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.” '