Condolences at the Umayyad Mosque for Dr. Rania and her 6 children

DAMASCUS. Some time ago, after Amjad Yusuf, known in Syria as the "Butcher of Tadamon," was captured in his hiding place, the interrogations and the information and data obtained revealed what had happened 13 years ago to Dr. Rania el-Abbasi, who disappeared together with her husband and six children. A video on Amjad Yusuf's phone showed how six children, the youngest of whom was one year old, children of a beauty and innocence you could hardly bear to look at, were brutally massacred. Behind the cameras passed over their lifeless bodies, the voices of their killers could be heard shouting "revenge." Revenge for what? Revenge against whom? When could these children possibly have inflicted what pain on whom, what harm could they have done, that the burden of a revenge should have been loaded upon their lives?

After these killers were caught, the details of the horrific 54-year life that Syria has lived came a little more into daylight, and, of course, were remembered once more by those who lived through it. We, of course, had been watching what was happening in Syria through those who took refuge in our country. Yet no one could have guessed, without having lived it, what kind of life those who fled for their lives, abandoning their homes and belongings and seeking refuge in Turkey, had left behind. Those who came this way were in fact carrying with them the legitimacy of the country they had come from. An administration that forced an entire people to flee from it in this way could not have had any rightful existence at all.

I have written about this before. The family of Dr. Rania el-Abbasi goes back to Tillo in Siirt. Her father, Muhammed Iyd el-Abbasi, is a great Islamic scholar with numerous books, among them works on topics such as Human Rights in Islam and The Consequences of Sectarian Fanaticism in Islam. After his own father migrated from Tillo in the thirties to study the Islamic sciences, he was born in Damascus in 1938. From the start he received an excellent education and studied the Islamic sciences. In 1980, in a political atmosphere in which even the possibility of being a Muslim Brotherhood member meant being thrown into prison or killed, he was arrested and spent 14 years in Tadmur Prison. We say "spent," but when you listen to him, it is impossible not to be astonished at how those 14 years could have been endured.

Even while listening to what he tells about the prison, you feel ashamed of your humanity. What kind of hatred, what kind of malice, what kind of enmity could have made human beings do these things to human beings? Can you imagine environments in which 130 people lived for weeks and months in a space of 30 square meters, pressed against each other, stuck to each other's bodies? How and for how long could a sack of flour placed in front of the door as food for that many people have kept them alive?

How could people in the rest of the world have continued with their normal lives while all this was happening in a place where torture was the most ordinary and systematic behavior of the state? What kind of life could the Syrian people have led for so many years under this regime? A mukhabarat regime that had seeped into every room of every house kept producing new victims for this torture machine. What kind of state could there have been in an environment where brother was turned into an informer against brother, even wife against husband and husband against wife, where human trust in human beings was driven to rock bottom?

Of course brother is not made an informer against brother, or wife against husband, willingly. When the obligation to inform is made mandatory by torture, there is no need for anyone to be a collaborator or an agent in order to extract false and erroneous confessions from people's mouths one way or another. The network of prisons across the country had turned torture into an economic sector, a machine, that needed to be fed constantly with victims. The wheel of that sector had to keep turning; the machine could not be allowed to run idle. That is why Amjad Yusuf was neither the only monster of that wheel, nor were Dr. Rania and her 6 children the only and most tragic victims of that system.

The story of Dr. Rania and her 6 children undoubtedly carries a special weight, and had acquired a symbolic meaning in revealing the condition of 60 years of systematic torture, massacres and disappearances. Because they were of Siirt origin, we set out for Syria, on the initiative of the Siirt Foundation, to attend the family's condolence program. Hamza Buldu, one of the family's relatives, and Zeki Akyüzlü of the Siirt Foundation, who works single-handedly like an army of humanitarian aid, former 24th-term parliamentarian Afif Demirkıran, Bursa parliamentarian Muhammed Müfit Aydın, Ankara Birlik Foundation President Yusuf Mücahitoğlu, Ombudsman Özcan Yıldız, and the businessmen from Siirt Fikret Baydarman, Ayaz Akkoyun, Murat Üzümcü, Abdullah Şanlı, Şamil Gülbaran, Oral Avcı and other members: together with them we came to Damascus to offer our condolences.

Only half an hour after our plane from Istanbul landed in Damascus, Muhammed Iyd el-Abbasi's plane from Riyadh landed. Thus we were granted the privilege of welcoming him at Damascus Airport, where he was coming for the first time in 26 years. Witnessing that moment of reunion is, of course, an entirely different feeling: the moment of returning, after 26 years of being forcibly kept away from one's own homeland. Remembering what we had heard before about what they had lived through, we are compelled to say that worse than this were the many lives of 26, even 40 years spent in Tadmur and Sednaya.

Abbasi had come with his wife and daughter. All of them were very excited and moved. After chatting for a while at the airport, we left. They went to their home, which they had been forced to leave 26 years ago and which for a long time had been occupied by one of the Baath officers. They had regained their home some time earlier, and it had been prepared for them by other members of the family.

We performed the Friday prayer at the Umayyad Mosque, accompanied by the sermon delivered by Sehl Cüneyd, the Mufti of Homs, one of the spiritual figures of the Revolution, a great preacher, and a member of the Syrian Supreme Council of Ulema. In the sermon, the imam reminded us of the debt owed to the martyrs in living this freedom, which by God's grace we could not even have imagined until a year and a half ago, and advised never forgetting this debt.

After the Friday prayer, we went to the Hall of Honor of the Umayyad Mosque for the condolences. The allocation of the hall for this condolence gathering came about through the initiative of the Turkish Embassy and the positive response given to it by the Syrian authorities. Normally this hall can be used for condolences only in very exceptional cases.

At this meaningful gathering, where Muhammed Iyd el-Abbasi's two other sons-in-law and his grandchildren were also present, the family of the deceased came together with the children of Siirt, her homeland and the city of her forefathers, and with valued Syrians who came from various regions of Syria.

At the condolence gathering there were parliamentarians representing the Syrian people, tribal and clan sheikhs, representatives of civil society organizations, and people from different segments of society. Everyone was voicing the same truth: Geography cannot sever blood ties, and borders cannot eradicate roots.

This gathering, notable for its spirit of solidarity as much as for its human dimension, showed once again that it is not possible to accept separation and rupture among the children of the same ummah.

Some of the participants made speeches expressing their condolences to the relatives for their martyrs, saying that learning of these martyrs' Turkish origins meant a great deal to them. They said that the noble stance Turkey has shown from the very beginning beside its Syrian brothers can never be forgotten.

In fact, in the persons of these martyrs of Turkish origin, we also offered our condolences for all one million Syrians who fell as martyrs in the heavy trial their people lived through. Dr. Rania, her husband and six children are only one example among 1 million martyrs and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who disappeared in the same way and whose fate is unknown; no one's blood is less or more valuable than another's. These martyrs were lives that opened the way to today's Free Syria.