Latest news with #HafezAlAssad
BBC News
3 days ago
- Health
- BBC News
The Documentary Podcast The future of the Alawites
In the wake of the Assad regime's fall in Syria, thousands of Alawites, a minority Shia sect historically linked to the former regime, have fled to Lebanon. They are seeking refuge from discrimination and sectarian violence that has left over 1,000 civilians dead, including women and children. The late Hafez al-Assad, Bashar's father, became the most powerful Alawite when he seized control of Syria in a coup in 1970. Under the rule of Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar - the ruling Assad's recruited heavily from the Alawite community placing them in top posts in state, security and intelligence branches. Syria's new President Ahmed al-Sharaa, promised to protect Syria's minorities, but has struggled to contain a wave of violence directed towards the Alawite community. Emily Wither travels to the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli to meet with Syrian Alawite refugees and a new youth movement. This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from Heart and Soul, exploring personal approaches to spirituality from around the world.
Washington Post
3 days ago
- General
- Washington Post
Returning to Syria to reckon with the ghosts of my father's past
In an Assad torture prison, I saw my father's poem still on the wall. As my father watched the news, his breath caught. A video of the inside of a prison cell was on the television. Tears streamed down his face. On one of the walls he could make out a poem, one he had written with his own hands. He watched as the Assad regime, which had imprisoned him in the notorious Palestine Branch, collapsed; watched as thousands fled the dungeons where Syrians had been starved, tortured, killed. These were memories I longed to forget: the days without my father, the stories of what he endured. But now, as a photographer on assignment in Syria, I had no choice but to confront them. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement The return I never imagined I'd return to Syria — especially not after my family and I left in 2004, and certainly not after the civil war. What began in 2011 as peaceful demonstrations — part of a broader wave of uprisings across the Middle East — was met with unsparing brutality by the Assad regime. The scars of its aftermath were everywhere. Crossing into Syria from Turkey, I felt disoriented. As I drove through the scorched countryside toward Aleppo — the first major city to fall in the final days of Bashar al-Assad's regime — we passed through towns that looked suspended in ruin. New revolutionary flags fluttered above the crumbling walls. Posters of Assad and his father, Hafez, had been torn down by those they had oppressed. Tanks and military uniforms were scattered along the road, evidence of a regime that had fled in haste. We drove past Aleppo, then Hama, where I remembered taking youth group trips to the old city. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement As we neared the capital, we stopped at Mezzeh military airport, once a tightly guarded area. During Assad's reign, approaching it had been unthinkable. Now, I walked freely through the wreckage there: destroyed helicopters, twisted steel, shattered cockpits — all reduced to rubble by Israeli airstrikes in the chaotic hours after the regime's collapse. Damascus, though, felt frozen in an earlier time: the narrow alleyways, the ancient stone, the scent of jasmine in the air. Here, I had walked as a boy, laughed with friends, built a thousand memories. But there were also pangs at what lay ahead — I knew had to see the Palestine Branch with my own eyes. The prison I found myself standing alone in a dark corridor. I walked through the cells, each more haunting than the last. The stench was suffocating. On one wall, a man had etched: 'I wish the reality was a dream, and the dream was a reality.' That man was my father. I had found his cell. More than two decades had passed, but his words remained — a haunting reminder of what he had endured. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement The Palestine Branch was one of the most feared security centers in Syria, infamous for its brutal interrogations, arbitrary detentions and systematic torture. For decades, it stood as a symbol of repression. My father was imprisoned there for seven months in 2000, at a time when Syria was gripped by paranoia and deep mistrust. We had come to Syria as refugees from Iraq, where my father had served in the military, which was mandatory during Saddam Hussein's rule. That was enough for the Assad regime to be suspicious. My father spent the first few months in Cell No. 4, a space meant for about three people. He recalled being there with 11 others. Later, he was moved to Cell No. 8, where he spent the bulk of his detention and endured severe torture. Living in Damascus After my father's release from prison, we settled in a neighborhood called Dwela, a modest working-class suburb of Damascus. I started sweeping up hair clippings and making tea at a barbershop nearby. Later, I worked in the basement of our building, where the landlord — a man named Abu John — ran a tailoring workshop. It was in that neighborhood that I experienced my first protest. The mass uprisings of 2011 were still years away, but you could already feel the growing anger. The government had announced plans to demolish homes in our area to make way for a highway and a bridge. One afternoon, we gathered in the street, chanting against the demolition. Riot police soon arrived, and before we knew it, we were surrounded by tear gas. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement When I returned to the neighborhood this year, the open fields where we once played were gone, buried beneath layers of concrete and makeshift buildings. Trash spilled into alleyways. After decades of war, residents' faces were etched with grief and exhaustion. The monastery One of the places I was most eager to revisit was the monastery where I had spent a significant part of my childhood — St. Ephraim, nestled in the village of Maarat Sednaya, just outside Damascus. We had lived in the capital for nearly a year when the government intensified its crackdown on undocumented refugees like us. Our Orthodox church stepped in, offering us shelter in the monastery. We spent about four years there. My parents helped with the cooking, and I worked in the fields alongside a monk named Hanna. Together, we tended to nearly a thousand olive trees that covered the hillside. Returning after two decades, I felt time had paused. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement I wandered among the olive trees that I had once watered, whose fruit I had once harvested and cleaned. I ate meals with the monks, joined them for morning and evening prayers, walked among the ancient books, and stood once again inside the small room where I had spent years of my life. A few miles away, across the mountain, a new monastery had been built. The Holy Cross Monastery reminded me of how the place once felt: sacred and untouched by the chaos below. When I visited, I was stunned to find Monk Hanna there. It was a bittersweet reunion. He barely remembered me. After my family left, hundreds of other Iraqi refugees sought shelter at the monastery. To him, I was one of many — a fading memory buried in decades of faces and names. When I showed him a photo of the two of us in the olive fields, something flickered, a faint recognition. I held on to that moment. I didn't need more. The departure In 2004, I sat in the departure hall of Damascus airport. We were leaving the home we had known for years. I didn't know if I'd return, but I still remember my heart pounding with excitement for what might come next. Two decades later, walking through the same halls, I was overwhelmed by a flood of memories — of uncertainty, of longing, of a younger version of myself who didn't yet know how long the journey ahead would be. As our plane lifted off, I looked down at the landscape of Syria — the cities and towns, the valleys and ridges, the scars of war and the quiet strength still holding the country together. I tried to stay in the moment, to reflect on everything I had seen over the past few months: the fall of the regime, the devastation, the resistance, the resilience. I thought of the people I was leaving behind — the shopkeepers, the mothers, the children, the former detainees, the elderly survivors who held their stories like heirlooms. They had endured so much under the iron grip of the Assad regime. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement I thought, too, about how rare it is for refugees to return. Most never do. But I had been blessed twice: once to return to my homeland, Iraq, and now to my second home, Syria.
Asharq Al-Awsat
4 days ago
- Politics
- Asharq Al-Awsat
After Decades in Assad Jails, Political Prisoner Wants Justice
Syrian fighter pilot Ragheed Tatari was 26 when he was arrested. Now 70, the country's longest-serving political prisoner is finally free after Bashar al-Assad's fall, seeking justice and accountability. Tatari, arrested in 1981 and sentenced to life behind bars, was among scores of prisoners who walked free when longtime ruler Assad was overthrown on December 8 in an offensive led by opposition factions. He has made it out alive after 43 years in jail, but tens of thousands of Syrian families are still searching for their loved ones who disappeared long ago in Syria's hellish prison system. "I came close to death under torture," Tatari told AFP in his small Damascus apartment. Since a military field court gave him a life sentence for "collaborating with foreign countries" -- an accusation he denies -- Tatari was moved from one prison to another, first under late president Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar who succeeded him in 2000. Showing old pictures of him in his pilot uniform, Tatari said he was not seeking revenge, but stressed that "everyone must be held accountable for their crimes". "We do not want anyone to be imprisoned" without due process, said Tatari. More than two million Syrians were jailed under the Assad dynasty's rule, half of them after anti-government protests in 2011 escalated into civil war, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor. The Britain-based monitor says around 200,000 died in custody. Diab Serriya, co-founder of the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison, said that Tatari was "the longest-serving political prisoner in Syria and the Middle East". Rights group Amnesty International has called the notorious Saydnaya prison outside Damascus a "human slaughterhouse". Tatari had been detained there, but he said his 15 years in the Palmyra prison in the Syrian desert were the most difficult. 'Wished for death' The Palmyra facility operated "without any discipline, any laws and any humanity", Tatari said. Detainees were "not afraid of torture -- we wished for death", he added. "Everything that has been said about torture in Palmyra... is an understatement." "A guard could kill a prisoner if he was displeased with him," Tatari said, adding that inmates were forced under torture to say phrases like "Hafez al-Assad is your god", although he refused to do so. In 1980, Palmyra witnessed a massacre of hundreds of mostly Islamist detainees, gunned down by helicopters or executed in their cells after a failed assassination attempt on Hafez al-Assad. Tatari said he was completely disconnected from the outside world there, only learning of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union through a prisoner who had returned from a hospital visit. In Sweida prison in the south, where Tatari was transferred after the 2011 revolt began, some inmates had phones that they would keep hidden from the guards. "The cell phone gets you out of prison, it makes you feel alive," he said, recalling how he used to conceal his device in a hole dug in his cell. But after his phone was discovered, he was transferred to a prison in Tartus -- his final detention facility before gaining freedom. Dreams of escape Tatari was one of several military officers who were opposed to Syria's intervention in Lebanon in 1976, and to the violent repression in the early 1980s of the Muslim Brotherhood, Syria's main opposition force at the time. "Many of us were against involving the army in political operations," he said. After two of his fellow pilots defected and fled to Jordan in 1980, he escaped to Egypt and then on to Jordan. But he returned when security forces began harassing his family and was arrested on arrival. His wife was pregnant at the time with their first and only son. For years, the family assumed Tatari was dead, before receiving a proof of life in 1997 after paying bribes, a common practice under the Assads' rule. It was then that Tatari was finally able to meet his son, then aged 16, under the watchful eye of guards during the family's first authorized prison visit that year. "I was afraid... I ended the meeting after 15 minutes," Tatari said. His wife has since died and their son left Syria, having received threats at the start of the protest movement, which had spiraled into war and eventually led to Assad's overthrow. During his time behind bars, Tatari said he "used to escape prison with my thoughts, daydreams and drawing". "The regime getting toppled overnight was beyond my dreams... No one expected it to happen so quickly."
