Few could bear to look long at his face, with its sunken, sorrowful eyes so full of pain – but when Mazen al-Hamada spoke, you could not help but listen.
He spoke to audiences across the West, in lecture theatres and in parliaments, bearing witness to the darkness of the Assad regime in low, urgent tones.
Sometimes, he showed them his wrists, scarred by the chains from which he hung until he lost consciousness. He would speak of the beatings and the rapes he and others suffered, his haunted eyes reddening at the memory.
On Thursday, they laid Hamada to rest in central Damascus, the capital coming to a halt as its residents gathered to honour the man who became the embodiment of a nation’s suffering and who now had become as powerful a symbol in death as he was in life.
Hamada was one of the last casualties of 13-year uprising against Bashar al-Assad, tortured to death by a vindictive regime in its death throes just hours before the advancing rebels flung open the doors of the infamous Sednaya prison where he was held.
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Having escaped for Europe in 2014 after his first incarceration, Hamada returned home six years later, fearing his crusade was having little impact, worried about his family’s well-being and relieved to have received assurances he would not be detained again.
Instead he was arrested at Damascus airport immediately after his plane landed and never seen again until, on Tuesday, just two days after Assad’s fall, the city’s new masters discovered his body among 35 corpses wrapped in bloodied sheets at a military hospital in the Harasta district.
Tens of thousands were tortured to death by the Assad regime over the course of the rebellion. Hamada was quite possibly the last of them, killed, so activists hypothesise, to prevent him testifying against Sednaya’s torturers.
Muhammad Jafran’s forensic medical team at Damascus hospital examined all 35 bodies and concluded that only two, Hamada’s and the corpse of an unknown man, had external injuries. The others, all believed to have been inmates at Sednaya, died either of starvation or asphyxia, most likely after suffocating in its overcrowded cells.
But what shocked Dr Jafran was the scale of the injuries to Hamada’s body and that they had clearly been inflicted over several days. It is probable, the doctors concluded, that he died on Friday, less than 48 hours before Assad fled the country.
“He had so many fractures,” Dr Jafran said. “There were injuries to his entire body, with heavy bruising on the femurs and abdomen. We don’t know which was the injury that killed him. We do know he suffered.”
From the morgue at the hospital, through the streets of Damascus and all the way to Hejaz Railway station, the crowd carried his coffin, chanting his name, lauding his courage and regretting how poignantly close he had come to rescue.
Yet it was not just Hamada’s picture the crowds held aloft. There were dozens of others, too, each showing the image of another of Assad’s victims who disappeared over the course of his 24-year-rule never to be seen again, buried, most likely, in unknown, unmarked graves across Syria.
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Fittingly, the man who in life championed the cause of all Syria’s 100,000 or more political prisoners had become the symbol of far more deaths than just his own.
Nor was it just those with missing relatives who joined the procession. So, too, did political prisoners of all generations who had also survived torture, not just under the regime of Bashar al Assad, but under that of his equally dictatorial father Hafez, who seized power in a coup in 1971 and ruled until his death in 2000.
They came not just to pay tribute to the man who gave voice to Syria’s suffering but to celebrate the fact that, for the first time in so long, there is a genuine atmosphere of freedom in the country.
“One of the biggest changes is that we don’t need to be frightened of each other anymore,” said Abdullah Fadel, who was held at Sednaya for nine years in the 1990s and for a further three months in 2016.
“I can put my arm around someone I don’t know on the street and tell them what I really think, knowing that no one is going to do anything to me. I never imagined I would live to see such a thing happening in Syria.”
Arrested for belonging to the Communist Party, Mr Fadel endured repeated torture during the early part of his first spell in custody, including the notorious “German Chair”, which saw inmates hogtied to enhance the agony of their beatings. The technique, possibly taught to the Syrian secret police by their trainers in the East German Stasi, was so effective that sometimes a prisoner’s vertebrae would snap.
Mr Fadel survived prison, he says, by teaching himself English and then translating George Orwell’s Coming up for Air into Arabic, setting him up for a lifelong career as a translator of novels.
“I am a proud graduate of the University of Sednaya,” he said, his arm around the woman who waited for him to emerge from prison and then married him.
Around Mr Fadel was a gaggle of other former political prisoners from the same era, including Shireen Alsbini, a former journalist who made the mistake of taking Bashar al Assad at his word when, after he took power in 2000, he pledged to allow freedom of expression.
After she and her sister wrote critical pieces about the regime they were both dragged from their homes in the middle of the night, still in their night dresses.
During two years in custody, they were beaten by men and women alike. As female prisoners, sexual abuse was inevitable.
“When we arrived in the prison, the guards tore our clothes off and we were obliged to — well, I think you get the picture,” she said.
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It is experiences such as these, inflicted on so many, that helped stir up such hatred in the Assad regime, and is one of the reasons that people flocked to join Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist movement that toppled it.
Standing guard outside an abandoned courthouse, ransacked by mobs showing their hatred of an instrument of state oppression, Suleiman Talal al-Ali, says he joined the group not just because he was dragged out of the restaurant he owned, arrested and jailed for reasons unknown — but because of what he saw in custody.
“There was a man in there,” he said, glossing over his own beatings. “We don’t know what he did. But one day, they brought his wife into the prison and four of the guards raped her on the floor in front of him.”
Among those at Hamada’s funeral, there was optimism that HTS would be better than the Assad regime — “it could hardly be worse,” said Ms Alsbini — tempered by the fear that it might not be.
“We have only walked half way,” said Mahmoud Isa, a 61-year-old former political prisoner. “The other half is to come and it will not be easy because we now need to move beyond the men with guns. Syria wants democracy. If we get dictatorship again, we will rise up again.”
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Mr Isa is not the only person expressing reservations.
Across the capital, in the city’s ancient Christian quarter, three 19-year-old women — Jessica, Miriam and Giselle — were in reflective mood as they sipped coffee in a café off Straight Street, along which St. Paul is held to have stayed following his conversion en route to Damascus.
As a minority, they hesitantly admitted, they regarded Assad, a member of another minority, the Alawites, as a protector from extremist Sunni Arab groups, HTS among them.
Yet it was only now that state television, which parroted the government line, had fallen that they had become aware of the atrocities the Assad regime had perpetrated, they said.
“We lived in the dark,” Miriam, who did not want to give her surname, said. “Now we are seeing the truth, we are hearing about the prisons and what happened. It is so shocking. We understand now that Assad was the problem. We just didn’t realise it at the time.”
Just as they had underestimated the abuses of the Assad regime, so far, they said, they had exaggerated the dangers of HTS, which once pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda but now insists it is pursuing moderation and tolerance.
Although bars in the Christian quarter remain closed, just in case, she knew of no retribution against Christians, Jessica said, despite their reputation as Assad supporters. That said, she added, these are early days and things could change.
“We are waiting,” she said. “It will take time to build confidence. We are hoping that we will live in a Syria where everyone is genuinely free and everyone can follow their own religion.”
“We just want to live quietly, to wear what we like, to celebrate Christmas and Easter. We are waiting for reassurances that this will be the case.”