Syria’s bread lines are so long that children have to skip school to wait in them

 

 'Every morning, Abu Mohammed and his two eldest sons wake up for dawn prayer in Damascus, then take turns heading to the bakery.

 They wait for at least three hours, barely making it to work or school on time, he said. Often, the boys miss their first few classes. Sometimes they miss the whole day.

 “One day I stood for seven hours,” he said in a telephone interview. “The next day it was eight, then six. I saw that my work was being hit. I need to work. I need to live.”

 Abu Mohammed, who declined to give his full name for fear of harassment by the security services, is among a rapidly growing number of Syrians languishing in seemingly endless lines.



 The bread crisis is perhaps the most visible and painful manifestation of Syria’s economic meltdown. It has seen the amount of subsidized bread most families can buy reduced by half or even more. Subsidized prices have doubled since October, despite official promises in the spring that price hikes for bread were a “red line” that would not be crossed.

 Abu Mohammed, a factory worker and father of five, said he needs three to four bags of bread a day. He buys two bags of coarse, low-quality bread from a government bakery, his full allotment under the subsidized system. He waits in line at private bakeries for other, higher-quality loaves. When desperate — and when he can find them — he pays 10 times the official price of about 50 cents to buy more low-quality loaves from what he calls “the crisis dealers” on the black market.

 Outside major cities, the deprivation may be even worse.

 “The poor man living in the village no longer has gas; he has wood. He’s out of bread; he makes his own,” said a resident of the coastal city Tartous, interviewed over Facebook.

 Syrians eat bread with nearly every meal in Syria. Torn chunks are pinched into mini-pockets, held between two fingers to scoop up strained yogurt and olives for breakfast. It hugs stuffed vegetables for lunch and is wrapped into late-night shawarma orders.

 Traditionally, it’s much larger, fluffier and thinner than pita found in the United States and is sold in a stacks of about seven inside transparent plastic bags. Recently, Syrians began to gripe that fewer pieces are being included in each bag.

 In an interview with the pro-government Al-Watan newspaper earlier this month, Agriculture Minister Hassan Qatna sought to deflect public discontent, saying, “Let’s go back to baking bread in our houses and instead of waiting on the government.”

 But as prices have doubled, quality deteriorated and lines have grown ridiculously long, citizens who would not have dared to complain before, fearing the autocratic government of President Bashar al-Assad, are venting their ire. This anger spiked after the newspaper of the ruling Baath Party reported earlier this month that 500 tons of wheat disappeared while being offloaded from a ship.



 During the past three years, Syria has imported an annual average of more than 1.1 million tons of wheat, according to the Syria Report, which monitors the country’s economy. Nearly all the imports were from Russia, a vital Assad ally, but the spread of the coronavirus pushed Russia to limit wheat exports earlier this year to protect its domestic supply. An official at the Syrian Grain Establishment said this month that Russian companies have withdrawn from six contracts with Syria, cutting total wheat imports nearly in half.

 At the same time, the deepening economic crisis — resulting from war, mismanagement, U.S. sanctions and the spillover effect of a financial meltdown in neighboring Lebanon — has gutted the value of the Syrian pound, making it prohibitively expensive to import wheat. The crisis has also disrupted the production and marketing of the crop.

 Wheat is historically the country’s largest crop, but Syria’s self-sufficiency, a decades-old cornerstone of Baath Party’s policies, was already being undermined by war and drought.

 Since 2011, the country has been riven by war after Syrians rose up against Assad. The three provinces richest in agricultural land — Aleppo, Raqqa and Hasakeh — have all suffered heavily from fighting among the Russian-backed Syrian army, anti-Assad rebels and the extremist Islamic State. Farm machinery has been destroyed and shipping routes turned unsafe, while costs of production have increased.

While ample rainfall and improving security helped double the size of the annual harvest last year, according to estimates of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, domestic production, at 2.2 million tons, remains almost half the pre-crisis average.



 To rally supporters, Assad’s government has blamed the United States for the crisis, in part pointing to the effect of U.S. economic sanctions. These have hindered Syria’s ability to import spare parts for machinery and pesticides and have also disrupted financial transactions, undercutting the value of the Syrian pound and aggravating the wider economic crisis. U.S. sanctions have hit fuel imports hard, leading to long lines of cars jamming roads outside gas stations, sometimes for more than 10 hours.


 The state news agency SANA has even blamed President Trump for wildfires that have scorched fields of grain, alleging he ordered U.S. Apache helicopters to burn a stretch of wheat crops in the northeast province of Hasakeh.

 The minister of education, Darem Tabbaa, appeared in a video this month in a field holding a large bouquet of wheat, urging students to plant the crop. “You are now seeing the importance of the wheat grain,” the minister said, “when you stand in line for the bakeries, when you wake up to eat breakfast, when you return home from school.”

 His remarks were met with online derision — critics baffled by his notion that wheat is no more than a household plant.

 Some reports in the government-aligned media and pro-government Facebook posts have suggested there is no bread crisis at all. These have been met with outrage. The Tartous resident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity fearing retaliation, said he is especially enraged by ministers who “sit there ridiculing the people and think everything is a-okay.”

 The lines for bread have grown so large that one Damascus bakery erected a six-foot-high chain-link fence to contain the customers. A photo of men crammed into what looked a pen or cage went viral online, provoking anger from Syrians at home and abroad infuriated by the demeaning, jail-like conditions.

 The bakery took the fence down.'

Halfaya: Municipality to Compensate Damaged Homes, But Only for Loyalists

 

 'There is talk among residents of Halfaya, a city north of Hama, that owners of homes damaged by the war may receive compensation of SYP 6 million. It is unclear where the funding for the compensation may be sourced, or which body would be responsible for distributing the money.

 Halfaya is located north of Hama city, in a fertile agricultural area. It served as an industrial area for the northern Hama countryside before 2011 and was home to around 35,000 people. Rebel factions held Halfaya for several years before regime forces recaptured it in 2017. The city remained a military zone from 2017-2019, with a base for Russian forces established nearby.

 Only around 240 families now live in Halfaya after regime forces allowed them to return in December 2019. The city still suffers from poor public services. Drinking water is sold from large tanks, electricity networks are not running, and the roads need full maintenance.

 In recent days, a list has circulated among residents containing the names of 20 individuals, representing 20 families, who are said to be the only people entitled to compensation, to be used to refurbish their damaged homes. The 20 individuals were reportedly requested to visit the Halfaya City Council to complete their files with a new real estate registry record. The list was leaked from a private WhatsApp semi-official group in the city. It was reportedly prepared by a former commander in the regime’s National Defence Forces (NDF), who now serves as an official in the Halfaya City Council. All the names included on the list appear to be those of residents who are loyal to the regime, some of whom are involved in the military or security forces.

 The official responsible for drawing up the list told residents who had objected: "Compensation is not for the poor, but for the honourable," meaning those known to be loyal to the regime.

 That is, out of 240 families now living in Halfaya, only 20 families so far are considered by the security forces as loyal to the regime. This vetting helps serve a small network of local beneficiaries who have come to monopolise the few aid supplies and public services that have been provided to the city. This applies to the distribution of fuel, seeds, and fertiliser, and even household water tanks.

 The head of the Hama governorate’s military and security committee issued a decree on 11 August that banned the ploughing of Halfaya’s agricultural lands until the committee formed by Administrative Order No. 3077 finishes taking stock of the properties belonging to former Halfaya residents who have been displaced to opposition-held territories elsewhere.