BBC News
07-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
The medics identifying remains from Syria's mass graves
'This will be the work of years': The medics identifying remains from Syria's mass graves Just now Share Save Tim Franks BBC Newshour Reporting from Damascus Share Save BBC Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed during 13 years of civil war "These," says Dr Anas al-Hourani, "are from a mixed mass grave." The head of the newly-opened Syrian Identification Centre is standing next to two tables, covered in femurs. There are 32 of the human thigh bones on each laminated white tablecloth. They have been neatly aligned and numbered. Sorting is the first task for this new link in the long chain from crime to justice in Syria. A "mixed mass grave" means that corpses were thrown one on top of another. The chances are, these bones belong to some of the hundreds of thousands believed to have been killed by the regimes of the ousted president Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, who together ruled Syria for more than five decades. If so, says Dr al-Hourani, they were among the more recent victims: they died no more than a year ago. Dr al-Hourani is a forensic odontologist: teeth can tell you so much more about a body, he says, at least when it comes to identifying who the person was. But with a femur the lab workers in the basement of this squat grey office building in Damascus can begin the task: they can learn the height, the sex, the age, what sort of job they had; they might also be able to see whether the victim was tortured. The gold standard in identification is of course DNA analysis. But, he says, there is just one DNA testing centre in Syria. Many were destroyed during the country's civil war. And "because of sanctions, a lot of the precursor chemicals that we need for the tests are currently not available". They've also been informed that "parts of the instruments could be used for aviation and so for military purposes". In other words, they could be deemed "dual use", and so proscribed by many Western countries from export to Syria. Add to that, the cost: $250 (£187) for a single test. And, says Dr al-Hourani, "in a mixed mass grave, you have to do about 20 tests to gather all the parts of one body". The lab relies entirely on funding from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The new government of Islamist rebels-turned-rulers says that what they call "transitional justice" is one of their priorities. Many Syrians who have lost relatives, and lost all trace of them, have told the BBC that they remain unimpressed and frustrated: they want to see more effort from the people who finally chased Bashar al-Assad from power last December after 13 years of war. During those long years of conflict, hundreds of thousands were killed, and millions displaced. And, by one estimate, more than 130,000 people were forcibly disappeared. At the current rate, it can take months to identify just one victim from a mixed mass grave. "This," says Dr al-Hourani, "will be the work of many, many years." 'Mangled and tortured' bodies Eleven of those "mixed mass graves" are slung around a beautiful, barren hilltop outside Damascus. The BBC are the first international media to see this site. The graves are quite visible now. In the years since they were dug, their surface has sunk into the dry, stony earth. Accompanying us is Hussein Alawi al-Manfi, or Abu Ali, as he also calls himself. He was a driver in the Syrian military. "My cargo," says Abu Ali, "was human bodies." Abu Ali thinks he transported lorry-loads of civilian corpses under the Assad regime This compact man with a salt and pepper beard was tracked down thanks to the tireless investigative work of Mouaz Mustafa, the Syrian-American executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a US-based advocacy group. He had persuaded Abu Ali to join us, to bear witness to what Mouaz calls "the worst crimes of the 21st Century". Abu Ali transported lorry loads of corpses to multiple sites for more than 10 years. At this location, he came, on average, twice a week for roughly two years at the start of the demonstrations and then the war, between 2011 and 2013. The routine was always the same. He'd head to a military or security installation. "I had a 16m (52ft) trailer. It wasn't always filled to the brim. But I'd have, I guess, an average of 150 to 200 bodies in each load." Of his cargo, he says he is convinced they were civilians. Their bodies were "mangled and tortured". The only identification he could see were numbers written on the cadaver or stuck to the chest or forehead. The numbers identified where they had died. There were a lot, he said, from "215" - a notorious military intelligence detention centre in Damascus known as "Branch 215". It is a place we will re-visit in this story. Abu Ali's trailer did not have a hydraulic lift to tip and dump his load. When he backed up to a trench, soldiers would pull the bodies into the hole one after another. Then a front-loader tractor would "flatten them out, compress them in, fill in the grave." Three men with weathered faces from a neighbouring village have arrived. They corroborate the story of the regular visits by military lorries to this remote spot. And as for the man behind the wheel: how could he do this for week after week, year after year? What was he telling himself each time he climbed into his cab? Abu Ali says he learned to be a mute servant of the state. "You can't say anything good or bad." As the soldiers dumped the corpses into the freshly excavated pits, "I would just walk away and look at the stars. Or look down towards Damascus." 