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.” '