 This was followed by the Military Security’s seizure of properties belonging to displaced residents who are wanted by security forces. The word “confiscated” was then written on their seized homes and shops. As for the properties of displaced residents who were not wanted by security, they were offered in October for investment in a public auction.'

Survivors of Syrian prisons share stories of death, horror and torture

 

 'Three former Syrian prisoners have come forward with shocking accounts of torture and despicable living standards in the Assad régime’s prisons, detailing the struggles of detainees within.

 The released prisoners were hosted by the Syrian Revolution Coordination Union. One of them, Salaah Ashour, spent 25 years in the régime’s labyrinthine prisons. This also included Hasna Alhariri, and Maysoon Libad, who narrowly escaped capital punishment after being arrested for delivering medical supplies to the wounded. After her arrest, Maysoon was imprisoned and tortured before ultimately being sentenced to death.

 Hanaa Darwish, Secretary-General of the Syrian Revolution Coordination Union says they usually mark detention day on December 1st every year with programs featuring former prisoners, but this year they held it online for health and safety precautions.



 Salaah Ashour, who originally hails from Hama, northern Syria, says he didn’t see his face in a mirror once during the length of his imprisonment which stretched from 1980 to 2004, which was mostly spent in the infamous Tadmor prison.

 While the rest of the world knows Palmyra for its stunning Roman ruins, it’s Arabic name evokes chills in most Syrians, home to what has been described as the worst prison in the world. Before being destroyed by ISIS, the Tadmor prison was synonymous with horror, death, and grotesque torture.

 Originally built in the middle of a blistering desert 200 kilometres northeast of Damascus by the French in the 1930s, it would gain its sordid reputation under Hafez al-Assad’s iron rule. While he was in power, thousands of dissidents were abused, tortured and executed there.

 Ashour painfully narrates how his gaolers would mutilate his face with a straight-razor or blade, while singing October revolution songs to make sure he was still alive. He also describes how younger youths were regularly raped. At times, he says, their mothers, and sisters were raped to force rubber-stamped confessions out of them.

 As he continues to tell his tale, Ashour relates witnessing his jailers cut off a male prisoner’s genitals, and another prisoner’s ear; only to pressure them during interrogations.

 In an interview with al-Jazeera, he was asked about what drove the Syrian régime’s security apparatus to such horrors, and how they justified such torture. “Their thuggish mentality,” he answers, which is inflicted on Syrians without distinguishing political leaning, or ethnic, sectarian or religious affiliation.

 “Imagine being beaten and tortured for twenty-one long years, denied the sight of your family. During the winter, the prison is made colder. In summers, they turn the heating on. You feel like exploding from the heat. All this happening years after the end of interrogations and investigations,” adds Ashour.

 Ashour emphasizes that this “thug mentality” must be countered by wisdom and rationality on the part of revolutionary forces, pointing out that the régime’s victims managed to coexist and even cooperate inside the prisons, facilitating a cultured, civilized spirit of working together.

 He also relates how a prisoner’s torture also includes the suffering of his family the entire time he’s incarcerated, with no news of him from within the prison. Tragically, his mother and father both passed away from a stroke after receiving conflicting stories about his fate.



 Alhariri is from Basr al-Harir, which sits in the countryside of Daraa, southwest Syria. She recounts multiple accounts of torture she witnessed while imprisoned first in 2011, and again in 2012.

 The mother to four martyrs who died in the course of the revolution, says she witnessed traumatizing, gruesome scenes during her second imprisonment with her daughter, which lasted for three years. During the course of her incarceration, she was transferred between a number of prisons and detention facilities spanning Deraa and Damascus.

 In her first days as a prisoner at a military prison run by the 102nd Brigade, she witnessed jailers burying youth who died after succumbing to torture in interrogation chambers.

 Alhariri adds that when she was transferred to Deraa, she stayed in an overcrowded room with 30 other prisoners. Every night, her jailers would choose one or more female prisoners, after which they would be taken for what they thought was interrogation. They would return in a deplorable physical and mental state, and refuse to talk about what was done to them.

 “I witnessed with my eyes as they gouged a prisoner's eyes out with a screwdriver, and drilled his neck and chest with a power drill. Then an interrogator asked one of the soldiers, “Is he dead?!”, and he was answered in the affirmative. So he replied, throw him into the Hamam [Turkish bath]. Before they took his corpse away, they wrote, “Traitor to the Nation” on his chest,” relates Alhariri.

 After her horrific time in Deraa, she was transferred to Damascus on a bus carrying 40 inmates, 6 of whom were women. The trip was a part of hell, describes Alhariri, with the inside of the bus coated in mesh and metal chains. By the time they arrived at their new detainment facility in Damascus, the inside of the bus felt like a raging inferno.

 “They were literally kicking us out of the bus, and hitting every single prisoner, even though most of them were already injured from torture. I was shocked by the square we had arrived in. It was carpeted with naked corpses of male and female prisoners”, Alhariri recounts.

 When asked what questions did the interrogators ask of her, Alhariri says they were primarily interested in getting her to confess to receiving instructions from Israel, and receiving funding from Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Kuwait.

 She would refuse this, telling them she was from Deraa, and that Syrians had come out in self-defense after their homes, wealth and honour were the targets of attacks.

 Her jailers separated her from the 6 other women and threw her into solitary confinement for 8 days before transferring her to the female prison cell, which Alhariri describes as a new scene from “hell”.

 She recalls they placed her in a room with “nearly 75 women… closer to a sanitarium for the insane, and the female prisoners had lost their minds. There was a jailer called Mohamed Alia who stripped every female prisoner that entered the prison and raped her. Among the girls, there were so many that were pregnant, after being subject to these violations.”



 Maysoon Libad, now an activist from Deraa, presents another gruesome testimony the deplorable circumstances of Assad régime prisoners. In it, she relates how they were made to sign blank confession statements to make the torture stop.

 Libad was active in the medical sector, and performed first aid to the injured during Deraa’s protests. That was, until she was arrested after being followed during one of her visits to Damascus in 2012. She would go on to spend a year and a half in prison.

 After her arrest, she summarily moved to Branch 215, one of 20 security branches operated by the Assad régime’s feared military intelligence.

 In it, she spent two months in solitary confinement. During that time, she was regularly subject to brutal torture, including left hanging from bound hands for long periods of time, being whipped, and being pushed into a fetal position, and then forced into a tire. When they were done with her, they would throw her in the trunk of a car.

 The activist was the victim of agonizing beatings in Deraa by members of Branch 215. After being thrown in a room with 15 other female inmates for a month, where she claims she met captives from Lebanon who had no idea that Hafez al-Assad had died.

 Shortly after, she was transferred to Adra Prison, northeast of Damascus. It was there that she met a Jordanian fellow prisoner with Palestinian roots. She also met a Libyan, who claimed to be a member of the late Muammar al-Qaddafi’s retinue, as well as one woman serving a life sentence after being arrested with her husband, who was killed in an interrogation that culminated in a verdict finding them guilty of an attempted assassination of the late Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

“I met one female prisoner who was the victim of rape, and there was another women from the Alawite sect who had a stroke and they let her be without providing any assistance. The conditions of the prison were the worst, between the deplorable state of hygiene, measly food, and torture,” she recounts.

