Hama: A rebellious Syrian town that can finally mourn the Assad massacre

Hama, Syria – For more than 40 years, people in Hama spoke in whispers about the February 1982 massacre that then-President Hafez al-Assad unleashed on this city.

Speaking about it could lead a Syrian to join the hundreds of thousands of their compatriots in al-Assad’s prisons.

Now, Syria’s fourth-largest city can commemorate and mourn in public the massacre of tens of thousands of people because Hafez’s son Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in December after an uprising and subsequent war that lasted 13 years.

A history of revolutions

Hama has been rebellious for generations, its historians say, with a sizeable chunk of its population having been expelled from other parts of Syria centuries ago and harbouring a distrust of central government diktats.

“For 600 to 700 years, Hama has had a history of revolutions,” Suliman al-Suliei al-Hiraki, a historian from Hama, told Al Jazeera.

During the Mamluk period (11th to 14th centuries) alone, al-Hiraki says, he counted more than 30 revolutions, some of which ended in bloodshed.

Then, in 1964, one year after the Baath party – which Hafez al-Assad would later take over – took power in Syria, a landmark uprising took place there.

Unrest and periodic violence continued until February 1982, when Hafez al-Assad ordered the full force of the Syrian army and regime-affiliated militias to crack down on a years-long Muslim Brotherhood-led uprising.

There was no quarter for the Hamawis, especially the Sunni Muslims who were targeted in the regime’s predominantly sectarian killings.

Piles of bodies

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

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

Another one was arrested and later died in prison.

Even among the litany of massacres committed by the Assad regimes – including the tens of thousands killed in the recent war – the Hama massacre stands out.

By the time they stopped, the army and militias, led by Hafez’s younger brother Rifaat, had killed thousands, the exact number unknown but estimated between 30,000 and 40,000 people, including entire families, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.

Locals say young men, some merely teenagers, were rounded up, lined up and shot. They recall seeing piles and piles of bodies.

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

The Assad regime also besieged the city while bombarding it, sometimes targeting the Muslim Brotherhood’s armed faction but often indiscriminately, and carrying out summary executions and torture.

“For a period of about 10 to 15 years, I didn’t see any young people,” Bilal said. “People from the ages of 15 to 45 or 50, were all killed.”

‘The walls have ears’

The massacre seemed to shatter Hama’s rebellious nature. Instead, a new culture of silence took hold as Syrian forces, including the notorious intelligence, watched it closely.

“[We told ourselves to] be careful and be quiet and don’t say anything,” Bilal said, adding that people were so scared that they did not even tell children what had happened for fear of repercussions.

For years, Bilal hid the portraits of his murdered relatives.

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

“For the generation of ’82 … any talk about politics was forbidden,” al-Suliei al-Hiraki said, adding that Hama shuttered its prestigious publishing houses that were known across the Arab world.

“[T]he arrests continued and the raids continued,” al-Suliei al-Hiraki said. “The city took on [a completely different] character.”

Rising again, but briefly

In the early days of the 2011 revolution, Hama was the scene of anti-regime protests that were so large they drew the attention of foreign diplomats.

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

Still plagued by the traumas of the 1982 massacre, Hama seemed to largely go quiet after that.

Then, on November 28, 2024, a shock rebel offensive liberated Aleppo to the north. A week later, they took Hama, then Homs and Damascus, forcing Bashar to flee and ending nearly five decades of the Assad dynastic rule.

Finally rid of the Assads, Bilal brought out the portraits of his slain family for the first time and hung them on the wall in his office.

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

For decades, he said: “We didn’t look at their pictures.”

‘Hurry up before they take us!’

Nofal Nofal was also able to share images from 43 years ago.

Nofal, then 26, photographed the damage from regime bombardment on the city’s houses of worship during the 1982 massacre.

While the majority of victims were Sunni, the bombardment campaign destroyed every church in Hama.

Nofal knew how great the risk was at the time he took the photos – so did Jihad Karbouj, who had gone out with him to photograph the scenes.

The 73-year-old Karbouj stood next to Nofal, now 69, in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Hama’s salon where an exhibition of the photos was being held in commemoration.

Karbouj laughs as he remembers how nervous he was then. “I told him, you better hurry up before they come and take us!”

Nofal kept the photos hidden, the passing decades doing nothing to reduce his fear that they might be discovered.

After the regime fell, he published them on Facebook for the public to see for the first time, then the exhibition was arranged during this month of commemoration and mourning, an event that would never have happened under al-Assad.

In an echo of past worries, the police were stationed outside the church to make sure everything went smoothly. The church had been shot at by unidentified gunmen in the days after the fall of the regime, and nobody wanted to take any chances.

Inside, Nofal’s images showed the destruction of Hama’s churches and its Great Mosque, wrought by Assad regime bombs in 1982.

One set of before and after images shows a newly built – at the time – Greek Orthodox church side by side with a photo of the aftermath of a government attack that reduced it to rubble. The church had taken 20 years to complete and had never been prayed in.

Absent the fear that once gripped them, the dozens of people gathered in the salon – including Christian and Muslim religious figures – were free to remember and mourn.

“Now, I’m living in freedom,” Nofal said.

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