After 50 years of Assad cruelty, Syrians search for dead loved ones – and closure

On a painted wall outside Damascus’s Mustahed Hospital are photographs of the faces of dead men.

A constantly changing crowd of people examine them, squinting against the low winter sun at men who look as if they died in great pain. Noses, mouths and eye sockets are twisted, damaged and squashed.

Their bodies are in the hospital, brought to the city centre from another on the outskirts of Damascus. The medics say the dead were all prisoners.

A stream of wives, brothers, sisters and fathers come to the hospital looking for information. They’re hoping most of all to find a body to bury.

They get as close as possible to the photos looking hard for anything on the faces that they recognise. Some of them video each picture to take home for a second opinion.

It is a brutal job. A few of the men had been dead for weeks judging by the way faces have decomposed.

From the wall of photos, relatives go on to the mortuary.

Mustahed Hospital received 35 bodies, so many that the mortuary is full and the overflow room packed with trolleys loaded with body bags.

Inside the morgue, bodies were laid out on a bare concrete floor under a line of refrigerated trays.

Body bags had been opened as families peered inside and opened the refrigerators.

Some corpses were wrapped loosely in shrouds that had fallen away to expose faces, or tattoos or scars that could identify someone.

One of the dead men was wearing a diaper. Another had sticky tape across his chest, scrawled with a number. Even as they killed him, his jailors denied him the dignity of his own name.

All the bodies were emaciated. The doctors who examined them said they had signs of beating including severe bruising and multiple fractures.

Dr Raghad Attar, a forensic dentist, was checking dental records left by families to try to identify bodies. She spoke calmly about how she was assembling a bank of evidence that could be used for DNA tests, then broke down when I asked her how she was coping.

“You hear always that prisoners are lost for a long time, but seeing it is very painful.

“I came here yesterday. It was very difficult for me. We hope the future will be better but this is very hard. I am really sorry for these families. I am very sorry for them.”

Tears rolled down her face when I asked her if Syria could recover from 50 years of the Assads.

“I don’t know. I hope so. I have the feeling that good days are coming but I want to ask all countries to help us.”

“Anything to help us. Anything, anything…”

The families and friends coming in went silently from body to body, hoping to find some end to the pain that started when their loved ones were picked up at one of the regime’s checkpoints or in a raid on their homes and thrown into the Assad’s gulag.

A woman called Noor, holding a facemask over her mouth and nose, said her brother was taken in 2012, when he was 28.

All they had heard since was a mention in a Facebook post that he had been in the notorious Sednaya prison, where the regime left prisoners to rot for decades.

“It is painful,” said Noor. “At the same time, we have hope. Even if we find him between the bodies. Anything so long as he’s not missing. We want to find something of him. We want to know what happened to him. We need an end to this.”

One couple told a doctor their son was hauled away for refusing to open his laptop for inspection.

That was 12 years ago. He hasn’t been heard from since.

During the years I have reported from Syria I have heard many similar stories.

On my phone I have a photo of the haunted face of a woman I met in July 2018 at a camp for people displaced just after the rebel stronghold of Douma in the Damascus suburbs was forced to surrender.

Her son, a young teenager, disappeared after he was taken at a checkpoint by one of the intelligence agencies.

More than 50 years of the Assads means 50 years of disappearances, of incarceration, of killing.

It means pitiless cruelty to the prisoners, to the families trying to find them and to the Syrian people who were outside the Assad’s circle of trust.

At the photo wall and in the mortuary at Mustahed hospital they wanted to find what had happened, some information and if they were very lucky, a body.

They needed a reckoning and many wanted revenge. Most of all, they dreamed and hoped for a life without fear.

A woman at the hospital said that even though she knew Bashar al- Assad was in Russia, the regime had drilled so much fear into her that she was still terrified of what it might do.

Maybe every Syrian who feels like her should go the crag overlooking Damascus where Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, ordered the construction of a presidential palace, to check that that the monumental, marble edifice is empty.

Our driver gathered his own video evidence. He took out his phone to start filming when the car turned into the palace’s long ceremonial driveway.

During the years of the regime, ordinary Syrians made sure they did not slow down near the palace gates in case they were arrested and thrown into prison as a threat to the president.

Mobile phones stopped working as you approached the palace’s security bubble.

The palace looks down on Damascus, visible from most of the city. It told the people that the Assads were always present and always watching via the regime’s web of intelligence agencies.

The system was designed by Hafez, the first Assad president. His secret police spied on each other and spied on the people.

A businessman I knew in Homs told me once that one intelligence branch approached him when he was developing a hotel, asking for the designs early in the project so they could incorporate all the listening devices they needed into the rooms. They explained it was easier tham retrofitting them after the building was finished.

The Assad family never lived at the palace. It was for ceremonial occasions, and upstairs there were some workaday offices.