 Libad, who now studies political science in Jordan, concludes her gruesome tale, “They forced me to sign 20 blank papers, then they filled it with prepared accusations and presented it to a court of law.” '

The Biden Administration Can And Should Rectify America’s Failures In Syria

 

 Mohammed Alaa Ghanem:

 'It has been almost a decade since the Syrian people rose up against the Assad regime, demanding their freedom. While the world was hesitant to support the protestors, malign powers gladly stepped in to help Assad, creating an unmitigated disaster that has devastated Syria and sent shockwaves around the world. Half of the population, around 13 million people, has been displaced, and more than a quarter of all Syrians have fled the country. Over 50% of the country’s critical infrastructure has been destroyed, over 80% of the population lives below the poverty line, and an entire generation of children knows nothing but war, dilapidated tents, and the squalor of camps. Still, the crisis has yet to be addressed in any clear and meaningful way by the most important actor on the world stage, the United States.

 The Biden Administration’s primary goal in Syria must be a genuine political transition as envisioned in the Geneva Communiqué and UN Security Council Resolution 2254 (2015). As long as Assad remains in power the conflict will never end, it will just evolve, and the millions of refugees will have no hope of safe return. While the goal of political transition and the many steps needed to reach it will be a heavy lift, the Biden Administration has several advantages over its predecessors. For one thing, after years of mismanaging the economy and neglecting the country to fund the military, Assad has created a financial meltdown. This crisis is causing unrest within the regime’s political base and even Assad’s own family. Another important advantage is that when President Biden takes office, the US will have ten years of experience and institutional memory in Syria to draw on. To tap into that, however, will require that America have an honest reckoning with its past mistakes in Syria and learn from them. Here are three key lessons that the Biden Administration should take to heart:

 Leverage is critical. The regime and its backers have broken every multilateral agreement they have made. After years of bad faith talks it is clear that the US must enter future negotiations with sufficient leverage to induce Assad, Russia, and Iran to take them seriously. This means keeping US Special Forces in the northeast, resuming support to the Syrian opposition, working closely with Turkey to shore up the fragile ceasefire in Idlib, and maintaining a political and economic pressure campaign in coordination with US allies.

 Deterrence works. To be effective, American diplomacy in Syria must be backed by the credible use of force. Early on many US officials argued that any strike against Assad would spiral into a broader conflict. This risk aversion hindered decision-making during the Obama Administration, resulting most notoriously in the failure to enforce President Obama’s chemical weapons “red line.” In hindsight, it is clear that this was a mistake because, with the credible threat of retaliation gone, the Assad regime and its backers escalated their attacks to unprecedented heights and Syrian civilians paid the price. By contrast, when the regime launched chemical attacks in April 2017 and April 2018, President Trump ordered retaliatory missile strikes. Not only did these strikes not spark wider conflict, they effectively ended Assad’s use of proscribed chemical weapons. These and other military actions since 2016 reinforce the fact that the US can use targeted force in Syria to protect America’s allies and uphold its red lines without getting sucked into deeper entanglements.

 What happens in Syria never stays in Syria. Syria sits at the crossroad of civilizations and its decade of tragedy has reverberated around the world. Refugees have overwhelmed Syria’s neighbors and caused instability in Europe. Propagandists have used Syrian refugees to fuel rising right-wing nationalist movements, to justify regressive anti-immigration policies in the US and Europe, and to encourage Britain’s exit from the EU. After using Syria as a testing and training ground for new weapons, militias, and tactics—and emboldened by the lack of repercussions—Russia and Iran have taken their enhanced military capabilities on the road, fueling new conflicts from Ukraine to Yemen. Since the consequences of the Syrian conflict are global, US policy must evaluate Syria within the wider foreign policy context. This is particularly true in terms of the Iran deal. When the Biden Administration seeks to reenter the deal, it must be clear-eyed about how the deal will impact Iran’s regional expansionism and have a plan to address its baneful consequences.

 The Biden Administration must consolidate and expand the leverage that it will inherit from Jeffrey and Rayburn. This means enforcing the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which singled out the most malign actors within the regime, and further expanding targeted sanctions. Similarly, the Biden Administration should go beyond just maintaining unilateral US pressure on the regime and its enablers by getting its allies to commit to these same measures. This could take the form of a signaling summit in 2021 where participants make a collective commitment to withholding reconstruction funds and refusing diplomatic normalization with the regime until there is a genuine political transition.

 As far as negotiations, the diplomatic process today has devolved into farcical ‘Constitutional Committee’ talks dominated by Russia. These talks, which most Syrians view as irrelevant, have been stagnant for over a year and have been exploited by Russia and the regime to delay progress while they consolidate military gains. It is time for the US to take back the reins. After restoring its support to the Syrian opposition, the Biden Administration should launch new, reinvigorated transition talks in cooperation with the UN and its allies.

 In terms of the Iran deal, the Biden Administration should renegotiate the terms to address Iran’s aggression across the Middle East. President-elect Biden recently wrote that the US would lift sanctions and “rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations,” but what incentive would Iran have to negotiate further if it’d already received what it wanted? Since the original negotiations, the US has, among other measures, levied new sanctions against Iranian financial institutions, creating greater leverage to push for better terms. The new administration should not squander this new leverage by lifting all sanctions without addressing the other regional threats posed by Iran, including its most lethal weapon: its vast and growing network of proxy militias. Iran is the primary underwriter of Assad’s war, and any sanctions relief to Iran that is not highly targeted will end up going to arm and train militias in Syria, as much of the 8 billion dollars in assets unfrozen by the Obama administration inevitably did. The US must not repeat the mistake of sacrificing the rest of the region on the altar of this singular end by giving Iran an unconditional windfall to destabilize the region. Instead the administration must take concrete steps inside and outside of the deal to deter Iranian expansionism and malign regional behavior.

 To create fertile ground for a successful national political transition, the US must also rethink its policies towards the political and armed opposition and the Kurdish-dominated SDF. A credible political opposition is needed so that Syrian civilians are effectively represented in negotiations, but with Etilaf, the main opposition body, dependent on Turkey, and the High Negotiations Commission beholden to Saudi Arabia, opposition figures have been turned into proxies for regional powers. The Biden Administration should reinvest in Syria’s political opposition, helping them to regain the independence needed to credibly engage in negotiations and reestablish legitimacy on the ground.

 With regards to the armed opposition, the US erred in abandoning vetted moderate forces in favor of the YPG and narrowing its scope in Syria to just defeating ISIS. The Kurdish YPG is the group behind the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF), which it created as a rebranding exercise to present itself as a more palatable partner. Although it was a reliable ally against ISIS, this group has fallen far short of the democratic fighting force that America envisioned. In 2017, then former Obama official (and current future Secretary of State) Antony Blinken wrote an op-ed about arming the Kurds in which he said the US “should insist that [the YPG] commit to not use any weapons against Turkey, to cede liberated Raqqa to local forces, to respect Syria’s territorial integrity and to dissociate itself from the P.K.K.” This advice was ignored, and to date the US has made no effort to hold its Syrian Kurdish allies accountable. The YPG has maintained its ties with the PKK (a designated terrorist organization), failed to diversify its ranks, refused to devolve control to local authorities, cozied up to the Assad regime, Russia, and Iran, and committed serious human rights abuses against Kurdish and Arab civilians.

