Among the rows of windswept trees and sandy housing, makeshift checkpoints of burned-out cars and dustbins protect Hama’s neighbourhoods. The atmosphere is tense as residents wonder what fate awaits the city at the heart of Syria’s five-month-old standoff between protesters and the regime. The answer came on Sunday July 31.
It is difficult to report from Syria because the government does not allow journalists to work freely. But according to residents and activists, the regime decided it had had enough. Without provocation, tanks stationed on the city’s outskirts for weeks approached Hama from four directions, followed by infantry and security forces. Those manning the city’s checkpoints tried to defend themselves with stones and bars but, in the most horrific day since the uprising began, the death toll steadily climbed as doctors called for blood donations and a stream of gruesome video footage emerged. By sunset, up to 100 people were dead and scores more injured.
But residents say the army has still not taken the city, despite an ongoing assault.
Locals drew comparisons with 1982 when Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father and the former president, unleashed his army on the city, leaving at least 10 000 people dead.
“If the security forces arrest me and ask why I am protesting, I will tell them: in 1982 you killed my brother and you killed my father,” said 54-year-old Mohamed when I spoke to him in July at his home in one of Hama’s central districts. “What more reason do I need?”
Mohamed was newly married and in his 20s when his brother and father were rounded up by security forces. They had fled 4km from the city after tanks arrived to repress an armed Islamist uprising that aimed to topple president Assad. Both were shot dead. The bodies, like many hundreds of others, were never recovered. Mohamed has refused to register them as dead.
“We saw men in white — the colour of the defence forces — using cannons and tanks, which would crash through houses. We saw cars with soldiers and holes dug for graves. There were 50 of us in this house and the army rounded up the men.”
Mohamed fled to the northern city of Aleppo, walking the first 15km. “I saw corpses everywhere: one there, three here, another five there. It was horrific.”
There is little official history of those three weeks in February in which the city, then Syria’s third biggest, was besieged by the Defence Brigades, forerunners of today’s much-feared 4th Armoured Division.
Muslim Brotherhood
Islamists based in Hama, Aleppo and the northwest had risen up against Ba’ath party rule, which came to Syria in 1963 and was taken over by Assad in a coup in 1970. Since the end of the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood had waged a campaign against the Ba’athists, slaughtering party members and even attempting to assassinate Assad. The authorities replied with massacres and thousands went missing.
Even 30 years ago, Hama’s role as protest capital was not new. It had been at the forefront of campaigns against land-owning families and, later, the Ba’ath party.
But matters came to a head in February 1982 after guerrilla forces declared Hama liberated and the government responded with what some believe is the greatest act of violence in contemporary Middle Eastern history.
It was then, as now, a war of survival for the Assad regime. Aircraft bombed the roads out of the city to prevent people escaping. Tanks and artillery positioned on the outskirts rained shells on houses, causing them to collapse on residents. Soldiers roamed the streets, lining up men and boys as young as 15 to be shot. According to personal testimonies, women were raped and some starved to death. The attack went far beyond obliterating the Muslim Brotherhood: Christian churches and mosques were razed.
Seventeen ancient norias, or waterwheels, that creak in the breeze and turn slowly in the Orontes, the river that weaves its way through the city, are almost all that is left of Hama’s ancient history — the city that appears in the Bible as “Hamath”.
Of the old city, only a few streets remain. Whole areas were bulldozed, while bullet holes pockmark buildings that still stand. The Cham Palace, a partly government-controlled chain of hotels, sits on a spot where Hama’s residents say a mass grave lies.
Hama, which used to draw tourists, has little infrastructure and few of the good restaurants that are a feature of Homs, a few kilometres south, or the main hubs of Aleppo and Damascus. In this city of 800 000 people, Syria’s fourth biggest — everyone has a story from 1982. The memories resonate strongly with the present uprising that has been brutally suppressed and has so far caused more than 1 600 civilian deaths.
Syria was seen as a possible exception to the revolutionary currents that started to sweep the region at the start of the year. Protests in February and March, including vigils for Egypt and Libya, were quickly put down by the security forces.
But in mid-March, Syria’s uprising got the spark it needed when a group of schoolchildren in the southern city of Deraa were snatched by security forces for writing anti-regime graffiti. Their parents were insulted by Atef Najib, the city’s security chief, and on their release the children bore marks of torture.
On March 18, renewed protests were met with live fire, killing several and sparking outrage across the country. Demands have escalated from local complaints and calls for reform to chants for the end of Assad’s regime.
Slow reforms
When Bashar succeeded his father in 2000, many hoped that this might signal a change. But shortly after 9/11, Assad suggested the United States could learn from Syria’s history of dealing with terrorists — implying its suppression of Hama. Reforms have been slow and the brutal crackdown since March has killed all hope.
On June 3, 70 people were killed in Hama after three trucks with large guns opened fire on protesters returning from Friday prayers. The front row of men, beating their chests and shouting “peacefully, peacefully!” to show they were unarmed, were felled; more followed. The bloodshed only stiffened the city’s resolve, which has been further strengthened by the latest attack.
The authorities themselves have fuelled comparisons with the 1980s, insisting that, now as then, Syria faces the threat of an armed Islamic insurgency. Hama’s residents are religiously conservative Muslims, but the Muslim Brotherhood or the ideas of political Islam hold little sway.
“In the 1980s, I saw bodies tossed on rubbish heaps; on June 3 I saw the same. They called it the war of pyjamas because they’d take people from their beds at night, and that’s what they’re doing now,” said Suleiman, referring to late-night security force raids on the fringes of the city.
Suleiman says he grew up knowing that his two uncles had been killed. “It influenced how I see this regime, how I see my country — and I’m scared of what they will do.”
Shared memory fuelled the country’s largest protest gathering in the city’s al-Assy Square on July 1. When it seemed that the security forces might attack, residents set up the barricades and the men sent women and children out of the city to relatives.
“Many of the young men manning the checkpoints are orphans of 1982,” said a female government worker in her 30s, putting coals on an argileh (hookah) as the day fades and lights flicker on across the city. She talks loudly, dark eyes blazing, no longer afraid in a country where political opinions have been whispered.
“I saw my neighbours dragged out of their house, put against a wall and shot. We hid, scrabbling for food and were lucky in being smuggled out to the villages,” she said. “You don’t forget a scene like that. We have to prevent something similar happening again.”
“The regime divided people and made them suspicious of each other, but this uprising has started to bring us back together again,” said a businessman in his 40s, sipping coffee in his house, a bullet hole on the whitewashed wall behind him. His mother, who lost a son in 1982, keeps calling to check that he is all right.
The double act of Bashar and his brother Maher, who is the commander of the 4th Armoured Division, matches Hafez and his brother Rifaat, who led the 1982 assault. But the uprising now is nothing like the ones before it.
Although clerics have taken a prominent role — the de facto negotiator for the city is the imam of Serjawi mosque and people have gathered in mosques — this is not a religious uprising. Protests reflect those across the country in that they are broad-based, unarmed and morally grounded.
“We are religious. But they are trying to portray us as extremists when we are not” is a common refrain in the city.
Instead, Hama’s residents say they hope for freedom, for a government that treats them with dignity and the end of 41 years of “beit Assad” — the house of Assad. —