyalists are still armed. But if he does too little, conflicts in neighborhoods like Hamza’s will continue to fester and the chance will increase that citizens will eventually become their own judge – with all the consequences that entails.
Attempted arrest
For the time being, courts are barely functioning, if at all, the new police are understaffed and the transitional government has too few troops, especially in old regime strongholds, to tackle alleged war criminals. This was evident on December 25 in the coastal province of Tartous, where fourteen government soldiers were killed by regime loyalists during an attempted arrest of a senior officer at Saydnaya Prison, held responsible for thousands of executions. A day later, Mohammed Kanjo al Hassan was arrested.
In Homs province, authorities also started the new year with a large-scale arrest wave, with some 650 people arrested, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. arrested. Among them, according to reports on social media, was also a man who allegedly took documents and surveillance images from Saydnaya prison. The operation has been completed, Syrian state media report, but according to Hamza, skirmishes between rebels and rebels are still taking place in the villages around the city. shabiha.
Especially in Homs, such violence can quickly take on sectarian forms. Many Sunnis and Alawites live in the city. While the Alawites were in charge under Assad (Assad himself is an Alawite), the roles have now been reversed. Shortly after the liberation, images appeared on social media of groups of Sunnis marching through the streets demanding that the Alawites leave the city.
When his uncle was murdered, the teenager joined the armed opposition
Hamza grew up amid these sectarian tensions. His family is Sunni, but neighbor Somer and many others in the neighborhood are Alawite. When the uprising against Assad broke out in 2011, the regime incited the Alawites in the neighborhood against the demonstrators. “I was seventeen at the time and participated in the protests,” says Hamza. “When the people in the neighborhood found out, my father told me to leave immediately. It was the last time I saw him. He died as a refugee in Jordan.”
Shortly after Hamza’s departure, his uncle was murdered with an ax by a group of men, he says. That was when the teenager decided to join the armed opposition. “I wanted to avenge my uncle,” says Hamza. “It felt good to pick up a gun.”
Thus began Hamza’s years-long wandering through countless rebel groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda and predecessor of Sharaa’s fighting group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). “I was looking for answers and all these groups claimed to be able to provide them,” says Hamza. In between fights, he said he took to the books. “I read everything from Goethe to Dostoyevsky to Abu Mus’ab al-Suri (an al-Qaeda theorist, ed.)”
In 2018, Hamza ended up in the rebel stronghold of Idlib, a northwestern province under HTS control. There he has been increasingly involved in painting and theater in recent years, he says. But when the HTS offensive began last month, Hamza rejoined his old comrades and rushed to Homs.
Regret
Does he regret what he did during the war? The hyperactive Hamza falls silent for a moment at that question. “There is one moment that continues to haunt me,” he says. “After a battle I saw seven regime soldiers. They were armed, but already in the process of withdrawing. I was in doubt: should I shoot or not? In the end I shot them.” He swallows. “They were people and I killed them.”
Now that the war is over, Hamza wants to establish a theater in which he and his old comrades-in-arms can give performances to process their traumas. But according to him, such catharsis is not for the regime’s accomplices. “Those people cannot heal,” he says. “Their goal was to commit crimes.”
Yet there is indeed a large group of former regime soldiers who were forced to join the army. The transition government is trying to encourage them to come forward and their to surrender weapons. In return, they receive a ‘temporary protection card’ with which they can identify themselves at police checks.
Also in Homs, dozens of men are queuing in front of the police station to hand over their weapons. They look uncomfortable, angry and ashamed. Many of them do not want to talk to the newspaper, but those who do dare always claim that they have done nothing wrong. “I was in the army for nine years but never fought with the rebels,” says Wissam, one of the men in line. He is clearly nervous and contradicts himself a few sentences later. “We were forced to fight. Those who refused were killed.”
The ex-soldiers must have a fingerprint made and are briefly questioned about their time in service, says an employee of the office. He covered his face for fear of reprisals. “The main thing now is to get the guns off the streets,” he says. “Later it will be up to a judge to find out who has blood on his hands.”
Destroyed neighborhood of Homs.
Photos Al Baraa Haddad
Legal talent
There is a dire shortage of judges, says Mohammed Joja (45), a Syrian lawyer who lived in Turkey until recently but returned to Homs immediately after the liberation. “I think about 60 percent of the judges in Homs have left,” says Joja in a cafe. “They were connected to the regime and corrupt. We have to completely redesign the legal system.”
The Syrian diaspora has enough legal talent to do that job, says Joja, who explains that he and many others have been invited by the authorities to contribute to the transition. “But first there must be a new constitution and an actual government. That will take years.” The lawyer finds this understandable, but also sees risks. “People who lost their loved ones in Saydnaya will not rest until they see justice. The longer that goes on, the greater the chance that people will take revenge themselves. This never serves justice.”
Many images of apparent revenge attacks are already appearing on social media
Many images of apparent revenge attacks are already appearing on social media. It shows both civilians and rebels beating or humiliating suspected former regime supporters. The images cannot usually be verified and are often distributed on channels where a lot of disinformation appears, but they also cause great unrest, especially within the Alawite community.
Hamza also lost a brother in Saydnaya prison, but in the pizza parlor in Homs the rebel solemnly vowed last month that he is no longer seeking revenge.
Three weeks later, in a follow-up telephone interview, he admits that he has become somewhat impatient. Although he is no longer allowed to enter his neighborhood without special permission from the authorities, this week he jumped on the moped of an acquaintance at the new security services to take a look.
To Hamza’s relief, it turned out that his old neighbor had indeed left, but as far as he was concerned, his neighborhood was far from safe. He immediately bumped into Somer’s cousin and told him that the shopkeeper opposite his house supports Assad’s old ally Hezbollah. “But now he has suddenly hung up a revolution flag. He wanted to shake my hand, but I refused. I don’t shake hands with criminals.”
When his mother returns from Jordan soon, Hamza does not plan to live together in his parental home. “Without justice we cannot feel at home,” he says. “I think we should rent something in a Sunni neighborhood for the time being.”