 At odds with Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, other Syrian Kurds, local Arab communities, and Syrian opposition groups, the YPG is a destabilizing force that lacks local legitimacy and long-term governing capabilities. Unless it plans to maintain America’s troop presence in Syria indefinitely, the Biden Administration must address this untenable situation and condition support on measurable reforms. It should also reinstate support to vetted moderate opposition forces, particularly in the south. Since the Trump Administration cut all support to these partners and Assad was allowed to recapture Daraa in 2018, conditions in the area have grown worse, not better. Government forces have murdered hundreds of “reconciled” opposition fighters and people live in fear of detentions, assassinations, and the low-level insurgency that regularly boils over into violence. A credible armed opposition is needed to provide security and stability to Arab-majority liberated areas and prevent the reemergence of ISIS.

 Syrian civilians and civil society must also be central in the US strategy because a strong civil society is needed for long-term stability and local resilience. The incoming administration should restore Syria stabilization funding and expand this support to liberated areas in the northwest where civil society organizations and local governing institutions have withered after years of neglect. Similarly, the US must extend humanitarian support to the extremely vulnerable communities in Rukban in the south, and Idlib in the northwest, working with our ally Turkey to stabilize the population there. Millions of displaced Syrians remain in Idlib, hundreds of thousands of them are in IDP camps that threaten to become regional coronavirus super spreader centers without US-led international action.

 Finally, the Biden Administration must lead by example with regards to the Syrian refugee crisis. It can do so by restarting admission of Syrian refugees and significantly increasing the cap above prior levels. This move will be a reaffirmation of American values and a clear stand against the ugly nativist fear mongering that caricatured these war victims as terrorists. Additionally, the administration should allow Syrians who have been living in the US under the uncertainty of the TPS program to apply for green cards, as was done last year for Liberians. Displaced Syrians who have lived in the US for years have become valued members in their communities and they cannot return to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria without risking torture and death.

 The state of affairs in Syria today is grim and shifting the momentum will require a significant commitment from the US, but it is both possible and necessary.'

Demographic change: The ultimate goal of the Syrian régime’s policy of forced displacement

 'For the Syrian régime and its Iranian and Russian allies the forced displacement of millions of Syrians since 2011 is not a mere consequence of the conflict, but a systematic policy to achieve strategic goals set out by Bashar Assad himself.

 Although the main target of this criminal policy of the Syrian régime seems to be the majority Sunni Muslims, who made up some 74% of pre-war population according to the International Religious Freedom Report 2006, and are seen as the main threat to the régime, yet in the implementation of this policy the régime targeted people of various backgrounds and affiliations, including Christians, Ismailis and other minorities. One person described the nature of the policy in these terms: “Demographic change that the Assad régime is undertaking seems not to be based on religion, but on the basis of political affiliation and loyalty to the ruler in order to build its own supportive society, his 'useful Syria'.” Considering the systematic nature of this policy and the scale of displacement committed to achieve it, there is a gap in the analysis informing the international policy-oriented discourse of this systematic effort to affect a permanent demographic shift.

 In 2016, Assad explicitly and publicly stated the goals of this strategy when he spoke of “useful Syria”, an area of the country both geographically and demographically crucial to the continuation of his rule. To achieve this utopia of a loyal population concentrated in areas seen as strategically important, the Syrian régime unleashed a campaign of forced displacement and replacement which continues in various forms to this day.

 The methods of forced displacement range from mass detention, torture and terrorising of people who raised their demands for reform to siege, starvation, indiscriminate attacks, including chemical attacks, on civilian population and infrastructure, to systematic repression and marginalization of entire areas seen as disloyal. In this effort, legislation was passed and measures taken to allow for confiscation of lands and property of the displaced people, to obstruct their return and to make it easier for foreign militia members and their families to obtain Syrian citizenship.

 The policy continues being applied to this date, as documented in the most recent Human Rights Watch Report which details attacks on Idlib, which were part of the policy of forced displacement: “One result of the Idlib offensive was mass displacement. According to the UN, nearly 1.4 million people across Idlib fled their homes during the period covered in this report, out of an estimated population of 3 million people. Many said they fled because of repeated attacks in populated areas, or feared ill treatment if Syrian régime forces were to retake the area. The repeated Syrian-Russian alliance attacks on civilian infrastructure in populated areas in which there was no apparent military objective suggests that these unlawful attacks were deliberate. The intent may have been to deprive local residents of the means to sustain themselves, to force the civilian population to flee and make it easier for Syrian ground forces to take territory, or simply to instill terror in the civilian population as a way to achieve victory. The Syrian-Russian alliance apparently intended to fulfil these aims with little regard for international law,” states the HRW report.

 To make the removal of the people seen as a threat to the régime from the targeted areas permanent, their forced displacement is always followed by a campaign of populating now empty areas with members of foreign militias and religious groups seen as loyal to the régime, mainly Shiites linked to Iran’s presence and Alawites, a majority of whom are loyal to Bashar Al Assad. Such policies closely resemble the policies of ethnic cleansing seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina and elsewhere, which aimed to affect a new reality by permanently removing the previous demographic majority and replacing it, at least partially, with population seen as loyal.'

What the case of Suleiman al-Assad tells us about the Syrian conflict

 

 'Over the past few days, several news sources have reported the release of Suleiman al-Assad from Syrian prison. While the assertion that Suleiman, the distant cousin of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, served even a day of his so-called ‘20-year sentence’ is questionable, understanding the context surrounding this particular incident is important for those wishing to make sense of the often-intractable terrain of Syrian politics.

 In August 2015, Suleiman shot and killed a decorated Syrian Air Force colonel, Hassan al-Shaikh, in central Latakia in a bout of road rage. At a time in which up to one third of military-aged Alawite men – the sect to which the president belongs – had died fighting on the frontlines for the government, Suleiman, according to al-Shaikh’s brother, had obscenely denigrated the Syrian military before firing off a barrage of bullets that killed the officer, also an Alawite, at a traffic light. The debasing of the army – viewed by the community as the only buffer between them and an increasingly vengeful and sectarian armed opposition – by a member of the ruling class, elicited a sharp response.

 Protests calling for Suleiman's execution erupted the next day in the city’s predominantly working class Alawite neighbourhood of Al-Zira’a. Other demands made by the demonstrators included an end to the impunity of the shabiha – a patchwork of predominantly Alawite armed gangs and smugglers linked to the régime that have terrorised Syrian society for decades – and to a security apparatus that applies equally to its citizenry. Sensing growing anger and restlessness among his main constituency, the president issued an arrest warrant in an apparent attempt to mollify them. However, weeks after state news reported that Suleiman had been detained, he managed to gun down two of his critics, including the host of Sham Radio, the pro-régime station that broadcast the interview with al-Sheikh’s brother and the governor of Latakia. Ironically, the governor was quoted as saying “no one is above the law.”

 Yet this wasn’t the first time that Bashar had allegedly ordered his cousin’s arrest. In 2014, after Suleiman received news of the death of his father, Hilal – a commander of a local branch of the country’s chief pro-régime militia, the National Defense Forces, or NDF – he reportedly went on a killing spree. Seeking retaliation for his father’s death at the hands of Sunni rebels, Suleiman assembled a convoy of shabiha and stormed Sunni neighbourhoods in downtown Latakia, shooting indiscriminately into the air and hurling grenades at residential balconies. In spite of killing dozens and running the risk of igniting a sectarian powder keg in the city’s most volatile areas, he was released a few days later.

