Hama, the Syrian Holocaust

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February 2nd, a dark day escaped from the documentation of the black box of Syria’s history in 1982, as there was no media or social media, nor their knights to document what happened in Hama (Abi al-Fida) that day! Hafez al-Assad besieged the city to punish the enemies of his regime who rebelled against him. With the first cries of dawn, his artillery and the army of his sectarian militias desecrated the sanctity of the city of prayer, with all imaginable and unimaginable human cruelty and criminality!

Twenty-seven days resulted in the killing of more than 40,000 Syrians in Hama. Those who were not fortunate enough to be eliminated on the spot were destined to face the fate of imprisonment in Assad’s cells with their unique tales, surpassing a hundred thousand detainees. As for the number of the missing, not included in the statistics, it exceeds 15,000 citizens.

Thus, the illusory victory of the beast Assad resulted in a ghost city, after the land was leveled with its people. Not a tree, human, or building remained. Even the stones and places of worship were not spared from the harm and tyranny of the brave army on that day; 63 mosques and 4 churches were destroyed. Not to mention the thousands of Hama natives who left Syria during and after the campaign in an emigration akin to secrecy, stealthily from Assad’s regime, fearing for their lives and the honor of their women and daughters. As for those Hama natives who could not leave the country, they continue to suffer greatly to this day, from the lack of employment for their children, monitoring and restrictions imposed on them, and being deprived of their simplest civil and even military rights, including promotions and holding high leadership positions and the like.

The result and conclusion:
The rule of Syria was supposedly stabilized for Hafez al-Assad and his partners, or so they thought! 29 autumns under the ashes, until the blood of Hama’s martyrs (Abi al-Fida) blossomed into a popular revolution that shook the ground beneath the feet of Assad the heir to his father’s legacy, burdened with the bones and skulls of Syrians. It stormed the pillars of his rule in 2011, bringing Hama back to the forefront as it was.

Surrounding circumstances:
Perhaps Hama was annihilated, but Assad’s regime could not stop the rotation of its water wheels, those that if you listened to them, you would unmistakably hear their groans as they rotate, carrying with them the screams of thousands of innocents who were thrown by Assad’s regime on that day into and along the banks of its famous river (and ask Hassan bin Thabit about this, for he is a witness), and to continue for 29 years watering the Syrian land with the water of the Assi River (resistant to every mighty tyrant, oppressive and suspicious).

Perhaps the Syrians felt in 2011 that the cost of Syria’s entire uprising against Assad’s regime would be expensive, and that this time the bill would be much larger than the bill of Hama’s rebellion! How not, when part of the 2011 revolution is nothing but paying the debt of 1982, adding the interest for 29 years of cowardice in resisting Assad and confronting his brave militias at the time, after the horrifying massacre of Hama.
The Syrian people are united:
From the communists to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Syrian people have been and continue to stand united against the sectarian authority of the Ba’ath party. The front of Sheikh Marwan Hadid is the same trench as Riad al-Turk in the face of and in opposition to Assad’s regime! Syria, which breathed democracy as the first democratic Arab state, might have seen the new colonizer attempt to change its rebellious nature against all oppression by supporting a series of varied military coups that led the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party to ascend to power in Syria. This allowed it to engage uniquely in its Ba’athist experiment after breaking off from its counterpart in the Iraqi Ba’ath Party led by Saddam Hussein!

Hafez al-Assad spared no effort in using every card at his disposal to strengthen the pillars of his regime, targeting his opponents individually and collectively with ready-made and prepared accusations! Nationalists were accused of sympathizing with the Iraqi Ba’ath, the religious were accused of affiliating with the Muslim Brotherhood, activists were labeled as communists, and intellectuals were charged with working for foreign interests, and so on.
Then, Hama had to serve as a collective disciplinary rod and a personal threat scarecrow, waved at the rest of the Syrian regions (the rod is for those who disobey), which indeed did not escape his wrath, starting from the south and not ending with Jisr al-Shughur in the north, by various methods (worthy of study and foundation).
Hafez avenged the Syrians under the pretext of opposition, just as his son Bashar al-Assad avenged all Syrians under the pretext of revolution after 2011, killing more than a million Syrians and displacing more than 15 million from their homes, and then to laugh his infamous laugh: “Now the people have become homogeneous!”.