'They broke his arms and beat his back' Damascus is where Malak Aoude has recently returned, after years as a refugee in Turkey. Syria may have been freed of the chokehold of the Assads' dynastic dictatorship. Malak is still serving a life sentence. For the past 13 years, she has been locked into a daily routine of pain and longing. It was 2012, a year after some of the people of Syria had dared to raise a protest against their president, that her two boys were disappeared. Both Malak Aoude's sons were disappeared under Assad's rule
Al Arabiya
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Al Arabiya
From socks to sarcasm: How Syrians are mocking the al-Assad dynasty
At Basel al-Sati's souvenir shop in a central Damascus market, socks bearing caricatures that ridicule ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his once feared family now sell like hot cakes. 'I want to bring joy to people who've been deprived of happiness for so many days and years,' said Sati, 31, displaying pairs of white ankle-length socks. 'Everyone who comes from abroad wants to buy the socks -- some to keep as a souvenir, others to wear mockingly and take pictures,' he told AFP. 'There are even some who buy them just to stomp on them,' he said. Stamping on someone's image is considered deeply insulting in the Arab world, so the socks allow wearers to trample the al-Assads underfoot as they walk. Pictures of the al-Assad clan have gone from being ubiquitous symbols of repression to objects of derision and mockery since his December 8 ouster by anti-government forces after nearly 14 years of devastating civil war. Some socks showing al-Assad in sunglasses read 'We will trample them', while others depict him with heavily exaggerated features. Others bear a caricature of Hafez al-Assad who ruled Syria before his son, depicted in his underwear and chest puffed out. They bear the phrase 'This is what the al-Assads look like' -- a play on the family's last name, which means lion. Al-Assad's once feared younger brother Maher labelled 'the captagon king' also features. Western governments accused Maher and his entourage of turning Syria into a narco state, flooding the Middle East with the illegal stimulant. 'No better' gift Sati's shop, brimming with other gift items, is decorated with images from Syria's revolution. An image of al-Assad is on the ground at the entrance so people can walk on it. 'It's another kind of celebration, for all the Syrians who couldn't celebrate in Ummayad Square after the fall of the regime,' Sati said. The Damascus landmark filled with huge crowds from across the country and hosted days of celebrations after al-Assad's ouster, with people raising the now official three-starred flag symbolising the revolution. Afaf Sbano, 40, who returned after fleeing to Germany a decade ago, said she had come to buy 'Assad socks', which sell for around a dollar a pair, for friends. There is 'no better' gift for those 'who can't come to Syria to celebrate the fall of the regime', she told AFP. 'I bought more than 10 extra pairs for my friends after I shared a photo on Instagram,' she said. 'We had never dared to even imagine making fun of him' before, she added. 'People hate him' Manufacturer Zeyad Zaawit, 29, said the idea of socks to mock the al-Assads came to him after the former ruler was deposed and fled to Russia. Zaawit started with a small number and then ramped up production when he saw they were selling fast. 'People hate him,' Zaawit said of al-Assad. 'I took revenge on him this way after he fled,' he said, adding that the socks were so popular that some customers even paid in advance. Zaawit said he produced around 1,000 pairs in the first week and has since tripled production, making more than 200,000 pairs in three months. Images of the socks have been shared widely on social media and they have even been used in satirical television programs. Al-Assad's own words have also been turned against him -- including a refusal to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a foe who is close to Syria's new authorities. Erdogan made repeated overtures to al-Assad in the period before his overthrow. In August 2023, al-Assad famously said: 'Why should I meet Erdogan? To drink refreshments?' The pronouncement, now the subject of jokes on social media, appears on posters in food and juice stalls, sometimes accompanied by mocking images of al-Assad.