 Suleiman had apparently inherited a legacy of gangsterism from his father, the hallmarks of which are a combination of rape, ransom, and arbitrary repression.



 However, this tashbeeh, as it is referred to colloquially by Syrians, has been a feature of the Assad régime since its inception. Bashar’s father, Hafez, in an attempt to crystalise his rule, generated a broad support base built around co-opting a range of actors, including criminal syndicates. In exchange for their loyalty, the shabiha were given access to lucrative smuggling routes that allowed them to penetrate the illicit economy – and do so with near total impunity.

 This exploded in the 1980s, when the Syrian occupation of Lebanon consolidated the securement of these lines across their porous borders and fostered a booming market for smuggling. Hafez’s ancestral village, al-Qardaha, effectively transformed into a regional hub for black market activities. As clientelist networks flourished, this gave rise to a new class of shabiha directly commanded by the president’s relatives.

 During this period, Fawwaz al-Assad, Hafez’s nephew, became the first notorious shabih of his kind. His unrestricted access to the port of Latakia proved especially fruitful and he and his entourage quickly developed a reputation for treating the city as their own personal fiefdom, setting a precedent for recruitment among disenfranchised Alawite youth seeking to amass fortunes at any cost.

 Under their reign, the coastal public sphere, particularly within urban Latakia, devolved into a semi-anarchic state in which they could arbitrarily beat up restaurant owners, shoot at bus drivers, and kidnap, rape, and kill young women with ease. The two tiers of shabiha, those connected to high-ranking officers, and those affiliated directly with the Assad family, operated above the law.

 For Syrians residing on the coast, home to most of Syria’s Alawite community, the fear of the dreaded and omnipresent security apparatus, or mukhabarat, was compounded by the thought that these thugs could execute them in cold blood, as Suleiman did, without hesitation – and without so much as even a pretext. Their contempt for life is such that practically every Syrian on the coast, regardless of their confessional background, can recite a story that recounts their barbarism. Prior to the conflict, the Alawites, contrary to what is commonly believed, were the main recipients of their criminality.

 When the uprising began in 2011, the shabiha were covertly mobilised by the régime to repress protests, particularly in cities with mixed populations. The subcontracting of repression to these armed clusters, dressed in civilian clothing, enabled the government to exercise plausible deniability while executing a host of atrocities and attributing them to “gangs and terrorists.” Deployed first to the coast, these régime-aligned thugs targeted businesses, sprayed sectarian threats on churches, and chanted genocidal slogans against religious minorities while posing as protesters. In conjunction with the régime’s release from prison of radical Islamists, the objective was to fracture and derail the uprising by persuading Syrians that Assad is their only hope of survival amidst growing instability and intercommunal antagonism.



 It depicted itself as the guarantor of minority security while engineering the facts on the ground critical to validating the false binary at the heart of its propaganda: either accept us and our henchmen – i.e. “the state” – or test the dispositions of the ‘jihadist’ revolt.

 The shabiha quickly metastasised into death squads that specialised in targeting Sunni Muslims in rebellious areas where the régime’s narrative was often contradicted by the violence committed – in broad daylight – by its security forces. Their atrocities accelerated as many were organised into local security committees and ultimately absorbed into the NDF in 2012. Since then, they have grown exponentially due to the militiafication of the Syrian army, resulting in an emboldened class of warlords who operate with increasing autonomy. They have exploited the conflict to loot, pillage, and engage in sectarian score-settling in Sunni areas and, to a lesser extent, have capitalised on the tenuous authority of the régime to target impoverished Alawite districts in Latakia. This has led to an unprecedented sense of lawlessness in ‘loyalist’ territories.

 Though accounts surrounding Suleiman’s detention vary, one particularly striking story circulated in 2016. According to the article, Suleiman was incarcerated in a prison compound in Tartous, where he and his entourage were labelled “the torturers” because of their role in abusing political prisoners. Another version of the same story even alleges that he is thought to have angrily held prison guards hostage while in jail. Though these anecdotes may sound far fetched, nine years of conflict have taught us that no detail, however seemingly absurd, can be intuitively ruled out when it comes to the Syrian theater.

 This is especially true of the dysfunctional substructure of the régime, the dynamics of which are defined by exceptionally surreal levels of brutality, corruption, and inequality. A mere juxtaposition between the pictures depicting Suleiman’s massive weight gain during his ‘incarceration’, and the images of the emaciated and mutilated corpses of political detainees at the hands of the mukhabarat, is the unequivocal evidence of this.

 Above all, Suleiman’s case is a microcosm: a glaring reminder that Syria under the Assads is a police state run by an assortment of gangsters and warlords who operate outside of the law. Its people are held hostage by an authoritarian mafia underpinned by the criminality of one extended family and its various networks and surrogates. Underneath the layers of dichotomies that inform popular opinion surrounding the country and the conflict – Sunni vs Alawite, oppositionists vs loyalists, the army vs the rebels – there are in essence two main Syrias: one for the Assad clan and its proxies, and one for everyone else.'

Spirit of revolt lives on in Syria's exiles

 

 'They may be scarred, but nothing, not even torture, bombing or exile, could break them.

 As the Arab Spring revolts swept through the Middle East and North Africa region like a wildfire, thousands of young Syrians joined protests in March 2011 demanding change in a nation ruled by the family of President Bashar al-Assad since 1970.

 The régime's revenge was swift and brutal, and many of the non-violent activists at the heart of the uprising paid with their freedom and their lives.

 Even now, with no end in sight to their exile, they do not regret their revolution.



 The first thing Omar Alshogre sees when he wakes up in his Stockholm flat are the photographs of two prison guards who tortured him in Branch 215, one of Syria's most notorious detention centres.

 It may seem surprising but Alshogre wanted the pictures, which he had to buy off the guards' families and keeps on his bedside table, as a reminder to himself that: "They could not break me, and I'm still alive."

 Alshogre, now 25, says he was just 15 when régime forces first arrested him "along with all the men" in his village near Baniyas city -- a protest hub in a largely pro-government province -- on the Mediterranean coast.

 He was released two days later -- but only after his interrogators had pulled out his fingernails and broken his leg.

 "I understood what freedom meant for the first time, and that's when I started protesting," Alshogre said.

 Over the next 18 months, he was detained six more times in different places, including at his cousin's home, in the classroom and at checkpoints.

 In May 2012, régime troops attacked his village, killing his father, a retired army officer, and his two brothers.

Following his final arrest in November 2012, he was transferred to a total of 10 different prisons and detention centres.

 "I saw more of Syria's prisons than I ever saw of Syria itself," he says.

 Released in 2015, he was a shadow of his former self, weighing just 34 kilos (just under 75 pounds).

 To save her sons' lives, his mother smuggled Omar and his younger brother Ali, then 20 and 11 years old, into Turkey.

 At the height of Europe's migrant crisis, they boarded a smuggler's boat to Greece and crossed Europe to Sweden, where they were granted asylum.

 Alshogre has since learned Swedish and English and speaks both fluently.

 Now, he works for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a US-based advocacy organisation, and has testified before Washington's Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on torture in Syria's prisons.

 He has given TED talks on his experience, inspiring his audience with a universal message on overcoming pain by finding meaning even in one's darkest hour.

 And recently he won a place at Georgetown University in Washington DC to study business and entrepreneurship.

 "It is not easy to lose your home, your father, your brothers, your school, your town, your mountains and your memories," he says.

