40 years since the Hama massacre, the day the regime bombed houses with tanks and got away with it

Forty years have passed since the most horrific massacre committed by the Syrian regime in the city of Hama, yet this incident still casts a shadow today on Syrian society, which has since faced a regime that has been encouraged by impunity to commit more crimes and massacres.

On the second of February of each year, the Syrian memory recalls the events of the Hama massacre, which the Syrian regime committed in 1982, which claimed the lives of thousands of civilians at that time.

Despite the horror of this humanitarian catastrophe, the Syrian regime managed to escape punishment, which consequently extended its hand to commit more crimes and violations against its people, which increased in frequency and intensity horribly after that, coinciding with the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in 2011.

Thus, the Hama massacre was one of the evidences of the brutality of a regime that has always faced its opponents and opponents with fire and iron, using largely to spread sectarianism among the people.

Hama massacre dead, displaced and arrested

The scenes of corpses and body parts in the neighborhoods of Hama, after the massacre, are still stuck in the minds of many who experienced it, and they recounted its details to various media and human rights organizations around the world.

In 1982, beginning on February 2, Syrian regime army tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery, and the Defense Brigades militia affiliated with the brother of the regime’s president, Rifaat al-Assad, surrounded the city, human and media besieged by cutting off electricity and ground communications, for 27 days until the beginning of March.

Before attacking the city and invading it on the ground, the regime’s soldiers, who numbered in the thousands, intensified the artillery bombardment, which, according to estimates of many reports, killed between 20,000 and 40,000 civilians, in addition to a large amount of destruction and devastation in the city’s neighborhoods and buildings.

After the city was exhausted, soldiers and militia members stormed Hama, and killed everyone who opposed them, under the pretext of pursuing members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the largest political grouping against the Assad regime.

According to eyewitnesses, during the events of the massacre, the regime soldiers gathered the residents of "Hama al-Jadida" neighborhood, for example, inside the municipal stadium, and then fired at them from machine guns, thus causing more than 1,500 people to fall victim to this field liquidation.

Meanwhile, the bombing continued with the launchers of various neighborhoods and locations that the regime forces wanted as rubble.

As families and civilians sought refuge in the basements and hid in them, militias and soldiers pursued them there, and the most horrific massacres were carried out among them. No neighborhood, house, or basement was spared from the regime's guns and mortars, nor did a child, an elderly person, or a woman escape from these horrific massacres.

In a shocking testimony, one of the civilians who lived through the horror of that day, speaking to the media, said, "The regime's soldiers used to cut open women's stomachs, and kill fetuses inside, saying that they were terrorists... They also cut off the hands of the women they killed, and stole gold from them."

Other reports said that the Syrian regime soldiers had executed collectively during the massacre, the worshipers in the Zaid bin Thabet Mosque on the old Hama-Aleppo road, and then burned their bodies after that.

Some people managed to escape and seek refuge in the migrating villages and cities before the regime forces reached them and executed them, while more than 17,000 people are still missing and their fate is unknown since their arrest, after the massacre ended.

Decades after the Hama massacre Has the regime's brutality changed?

Many facts and details about the humanitarian catastrophe that occurred in Hama 40 years ago are still unknown today, as the regime of Hafez al-Assad worked hard to conceal it and prevented media professionals and human rights defenders from accessing it for months after the incident.

But these long decades that followed the Hama massacre did not, in fact, change anything in the practices of the Syrian regime, as confirmed by activists and observers. The regime of Hafez al-Assad, the father, who committed the Hama massacre and shed the blood of nearly 40,000 people, is not much different from the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the son, who today killed more than 400,000 civilians, and carried out many massacres with chemical weapons, and the cycles of violence and persecution continue, since the revolution began. Syria in 2011.

And if the Syrian regime during the reign of Hafez al-Assad committed this massacre, citing its confrontation with the rebellion of the “Muslim Brotherhood” movement, which it claimed was arming its members and attacking the Syrian regime forces at that time, the Syrian regime today, under the jurisdiction of Assad the son, justifies the atrocities it committed under many names. And the result was the same, killing and destruction, according to international organizations and activists.