Ham, Syria -Moreover of 40 years, people in Hama spoke to a whisper about the February 1982 massacre, which the then President of Hafez Al-Assad liberated this city.
Talking about it, he could bring Syrian to join the hundreds of thousands of his compatriots in Al-Assad prisons.
Now, the fourth largest city in Syria can mark and mourn the massacre of tens of thousands of people in public, because Hafez’s son Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in December after the uprising and the subsequent war, which lasted 13 years.
History of revolutions
Hama was a rebel for generations, his historians say, with a large part of his population before expelled from other parts of Syria a century ago and having distrust in the dictatts of the central government.
“In 600 to 700 years, Hama has had a history of revolutions,” Al Jazeera Suliman al-Suliei al-Hiraki, a Ham historian, told Al Jazeera.
During the Mamluk period (11th to 14th centuries), says al-Hiraki, he counted more than 30 revolutions, some of which ended with bloodshed.
Then in 1964, a year after the Baath-Koji party, Hafez Al-Assad would later take over-the power of power in Syria, there was a significant uprising.
The unrest and periodically violence continued until February 1982, when Hafez Al-Assad ordered the full power of the Syrian army and militia related to the regime to break at the multi-year uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood.
There were no quarters for Hamawa, especially Sunni Muslims who were targeted in predominantly sectative killings of the regime.
Bounds of body
Abdelrahman Bilal was 11 at the time – memories have persecuted him to this day.
“At the same time, they tortured three of my relatives,” he said from the office of his MP in Hama. One of three was only 14 years old.
Another arrested and later died in prison.
Even among the Litany of the massacre committed by the Assad regime – including tens of thousands killed in a recent war – the Hama massacre stands out.
When they stopped, the army and militia, led by Hafez’s younger brother Rifaat, killed thousands, the exact number unknown, but estimated between 30,000 and 40,000 people, including entire families, according to the Syrian Human Rights Network.
The locals say that young men, some only teenagers, were rounded, lined up and fired. They recall that they saw the crowds and piles of bodies.
“They took out the whole neighborhood, all the men and took them to the door of their homes,” Bilal said.
The Assad regime also surrounded the city as it bombed it, sometimes targeting the armed fraction of the Muslim fraternity, but often unleelned, and executing the abstracts of execution and torture.
“I have not seen any young in about 10 to 15 years,” Bilal said. “People aged 15 to 45 or 50 years, everyone was killed.”
‘Walls have ears’
The massacre seemed to break Hama’s rebellious nature. Instead, the new culture of silence lingered while the Syrian forces, including the infamous intelligence, watched it carefully.
“[We told ourselves to] 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 had happened because of fear of the consequences.
Year Bilal hid the portraits of his killed relatives.
The usual refrain in Syria under Al-Assad was: “The walls have ears.”
“For the generation of ’82 … any conversation about politics was forbidden,” Al-Suliei al-Hiraki said, adding that Hama had closed his prestigious publishing houses that were known throughout the Arab world.
“[T]The sequel was arrested and raids continued, “Al-Suliei al-Hiraki said.” The city took over [a completely different] character.”
Rising again but briefly
In the early days of the 2011 Revolution, Hama was the scene of anti -regates of protests that were so great that they attracted the attention of foreign diplomats.
It was also one of the places where the regime reacted with a rapid, deadly force, killing more than 100 people.
The still tortured traumas of the 1982 massacre of 1982, it seemed that the hamma was largely silent afterwards.
Then on November 28, 2024, the shock -spection offensive liberated Aleppo in the north. A week later, they took Ham, then Homs and Damascus, forcing Bashar to flee and end for almost five decades of the Dynastic rule of Assad.
He finally got rid of Assad, Bilal first presented portraits of his killed family and hung them across the wall in his office.
The young men have contemporary hairstyles and clothing in the photos, not a religious dress associated with a Muslim Brotherhood.
He said for decades, “We haven’t looked at their pictures.”
“Hurry before they take us!”
NoFal Noophaal was also able to share pictures from 43 years ago.
Nofal, then 26, photographed the damage from the bombing of the regime on the city houses of worship during the 1982 massacre.
While most of the victims were Sunni, the bombing campaign destroyed every church in Hama.
Nofal knew how big the risk was at the time he took the photos – so is Jihad Karbouj, who came out with him to photograph the scene.
The 73-year-old Karbouj stood next to Nofal, who is now 69, in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of the HAMA Salon, where a photo exhibition was held in the commemoration.
Karbouj laughs when he remembers how nervous he was then. “I told him, better to hurry before they come and take us!”
Nofal kept the photos hidden, a passing decade without doing anything to reduce his fear that they could discover them.
After the regime fell, he posted them on Facebook for the public to see them for the first time, and then the exhibition was agreed during this month of commemoration and sorrow, an event that would never have happened under Al-Assad.
In the echo of past concerns, the police were stationed outside the church to make sure everything was going smoothly. The church was shot by unidentified attackers in the days after the fall of the regime, and no one wanted to take the risk.
On the inside, Nofal paintings showed the destruction of Hama’s churches and his great mosque, performed by the 1982 bomb bomb.
One set of paintings before and later shows the newly built – at that time – the Greek Orthodox Church side by side with a photo of the consequences of a government attack that reduced it to ruins. It took the church for 20 years to end and never prayed.
The absent fear that once caught them, dozens of people gathered in the salon – including Christian and Muslim religious figures – were free to recall and grieve.
“Now, I’m living in freedom,” Noophaal said.