 "But if I had the possibility to go back in time, I wouldn't do it. Because the revolution is the first thing we did right in Syria."



 "When I was pregnant and I had pain in my belly, I would cry. Not for me, but for the Syrians living in displacement camps who can't see a doctor, and for the detainees who suffer constantly," says Nivin Al-Mousa, who has lived in Berlin since 2015.

 When she joined the protests in her town of Taybet al-Imam in the central province of Hama, she never imagined she would end up seeking refuge abroad.

 In 2013, her younger brother Hamza, also a non-violent activist, was detained at a checkpoint.

 "We later learned that he had been tortured to death," says Al-Mousa, who identified his body in one of the pictures of torture victims' corpses released by a former Syrian military police photographer, codenamed "Caesar", who fled the country taking thousands of photographs documenting abuse and torture.

 "The moment you see that picture, a wound opens inside you, and the pain never heals," she says.

 Al-Mousa, her mother and siblings fled to Turkey in an escape "worthy of a James Bond movie. There were warplanes above us, bombing all around us, and the driver was speeding at 200 kilometres (125 miles) an hour," she says.

 In Turkey, she met her husband Mohammad, who originates from the central Syrian city of Homs and had narrowly survived being randomly shot in the head by a sniper while coming home from university.

 In 2015, he was granted a visa to seek medical treatment in Berlin. There, the family received refugee status.

 Al-Mousa, now 36, has frequent nightmares. "We are all traumatised," she says.

 But for her two daughters' sake, she works hard to adapt to her new life.

 She now speaks fluent German as well as English and Arabic, as do her girls, who are six and four.

 She works for international aid group Humanity & Inclusion, formerly known as Handicap International, helping refugees with disabilities in Germany.

 She also participates in protests in Berlin, home to a large Syrian refugee community, to help shine a light on the suffering of Syria's detainees.

 "All we want is a government that respects our basic rights," Al-Mousa says. "One day, the régime will get the fate it deserves."



 Tohama Darwish survived an August 2013 chemical attack on the besieged Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta blamed on the régime, in which rights groups say 1,400 people were killed.

 Then in 2018, the area faced an onslaught when the army, backed by Russian warplanes, crushed the armed opposition.

 "The bombing was so intense, I wished my daughter had still been in my belly so I could run faster," says Darwish, whose daughter Sumu was two at the time.

 Darwish, then a volunteer nurse, and her family joined the tens of thousands who fled Eastern Ghouta to the rebel-held northern province of Idlib.

 There, Islamist fighters accused her of spreading "obscenities" through her work raising community awareness about violence against women.

 "We didn't want to leave Syria," the 30-year-old says. "Unfortunately, there was no difference between the régime and the Islamists ruling Idlib."

 The family went to Turkey, from where Darwish and her husband applied for asylum in France.

 They now live in state housing in the northeastern French town of Colmar, where they are learning the language as they wait for their residence permits to come through.

 "From a gender perspective, life is better here. It's hard to be a feminist in Syria," she says.

 "I feel guilty for leaving my relatives behind. But I am happy that Sumu is at school here," she says.

 "She will always be Syrian, but her life is here now. When she's older, I will tell her everything that happened."



 When Bashar Farahat was released from detention in early 2013, he was barred from resuming his postgraduate paediatrics training at a government hospital in Latakia in western Syria.

 He had been jailed for joining the protests, and beaten by his interrogators "even harder" because he was a doctor with a degree from a public university.

 In April 2013, he was detained again for another six months.

 "In prison, the torture during interrogations was bad. But the worst was the constant torture of living in a tiny cell of 30 square metres (320 square feet) with 90 to 100 other detainees," says Farahat, who is now 36 and a registered doctor working in London.

 "We would take turns to sleep while the others stood," he says.

 As a doctor, his cellmates would ask him to treat their wounds. "But I had nothing to treat them with," he says of his time in a military intelligence detention centre in Damascus.

 "Occasionally, the guards would give us two vitamins or two anti-inflammatory pills to share among 100 people. People would lose limbs because of simple injuries becoming severely infected," he adds.

 Following his release in November 2013, he fled to neighbouring Lebanon, where he applied for resettlement through the United Nations.

 He arrived in Britain in March 2015, and has since passed the conversion exams allowing him to practise medicine there.

 Now married to an interior designer, he works at a National Health Service (NHS) hospital in north London.

 "When the Covid-19 pandemic began, of course I worried for my loved ones, but I think my experiences in Syria prepared me to work well in a crisis," says Farahat, who feels proud to be able to give back to Britain in its time of need.

 He has also set up a telemedicine website offering vulnerable Syrians online consultations free of charge.

 "We have to be strong, work hard and build good lives, so that when the régime falls we can contribute to Syria's future," he says.

 Looking back, knowing now what he didn't know in 2011, what would Farahat tell his younger self?

 "I would say: go out. Protest. Even more than I did. Do I regret the revolution? Never, not for a second. The revolution made me who I am today." '

How did Mazen Hamada, the survivor of Assad’s slaughterhouse, disappear?

 

 'Mazen Al-Hamada escaped from the Assads’ torture dungeons and did what no one dared to do: using his own name, he told the world what happened to him even before he sought refuge in the Netherlands. Today, Mazen is missing, and his family fears that he is in the grip of the régime.

 “In his last call before he disappeared, Mazen repeated the sentence: ‘Pray for me’. His voice was trembling with fear. It made me feel that someone was listening to the call,” his nephew confirms. Mazen assured his family members of the thing they didn't want to hear: “I am in Syria, I am at Damascus International Airport.”

 The last thing Mazen said to his nephew was: “My nephew, pray to me”. Then the line went dead.

 It happened on a Sunday, a few minutes after midnight. Ziad stayed on the other end of the line in the German city of Krefeld, blaspheming and cursing his uncle Mazen: "Damn everything, Mazen, why did you return to Syria?!"

 Mazen Al-Hamada, aged 42, had been living in the town of Hillegom in the heart of the tulip-growing region in the Netherlands, in an apparently safe situation. But he was not an ordinary Syrian refugee; instead he’s one of the brave Syrians in Europe whose number does not exceed the fingers of one hand, who dared to be identified and to speak out, giving public testimony about the forms of torture they were subjected to in Bashar al-Assad's prisons.

 Mazen presented the story of his torture to politicians and human rights organizations in Washington, Geneva and London. "It was prominent in Europe." Ugur Angor, a researcher at the Dutch Center for War Documentation, which researches the issue of torture in Syria, said this. Ugur asks, "What made Mazen, a symbol of the resistance against Assad, go to Syria, the country that brought him close to death by torture?"

 Mazen grew up in a village close to Mohassan in eastern Syria, which was known as ‘Little Moscow’, due to the large number of communists among its children who were hostile to the Assad régime. When he graduated, Mazen worked for a French company carrying out oil exploration in Syria. With the outbreak of the Arab Spring and its arrival in Syria, Mazen began working to coordinate popular protests against Assad.

 As with many protesters, Mazen was arrested twice, and each time he returned after a few days to resume his activities. The third time, he was arrested by Air Force Security in Damascus in March 2012, he was detained for a year-and-a-half, moving between several prisons, including the military hospital, known as ‘the slaughterhouse’.