How did Syrians deal after the massacre?
History is full of many crimes, some documented and some not! Starting from “Muslim ibn Uqba,” the perpetrator of the Harra massacre, through the Tatar massacres, to the Hama massacre.
Perhaps the difference today is that the media, which was monopolized by Assad’s regime in 1982, is now available to everyone! I do not believe there is a mobile phone in Syria that has not played a role in conveying the truth as it is from the inside, whether through the devices of the revolutionaries or even the Shabiha themselves! Even the footage broadcasted by Syrian television is nothing but a tool of condemnation for it, documenting its crimes (preparation, planning, and execution), even the cries of Syrians rejecting the rule of their tormentor, took their place from the archiving for the era of rejecting the rule of both Assad the father and son.
In the early signs of the launch of the Syrian revolution, the reformers tried to play a reformist role to prevent the minor resurrection! And to spare the country the experiences of other countries in the region!
But the Syrians learned the lesson well, and realized that what is after 2011 is not like before it, and that the opportunity to pounce on the rule of Assad the heir would mean another thirty years without hope for reform or righteousness, and that turning a blind eye to what happened and is happening means massacres in the manner of Hama, albeit later!
Social media undoubtedly played a role in changing the Syrian mindset, which has become immediate in its following and interaction. Every Friday, popular demonstrations would occur, quickly turning into funerals (weddings of the martyrs) as Assad’s regime took lives, and the shoulders of the next Friday’s demonstrators would bear them, and so on!
Perhaps the Syrian regime thought that the Hama experience in the eighties could also succeed today! However, it met with unprecedented Syrian obstinacy! The Syrians, from the revolutionaries, managed to build an army of the free to defend themselves and repel the aggression first. As violence escalated, the Syrians borrowed the wrath of the jihadists, swearing allegiance to death, their concern being not to coexist with the criminal Assad regime any longer, either to live freely or to join the martyrs of the Hama invasion!

Explaining reality does not mean endorsing every detail of it, nor does it mean that we advocate for bloodshed! But the reality imposed on us, and still stronger than principles, is undeniable.
Despite their political and military naivety, the Syrians managed to break the intelligence neck of Assad. He resorted to the extremists among the Shiites, invoking the history of Muawiya and Yazid in the Umayyad capital. When the killing by the Shiites intensified, their only solution was to pass off the intelligence game of ISIS! The Syrians were more astute and prudent, they besieged ISIS and also wreaked havoc on it, leaving it in the “Maliki” lair that gifted them “Mosul” and its weapons and hopes in a blatant historical game. “Qasem Soleimani” had no choice but to fly to “Moscow” to sell a share of their Syria to “Putin,” who awaited a foothold on the Mediterranean Sea after being expelled from Libya!
Thus, the strength of the Syrians became armies, legions, and battalions beyond count or measure, surrounding the capital Damascus and threatening the presidential palace, leading to the entry of the Russian bear in 2015, declaring war on the Syrians and aligning with Assad, and you know the rest of the story….

Conclusion:
Some may wish to lash our backs as Syrians, for we are human and possess countless faults, never claiming to be angelic. However, it is impossible, under any circumstance, to deny ourselves the rights we deserve! We rose with the word when it was stronger than the cannon, with bullets when they represented struggle, and with patriotism when ISIS was decimating our heroes. We will spare no effort in reaching a just Syria, secure and stable, for the nation called its people, its protectors, and its fighters, and we responded. The waterwheel of Hama turned the millstone on the head of Assad’s regime, and by our will, we replaced the inspiring leader, the cherished symbol, the guiding father, and the eternal president, whom the Syrian regime tried to make an idol in every city and village, with Abdul Qader Saleh, Abu Furat, Abdul Baset Sarout, Meshal Tammo, and others.
Today, we stand before a great gamble, requiring more awareness and vigilance. Our struggle is still long to reorganize our ranks, to gather our lines within a new revolutionary front. As we used the word in its place, and the weapon in its place, we must also employ deep understanding and awareness in the face of accelerating events, hoping that this reality will end without further losses that would continue the noise of bloodshed in Hama… and in all of Syria.