Syria: Calls for justice and accountability after Assad’s fall

On the edge of Douma, one of the Damascus suburbs most devastated by the war, in a shrouded living room next to a stove, Umm Mazen recounts the 12 years she desperately sought news of two of her sons, who were arrested in the first years of the uprising and civil war, and swallowed up in the Assad-era security system.

For her oldest son, Mazen, she finally received a death certificate, but for Abu Hadi, no trace of him has ever been divulged.

Her third son, Ahmed, spent three years in the security system, including eight months in the red block for political prisoners in that byword for brutality, Saydnaya prison.

His front teeth stoved in by a torturer’s hammer, he remembers one moment when he believes he heard his brother Mazen’s voice answering a roll call in the same jail, but nothing more.

What justice does Umm Mazen seek for the destruction of her family?

“There should be divine justice, coming from God,” she says.

“I saw some local men bringing a shabiha (an armed regime supporter) to be killed.

“I told them: ‘Don’t kill him. Rather, torture him exactly the same way he tortured our young men’.”

“My two children died – or probably have died, but there are thousands of other young men who were subjected to torture.

“I pray to God that Bashar [al-Assad] stays in a dungeon underground and that Russia, which used to protect him, can’t help him.

“I pray to God to put him somewhere underground and that he is left in oblivion – just as he left our young men in his jails.”