 He was released without understanding the reason, but it was clear that he had to leave Syria. Mazen arrived in the Netherlands in 2014 as a refugee, broken in body and soul. A newspaper journalist who met Mazen in 2014 reported that he was amazed at the sheer number of bikes in the Netherlands. When we asked him at the time if he could live comfortably, he replied: “I don’t know.” He said he was just a ghost. "I'm not living any more."
Mazen's sister and husband live in the town of Hillegom, where Mazen got a small apartment on the first floor of a building intended for low-income people. Like all expatriates, he had to follow language and integration classes. He was unable to learn the Dutch language. “I cannot memorize anything - my brain is full,” he says to his cousin Amer Obeid.

What distinguishes Syria from other dictatorships in recent history is the killing of thousands of people since the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011 by torturing them to death. For those who have researched torture, this policy is exceptional. "Torturing a person to death is a terrifying way to carry out an execution," said Angorou, a researcher who’s been analyzing the Assad régime's violations of people's rights. "After 2011, the goal of torture became to terrorize the people, not to obtain information."

 Most of those who survived the torture in Assad's dungeons are too afraid or ashamed to talk about what happened to them there. Mazen presented the entire account of his harrowing experiences to a Syrian research group, the Violations Documentation Center, formed by Razan Zaitouneh, while he was in Syria. Subsequently, from his place of residence in the Netherlands, he worked with the International Commission for Justice and Accountability, and with many Western-backed human rights organizations in an effort to help ensure justice for the employees of the Syrian régime.

In the documentary Syria's Disappeared, Mazen narrated the methods of torture practiced on him by Air Force Intelligence agents. He admitted to them that he had filmed the demonstrations and his ‘weapon’ was a Toshiba camera. An Air Force Intelligence interrogator falsely accused him of killing soldiers and attacking régime checkpoints. When Mazen denied these charges, the interrogator withdrew, leaving four monstrous thugs to beat the poor young man. They broke his ribs and hung him from hooks on a window frame, with his legs dangling in the air half a meter off the ground, Mazen told the newspaper in a 2014 interview. They forced him to remove his clothes, and the executioners put a large pair of pincers on his genitals.

"They continued to pinch and tighten these pliers until they cut the penis," Mazen recalled in Syria's Disappeared. Then they raped him by inserting a sharp object into his anus. They continued with this action until he finally agreed to sign the ‘confession’ wanted by the interrogator, who was waiting in the next room.



 Sexual violence is a daily occurrence in Syrian prisons. It is exceptional for the victim to speak about this openly, using his name. What makes Mazen’s story even more unique, however, is that he escaped from Hospital 601 in Damascus, the infamous hellhole known as the ‘slaughterhouse.’

According to the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, Hospital 601 is one of two hospitals where more than 6,000 prisoners were killed between 2011 and 2013. A military photographer known as ‘Caesar’ smuggled harrowing photos of the victims out of the country when he managed to escape to the West in 2013.

The régime agents brought Mazen to Hospital 601 because he was urinating blood, due to the torture he had endured. In the toilet there, he saw three bodies, bound and dumped. Chained in his bed, Mazen watched as another one was beaten to death, realizing he could be the next victim. So he decided to claim that he had recovered in order to escape from this hell. Will they take him again to the torture prison? To hang him there again by his wrists? escape from this hell. Would they take him back again to the torture prison? To hang him up there again by his wrists? It seemed to him that the executioners were frustrated that he was still alive.

Mazen sustained permanent injuries due to torture. “Don’t talk to me about this,” he would say, weeping, every time Amer Obeid, his sister’s husband, mentioned the issue of marriage to him, saying – unaware what Mazen had endured - “You’re a young man. Time to get married.”
In Holland, Mazen visited the ‘Arc 45 Center,’ which specializes in treating the effects of war trauma, Amer says. Soon after starting there, however, he stopped the treatment. “They were putting him in a closed room, which he could not bear,” Amer explained. After that, he began to lose control of his life. According to Amer, who lives nearby, “Mazen's apartment became a pile of chaos, while Mazen spent his days eating and smoking at his laptop."

 The Dutch bureaucracy had no way to deal with Mazen. In the small community of anti-Assad activists there, he is considered a hero, despite being difficult to deal with. But the Dutch government viewed him primarily as an unemployed asylum seeker. This contradiction was further highlighted when a municipal social worker discovered that Mazen had again traveled abroad to tell his story internationally.

Amer, who was in charge of translating conversations between Mazen and the municipality employee, said that the latter expressed anger at Mazen, insisting that he was not entitled to travel without informing the municipality, which would need to deduct money from the unemployment benefit he received for the days he was absent. As for the fact that Mazen was a witness to historic crimes against humanity of international importance, this was of no concern to the municipality employee. “The way the municipality officials interrogated him was similar to that of the Assadist Intelligence,” Amer says. “They pressured him a lot.”

The municipality says it was unable to respond to Mazen’s case due to client privacy laws. “We know that the goal of social service is ‘to make the population as independent as possible in terms of work, income and care,” an official said, adding, “The right to receive unemployment benefits is safeguarded according to the rights and duties of the person entitled to it. Whoever does not abide by this rule and does not respond to repeated requests for compliance, the municipality has the right to stop paying him the unemployment benefits."

 Things got worse on November 12th, 2019. On returning home, Mazen discovered that his key no longer fit the front door lock. The Stek Housing Association seized his house and everything and evicted him. It was only then that Mazen's sister and husband knew that Mazen had not paid the rent for months.

Liesbeth Gort, a spokesperson for the Stek Housing Association, says eviction is the last resort if attempts to help the tenant get rid of rent arrears fail as claimed. He says that there is a team that specializes in helping tenants who have late-paid rents. “Of course we deal a lot with people with mental problems,” Gort says. We are trying to find solutions for them, in cooperation with the municipality's social team and the health care network. ”

 “We always take special circumstances into consideration and we have done that here. But if you don't provide real help, the housing company will stand helpless, ”says Gprt. "The eviction has been approved by the court and the tenant has been informed of this."

 

 After this, Mazen's laptop computer was seized, together with possible evidence against the Syrian government. Mazen's belongings are kept by the bailiff, O.J. Boeder in Haarlem. The owner of the company does not want to go into discussion of the matter with us and does not want to answer our questions. Generally, they say, when property is seized, things of economic or personal value are stored with an external storage company for a period of 13 weeks, after which they are destroyed.

 Mazen was living in a different reality. One of his acquaintances in Scotland, Idrees Ahmad, explained, "He said people from the Dutch intelligence services broke into his house and confiscated his documents." Ahmad adds that Mazen was suffering from schizophrenia.
Without a home and property, he lived with his sister Maha and her husband Amer in Hillegom. “He would sit there on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, smoking a lot and barely eating. He was chatting for long periods on the phone, Amer says, "I was curious to know who he was talking all this time without stopping. There was no one on the other end of the line - he was talking to himself."

 “I want to go back to Syria,” Mazen said repeatedly. Nobody took him seriously.
But Mazen left Helligom on 15th February. “I'm going to see friends of mine in Germany,” he said during his final farewell. Everyone - his sister, her husband, and also his nephew - believes that people in Berlin working for the régime had reached out to him. “We don't know how they pulled it off,” his family said. It is possible that his feelings were being played, that régime loyalists told him he could return to Syria, in exchange for the release of several family members who are still in prison there. There are rumors and allegations circulating on social media that Mazen called the Syrian Embassy in Berlin. 

