The day he arrives in the Netherlands and is alone in his room in the asylum seeker center for the first time, Mazen al-Hamada lies down in bed. He puts on his hood, curls up under a woolen blanket and closes his eyes. “There was a terrifying buzzing in my head,” he writes in the book about his life Oublie ton nom, which was published in 2022. ‘Zzzzzzzzz… Tac tac tac tac.. all these sounds entered my brain. The planes, the prisoners. Dead people, burned people. People… people. […] No one can imagine the horrors I saw.”
The moment the images flash through his mind, Mazen al-Hamada makes a decision: now that he has arrived safely in Europe, he will become a witness. “I have a duty to those I left behind in prison, a moral duty as a Syrian to his people and his cause.”
From the Netherlands, Mazen al-Hamada became one of the international faces of the Syrian victims of the Assad regime. He did something that few people dared: talk about the atrocities that took place in Assad’s prisons. Mysteriously, Hamada returned to his native country in 2020 and was never heard from again. Until last Monday. When the Syrian rebels opened the infamous Saydnaya prison after ousting Assad, they found the suspected body of Mazen al-Hamada there.
“Based on the photos, he appears to have been executed shortly before the fall of Damascus,” says professor Ugur Üngör, who conducts research into torture for the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (Niod). “This could be an act of revenge by the regime,” says Üngör. “Mazen was a prominent activist who drew international attention to Assad’s crimes.”
Assad’s slaughterhouse
The first time Hamada was held in Saydnaya prison, also known as Assad’s slaughterhouse, was in 2012. He was arrested for involvement in anti-Assad demonstrations. In prison he undergoes the most gruesome tortures. He is released, flees the country in 2014 and applies for asylum in the Netherlands. He is assigned a rental house in Hillegom. But building a new life is not possible. His traumas are too great for that.
Hamada throws himself into exposing the horrors taking place in Syria. He talks about it to American generals, at international conferences and works with human rights organizations that try to track down Syrian war criminals. “I will not rest until I bring them to justice,” Hamada said in the documentary Syria’s Disappeared. “I will prosecute them no matter what, even if it costs me my life.”
Although he manages to draw attention to the torture practices, he is left with a feeling of deep disappointment, says the Syrian Dutchman Fouad Hallak, who was in contact with him. “He spoke to journalists from all over the world, but nothing changed. Western countries that say they believe in human rights continued to refuse to intervene. It made him desperate.”
Hamada also writes about this in his book. He would like nothing more than to return to Syria to help heal the “wounded souls” who have lost everything. “I would like to build schools for the new generations, so that they do not develop towards extremism,” he writes. ‘I want to end all this, end this life, hang myself in a room somewhere. This life is damned.”
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Back to Syria
While Hamada struggles with trauma and depression, he has to deal with Dutch social services. There they see him as an unemployed status holder who has to work for his benefits. If he can travel abroad to tell stories of torture, then he should be able to accept a job, right? His benefits are cut. At the end of 2019, he can no longer pay his rent and ends up on the street.
Hamada then leaves for Germany. He visits the Syrian embassy in Berlin several times to discuss a voluntary return, he writes the Washington Post in a reconstruction of his departure in 2021. There he would have been told that he was not wanted in Syria and could return with peace of mind.
After landing in Beirut, on his way to Syria, a Syrian activist calls him in an attempt to change his mind. What drives him to return to the country where he was tortured? In the recording of the conversation, published Through the Washington PostHamada says he is tired of convincing the world of Assad’s evil. “We went to America and told them the whole story. We went to Germany and told them the whole story. We went to the Netherlands, France and even Italy. And people didn’t listen. The whole world wasn’t listening,” says Hamada.
That’s why he should go now himself, he thought, to work on a solution to the war. Even if it meant his death.
After his arrival in Syria, he was never heard from again. It now appears that he was most likely killed in prison shortly before Assad’s ouster. That is extra sad, says Fouad Hallak. “For a long time he dreamed of the fall of the regime. And now that the time has finally come, he will no longer experience it.”
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