He risked everything to confront Assad, but never saw the regime fall.

Time and time again, Mazen al-Hamada risked everything to help his fellow Syrians.

In the early days of the Arab Spring uprisings, he marched in the streets and called for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime.

For this, he was arrested and repeatedly tortured in the country’s infamous prison system.

He escaped to the Netherlands in 2013 and spent the next seven years talking about the horrors he had suffered. witnessed and endured in prisonhoping to convince world leaders to bring Assad to justice.

Finally, in 2020, he returned home desperate, hoping he could convince the Syrian authorities to release those still trapped behind bars, including his own nephew.

But he was detained immediately upon arriving at Damascus airport, and his loved ones never saw or heard from him again until Tuesday, when his family identified his body in a hospital morgue.

On Thursday, hundreds of Syrians took to the streets of Damascus, some for the first time in more than a decade, to attend Hamada’s funeral procession.

“I was very emotional watching the videos. It’s a comfort to see people honor him like this,” said British filmmaker Sara Afshar, a friend of Hamada. How it happens presenter Nil Kuddlesal.

“They’re giving him a hero’s funeral, which is what he is. He’s a hero.”

Afshar first met Hamada in the Netherlands in 2016 while researching his documentary about the regime’s crackdown. The missing of Syria: the case against Assad.

There were no cameras during that first meeting, he said. They just talked. But he knew right away that he wanted him to be the focal point of his film.

“He was incredibly open, more so than anyone else I’ve ever talked to,” she said.

“He was willing to make himself vulnerable, at great cost to himself. But the reason he wanted to do it was because he really wanted everyone to hear his story, to know what was happening in these prisons, because he wanted the world to act.”

But the world, he said, let him down.

For three years after the film’s release in 2017, Hamada traveled the world with Afshar, meeting with policymakers and pushing for justice for Assad’s victims.

But what they found, he says, were governments willing to look the other way and normalize relations with the regime.

“That makes me very angry and it made Mazen very angry,” he said. “I was telling people how atrocious and monstrous the situation was inside these prisons, and the world was doing nothing about it.”

Why did he come back?

In 2020, Hamada returned to Syria, against the wishes of his loved ones.

The Syrian government had given him guarantees that he would be safe, The Washington Post reports. But instead, he was detained immediately upon his arrival at Damascus airport.

“We can sit here and think, well, why would I do something so risky?” Afshar said. “But the thing is, I really felt like I had done absolutely everything I could in the West.”

After Hamada’s arrest, it is unclear what became of him, which is not unusual in Syria. United Nations estimates 100,000 people disappeared Throughout the 14 years of war, many of them were arbitrarily detained or forcibly disappeared.

When rebels overthrew Assad this week and began opening the country’s prisons, Hamada’s loved ones hoped to be reunited with him.

Instead, they found him dead in a military hospital, his body in a condition that suggested he had been killed only last week.

Singing in the streets

On Thursday, Syrians carried his coffin, draped in the Syrian flag, through the streets of Damascus.

“We will not forget your blood, Mazen,” protesters, many of them young, chanted outside a mosque as family and friends held funeral prayers inside.

Others chanted: “We will take revenge, Bashar. We will bring you to justice.”

Some of the protesters knew Hamada and others did not. Many held black and white photographs and shouted the names of their missing loved ones.

Hamada’s brother Saed told Reuters that when Assad’s government fell, he wanted Hamada to be released from prison so he could see what was happening in Syria.

But now, he says, his brother is a martyr.

“After his martyrdom, we feel happy because we paid the price for this freedom with blood,” he said.

For some, Thursday’s rally and funeral were a symbol of hope for the war-torn country, whose future remains uncertain.

Many participants said they last protested in Damascus about 13 years ago, before Assad’s crackdown on protesters turned the conflict into a full-blown war.

“I couldn’t have imagined participating in a demonstration in any way in Damascus,” said Mohammad Kulthum, 32, as he marched in the procession with his mother.

Afshar says it would have meant a lot to Hamada to see the spirit of revolution alive again on the streets of Syria.

“I wish and hope that where he rests in peace he can see how they honor him and what he meant to them and to the fight and the campaign for the disappeared, and for what is to come, which is the campaign for justice.”