 The Syrian embassies in Europe are a well-known base for Assad's spies. "The embassy mafia is trying to keep refugees in Germany under control," says Ziad, Mazen's nephew who lives in Krefeld. According to Angor, "It is 100% certain that the Syrian intelligence services are also active in the Netherlands."



 The first message about Mazen’s presence in Syria was posted on a pro-régime Facebook group on Saturday, February 22nd. When his nephew Ziyad heard this, he called him via WhatsApp, and this call remains the only evidence that Mazen is currently in Damascus. Ziyad recounts that his uncle told him that the Syrian authorities had given him a choice between undergoing a simple investigation in Damascus or leaving, on Sunday, February 23rd, for Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to return from there to the Netherlands.

 Ziad says: “I think it sounded weird and irrational, but that’s what he told me. He was not in good shape and was speaking strangely, as if they were giving him hallucinogenic pills or drugs. Ziad urged Mazen to try to leave Syria for anywhere. Mazen’s appearance on WhatsApp was at 12 minutes past midnight on Sunday, February 23.

 Police in the Netherlands are investigating Mazen's disappearance. The County Department of Investigation requires witnesses to provide their testimony about the case. A foreign ministry spokesman said that the Netherlands “cannot provide consular assistance in Syria,” and that so far no inquiries have been made about Mazen's current residency. It is not clear how Mazen traveled to Syria at all. According to his family, he did not have a valid passport.
Mazen's sister and husband hope for any sign that Mazen is alive. Mazen was already weak in the Netherlands, not to mention what he suffered when he fell into the hands of Assad officials. “This régime is filthy, and its morals are disgusting,” says Amer, Mazen’s brother-in-law. His family fears that at some time, Mazen will be forced to appear on Syrian TV, making one of the régime’s typical forced confessions, denying all he said previously in a scripted statement, and saying, “Everything I mentioned before is untrue.” '

Escalating violence in strategic Syrian city belies Assad’s claim that he’s in control

 

 'Violence has erupted in recent weeks in a strategic Syrian city with Assad régime forces and former rebels clashing amid a wave of assassinations, revealing the difficulty President Bashar al-Assad faces in maintaining control over areas he says he has pacified.

 The southwestern city of Daraa is considered the cradle of the Syrian revolution because it is where the first anti-government demonstration broke out in 2011. Seven years later, after peaceful protests had turned into a devastating civil war, Russian-backed Syrian forces recaptured Daraa, raised the national flag and introduced a program of “reconciliation” with rebel fighters.

 But dissent continued to simmer in Daraa, even as régime forces took their battle to other fronts. And the turmoil of recent weeks has become the latest challenge to Assad’s authority, which was already under pressure from a crippling economic crisis and growing dissension within the ranks of his traditional allies.



 Tensions in Daraa spiked last month after gunmen attacked the car of a prominent rebel leader who had continued to voice opposition to the régime even after Assad’s forces recaptured the area. The former commander, Adham al-Karad, and four of his companions were killed, sparking weeks of violence, according to opposition media reports corroborated by monitoring groups, analysts and social media posts.

 Under pressure, Assad agreed to release 62 people who had been arrested for “incidents in the province,” the pro-régime al-Watan newspaper reported two weeks ago.

 But days later, the army’s Fourth Division, which is headed by Assad’s brother Maher, rolled into southern Daraa in search of wanted men, provoking clashes with former rebel fighters who later shut down roads leading to the city to prevent the military’s advance, local pro-opposition media reported. Days later, an air force intelligence checkpoint in a nearby town was attacked, prompting the Fourth Division to try to storm Daraa and triggering a battle with former rebels.



 This month, at least nine former rebels who had agreed to join the Syrian army and seven others who had returned to civilian life were killed, according to Mohammed al-Sharaa, a member of the Daraa Martyrs Documentation Office. The assailants were unknown, with suspicion falling in turn on régime forces seeking to settle scores with former adversaries; opposition loyalists who feel betrayed by former comrades; and even Islamic State militants.

Reliable information about developments in Syria is often scarce because of the régime’s tight media controls and widespread fear of the police state. But the documentation office, a Belgium-based monitoring group, has sought to chronicle the rising toll, reporting that 193 former rebel fighters who had put down their weapons have been slain in Daraa since régime forces retook the city in July 2018, with the pace of killings accelerating each year. More than 200 other civilians have been killed, some under torture, the group reported.

 Assad's military has reclaimed much of the territory that had been lost at the height of the insurgency, and rebel fighters are now bottled up in one remaining enclave in northwestern Syria. Nor is there any other obvious contender for the presidency of the country, ruled by the Assad family for 50 years.

 But the unrest in Daraa comes at a time when Assad has been confronting the biggest challenges to his power since Syrians first rose up against him in 2011, including strains over the past year within his family and with his crucial Russian allies.



 The violence in Daraa is also eroding the image Assad has tried to portray as he urges Syrians who fled the country to return home to régime-controlled territory. He has promised that no harm will befall those who come back. But many Syrian refugees remain skeptical, aware of reports that many who’ve returned have disappeared or died in custody.

 During an international conference in Damascus this month, Syrian officials discussed steps they were taking to welcome returning refugees and blamed the regional Arab media for painting too negative a picture.

 The Syrian régime’s “proclaimed military victory and the physical return of its institutions does not mean the restoration of security and stability,” said Abdullah al-Jabassini, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute. “The situation in Daraa contradicts the ‘return of the state’ ideal narrative.”

 Not only does Assad’s régime continue to face violent opposition, Jabassini said, but it has yet to show that it can exercise meaningful control of the territory it has recaptured. The continuing turmoil in Daraa is fueled by a range of factors, he said, including unresolved grievances and score-settling, an unusually high number of former rebels, an abundance of available weapons, and local anger over the presence of fighters from Iranian militias and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which are aligned with Assad.



 Daraa’s significance goes beyond symbolism. Daraa city is just north of Syria’s border with Jordan, and the province of the same name hosts a strategic border crossing. Two months after the city was recaptured by Assad’s forces, the régime reopened the crossing to both people and commerce, seeking to swiftly restore a once highly profitable trade route after it was blocked for several years.

 The weeks-long battle over Daraa was exceptionally fierce. After the opposition was defeated, some rebels chose to pack up and pile into the now-infamous green buses dispatched by the régime to relocate fighters and their families to Idlib, a rebel-held enclave in the northwest of Syria.

 Other fighters chose to stay. Some accepted reconciliation deals, with many joining the Syrian army’s Russian-sponsored Fifth Corps, created ostensibly to fight the Islamic State. Soon after, the régime announced nearly 1,000 reconciliation deals struck in Daraa in a single day.

 The pro-régime media has trumpeted such reconciliation deals, saying they “preserve blood and return those who have lost their way to the homeland’s embrace.” But unlike in some other recaptured areas of Syria where former insurgents have been offered these agreements, the deals in Daraa did not put an end to resistance. Many former rebel commanders and fighters have remained openly defiant of the régime.

 Karad, the rebel leader assassinated last month, was one such commander. Even after the city fell, he continued to speak of revolution and criticized Iran and Russia, Assad’s biggest backers.

 “We are rebels from the city that is the cradle of the revolution. We succumbed to reconciliation under international pressure, and we have not abandoned our cause,” he said in a Facebook post after surviving an assassination attempt last year.

 In death, he leaves behind a 1-year-old son, named Saladin. On Facebook, Karad had written that he hoped God would allow his son to emulate the legendary Islamic commander who fought the Crusaders in the 12th century.'