THE WITNESS

An activist fled Syria to reveal Assad's crimes. Then, mysteriously, he went back.

- JON LEE ANDERSON

Mazen al-Hamada spent years describing to Western officials the torment that he and countless others—including Motasem Kattan, above-had endured in Syrian prisons. Since the regime fell, the evidence of a ruthless police state has grown overwhelming.

A few days after the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled two cells in December, an elderly woman sat on the sidewalk outside a morgue in Damascus. Her head wrapped in a scarf, she rocked back and forth and clasped her hands, wailing about what she had lost to Assad’s regime. “Help me,” she called. “They took my sons. Where are they?”

A crowd of people stepped gingerly around her. They were there not to search for the woman’s sons but to mourn another of Assad’s victims. They had been gathering for an hour or more—a few family members at first, but eventually hundreds of friends and sympathizers. Finally, a car was carried from the morgue and placed on the roof of a minivan, which had a photograph of the deceased fixed to the front bumper.

In recent days, the same image had gone up around the streets of Damascus. Plastered on walls and electrical poles, it depicted a slender man in his forties, with a gaunt, boyish face, high cheekbones, and all-consuming eyes, staring straight at the camera with a fearless expression. The man, Mazen al-Hamada, is regarded as a martyr by the rebels who deposed Assad after thirteen scourging years of civil war. “Mazen is an icon of the revolution,” one activist told me. “We will teach our children about him.”