Then, starting in mid-2011, Assad began to kill or capture the main protest leaders, while at the same time releasing Islamist extremists and al-Qaeda-linked militants from his prisons. These people pushed the rebellion toward armed confrontation with the regime, providing Assad with the excuse to ratchet up his violence against protesting communities. Yasmin’s father and brother were among dozens of Daraya activists and protesters, including Shurbaji, abducted by the regime. The tortured and brutalized corpse of one of these activists, a 25-year-old tailor nicknamed Little Gandhi, was sent back to Daraya by the regime, while most of the others, including Yasmin’s father and brother, remained missing. Her brother was released in 2012 but then rearrested in 2013. [...]
There is no precise estimate of the number of dead on the lists. That’s because many families keep the information to themselves after they receive it from the registry, for fear of retribution by the regime. On July 29, the Syrian Committee for Detainees, an opposition group, said that it had counted some 3,270 names, 1,000 of which were from Daraya alone. Another group, the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said at the end of July that it was able to cull the names of 532 forcibly disappeared persons from the state records of the deceased. The group estimated that there had been about 82,000 cases of forced disappearance at the hands of the regime alone since March 2011. [...]
Other Syrians, though, believe the regime wants the lists of the dead to serve as a cruel, macabre epilogue for all those who rose up more than seven years ago to liberate themselves from nearly 50 years of Assad-family rule. Assad’s message to the people of Daraya, a town besieged and bombarded for nearly four years and then emptied of its residents in 2016, is loud and clear: You must lose everything for having challenged me. Nobody is going to hold me accountable for punishing you.
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