Hama: a rebellious Syrian city that can finally mourn slaughter in Assad | Syria's War News

Hama, Syria -More than 40 years, the people in Hama talked with whispers about the slaughter in February 1982, which then President Hafez al -Assad unleashed in this city.

Talking about this can make Syrian join the hundreds of thousands of compatriots in Al-Assad prisons.

Now the fourth largest city in Syria may also mark the sorrows about the public slaughter of tens of thousands of people, because Hafez Bashar al -Assad's son was overthrown in December after an uprising and a subsequent war that lasted 13 years.

Revolutions

Hama has been rebellious from the generations, her historians say, with a significant part of his population being expelled from other parts of Syria centuries ago and held distrust of the dictates of the central government.

“From 600 to 700 years, Hama has a history of revolutions,” said Suliman al-Suli al-Hiraki, a historian of Hama, to Al Jazeera.

During the Mamluk period (11 to the 14th century), says Al-Hiraci, he counted more than 30 rpm, some of which ended with bloodshed.

Then, in 1964, one year after the Baat-Kafe al-Assad party, he would later take over-Syria, there was a remarkable rebellion there.

The unrest and periodic violence continued until February 1982, when Hafez al-Assad ordered the full power of the Syrian army and related to regime militias to collapse into a long-standing uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

There was no quarter for Hamavis, especially for the Sunni Muslims, who were aimed at mostly sectarian killings of the regime.

Piles of bodies

Abdelrahman Bilal was 11 years old at the time – memories persecute him to this day.

“They struggled three of my relatives at the same time,” he said at the office of his car dealership in Hama. One of the three was only 14 years old.

Another was arrested and later died in prison.

Even among the literacy of the massives carried out by Assad's regimes – including the tens of thousands killed in the recent war – the slaughter in the Hama stands out.

By the time they stopped, the army and militia led by the smaller brother of Hafez Rifaat had killed thousands, the exact number of unknown, but evaluated between 30,000 and 40,000 people, including entire families, according to the Syrian human rights network.

The locals say that young men, some just teens, were rounded, lined and shot. They remember that they saw piles and piles of bodies.

“They pulled out entire neighborhoods, all men and executed them at the door of their homes,” Bilal said.

Assad's regime also besieged the city while bombarded it, sometimes heading to the armed fraction of the Muslim Brotherhood, but often indiscriminately and performs generalized executions and torture.

“For a period of about 10 to 15 years I have not seen young people,” Bilal said. “People aged 15 to 45 or 50 were killed.”

“The walls have ears”

The slaughter seemed to be breaking down the disobedient nature of the ham. Instead, a new culture of silence was caught when the Syrian powers, including the notorious intelligence, watched him closely.

“(We said yes) Be careful and be quiet and say nothing,” Bilal said, adding that people were so scared that they didn't even tell the children what happened for fear of consequences.

For years, Bilal has been hiding the portraits of his killed relatives.

A common refrain through Syria under Al-Assad was: “The walls have ears.”

“For the generation of '82 … all kinds of talk about politics were banned,” said al-Suli al-Hiraci, adding that Hama closed his prestigious publishers, which were known in the Arab world.

“(T) He arrested continued and the raids continued,” said Al-Suli Al Hiraki. “The city took (a completely different) character.”

Rising again but briefly

In the first days of the 2011 revolution, Hama was the site of anti -row protests, which were so great that it attracted the attention of foreign diplomats.

It was also one of the places where the regime responded with a quick, deadly force, killing more than 100 people.

Still struck by the injuries of the 1982 slaughter, Hama seems to be very silent afterwards.

After that, on November 28, 2024, a shock rebel offensive Aleppo in the north. A week later, they took a hammock, then Homs and Damascus, forcing Bashar to run and end for nearly five decades of the Assad Dynasty rule.

Finally, he got rid of Assads, Bilal led the portraits of his murdered family for the first time and hung them on the wall in his office.

The young men in the photos have contemporary hairstyles and clothes, not the religious dress associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

For decades, he said, “We didn't look at their photos.”

– Hurry up before they take us!

Nofal Nofal also managed to share images from 43 years ago.

At the age of 26, NOFAL filmed the damage to the bombing of the city houses for worship during the slaughter in 1982.

While the greater part of the victims were Sunni, the bombing campaign was destroying every church in Hama.

Nafal knew how big the risk was at the time he did the photos – so did Jihad Carbuy, who came out with him to shoot the scenes.

73-year-old Carbudzh stood next to Nofhal, who is already 69 years old, in the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of the Hama Salon, where an exhibition of the photos was held in commemoration.

Carbuy laughs as he remembers how nervous he was then. “I told him, better hurry before they came and take us!”

Nafal kept the photos hidden, and the past decades did nothing to reduce his fear that they could be found.

After the regime fell, he published them on Facebook for the public to make sure for the first time, then the exhibition was organized this month of commemoration and mourning, an event that would never happen to Al-Assad.

In an echo of past concerns, the police were located outside the church to make sure everything was going smoothly. The church was shot dead by unidentified artillerymen in the days after the regime's fall and no one wanted to take risks.

Inside, the images of NOFAL showed the destruction of the churches of the Hama and its large mosque made by the Bombs of the Assad regime in 1982.

One set of before and after images shows a newly built – at that time – the Greek Orthodox Church next to each other with a picture of the consequences of a government attack that reduces it to ruins. The church took 20 years to finish and never prayed.

There were no fear that they once covered them, dozens of people gathered in the salon – including Christian and Muslim religious figures – were free to remember and mourn.

“I live in freedom now,” Nofhal said.