I went there a lot in 2015, to negotiate the terms of an interview with Bashar al- Assad. I had interviewed him twice before, some years before the uprising against him started in 2011.

That was when he was still tantalising Syrians with talk of reform, which turned out to be lies.

He was also encouraging western leaders to believe he might be separated from Iran and if not join the western camp exactly, then be persuaded that it was worth his while not to oppose it.

The US, Israel and the UAE were still trying to persuade him to dump Iran in the weeks before he was forced to flee to Moscow.

Now that Assad has gone, my target at the palace was an opulent villa in the grounds. I wanted to go there because it was where I met Assad for the interviews.

The villa, much more luxurious than the state rooms at the palace, was built, I was told, as a private residence for the Assad family.

Its floors and tables are marble, the wood is polished walnut and the chandeliers are crystal.

The Assads did not like it, so it was used as a guest house and for Bashar’s rare interviews.

I could see why they might have preferred their existing residence, a beautiful French colonial mansion that stands behind a screen of pine trees. It feels like an aristocrat’s retreat on the Riviera.

Until less than two weeks ago in the souk in old Damascus you could buy fridge magnets of Bashar al-Assad and his siblings as children, playing on bikes in a garden as their indulgent parents looked on.

Presumably the photo was taken on the villa’s spacious, immaculate lawns.

The extended Assad family treated Syria as their own personal possession, enriching themselves and buying trust with their followers at the expense of Syrians who could be thrown into jail or killed if they stepped out of line, or even if they didn’t.

A fighter called Ahmed, who had taken up arms against the regime in 2011, survived the rebel defeat in Damascus, and fought his way back from Idlib with the rebels of Hayat Tahrir al Sham was inspecting the way the Assads lived with his three brothers, all rebel fighters.

“People were living in hell and he was in his palace,” Ahmed said calmly.

“He didn’t care about what they were going through. He made them live in fear, hunger and humiliation. Even after we entered Damascus people would only whisper to us, because they were still afraid.”

I found the marble guesthouse, and walked through the walnut-panelled, marble-floored library where I had interviewed Assad when the regime was fighting for survival in February 2015.

The highlight of the interview were his denials that his forces were killing civilians. He even tried to joke about it.

Now, rebel fighters were on the door and patrolling the corridors. Some of the books had fallen off the library shelves, but the building was intact.

I walked across to an ante room where Assad would grant 10 or 15 minutes of private conversation before the interview.

He was unfailingly polite, even solicitous, enquiring about my family, and the journey to Syria.

Bashar al-Assad’s slightly awkward demeanour made some western observers believe he was a lightweight who might bend to pressure.

In private I found him self-confident to the point of arrogance, convinced he was the all-knowing spider at the heart of the Middle East web, tracking his enemies’ malign intentions and ready to strike.

His father Hafez al-Assad was a kingpin of the Middle East. He was a ruthless man who built the police state that lasted for over fifty years, using fear, guile and a willingness to destroy any threat to impose stability on Syria, a country that had been a byword for violent changes of government until he seized sole power in 1970.

I had the impression that Bashar wanted to be his father’s son, perhaps even to outdo him.

He killed many more Syrians than Hafez and broke the country to try to save the regime.

But Bashar’s stubbornness, refusal to reform or negotiate and his willingness to kill sealed his fate and condemned him to a last terrified drive to the airport with his wife and children on their last flight out of Syria to Moscow.

In a scruffy, bustling neighbourhood not far from the grace and beauty of the old city of Damascus, I had a front row seat as some of the pressures facing Syria and its new rulers surged through an excited crowd.

They had heard that the man who until less than a week ago was the local boss, the mafia-style godfather of their suburb was going to be executed.

The man, known as Abu Muntaja, was one of the military intelligence officers considered responsible for the Tadamon massacre in 2013 of at least 41 local men.

The crowd grew until thousands blocked the streets, delighted that a notorious regime killer was going to be executed in in front of them in the main square that he used to swagger across.

The atmosphere throbbed with excitement, expectation and anger.

Justice meant watching their enemy die, not just because of his crimes, but because of the boundless cruelty of the Assad regime.

An elderly women called Muna Sakar, dressed in a neat coat and hat, was there to see him die as a thief as well as a killer.

“He stole my house and money. Of course I want to see him dead. I would have done it myself with my own hands. But I couldn’t find a way. I wanted to kill him.”

When rumours flew around that the execution was starting, the crowd surged back and forth, jostling for the best position, phones held high in outstretched arms for the video.

No one wanted to miss a thing. When they decided the execution was happening down the street, they stampeded over fences and cars stuck in traffic to get there.

In the end there was no execution, at least not yet. It was probably a rumour, that thousands wanted to be true.

If Syria’s new rulers do not want change to be measured in blood, they will need to control the desire for revenge.

When the weight of dictatorship is lifted, powerful forces are unleashed.

How Syria’s new rulers deal with them will shape what comes next.