Advisory: This story has graphic descriptions of torture in Syria.
Hasna Al-Hariri still clearly remembers how some of her children’s classmates came back to their parents months after they were detained by the Syrian government in 2011. Their right thumbs and index fingers were mutilated — a punishment for allegedly writing anti-government graffiti on their school wall.
Others had their eyes blinded by cigarettes, said Al-Hariri, wiping tears from her eyes in an interview in her home in Saanich.
Today, the 64-year-old lives in Gordon Head with one of her sons, his wife and three grandchildren after coming to Victoria in 2022.
But on March 18, 2011, she was on the streets in the southwestern Syrian city of Daraa, protesting for the return of seven schoolchildren who had been detained by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces over the anti-government scrawl.
Security forces opened fire on the crowd with live ammunition that day, killing four people in what activists regard as the first deaths of the Syrian uprising and the ensuing revolution.
Like many Syrians who came to Canada to escape the war, Al-Hariri kept a close eye on her homeland when opposition groups’ surprise offence began late last month.
As opposition forces converged toward Damascus and Assad fled the country, Al-Hariri took to the streets again on Sunday, this time in Victoria, to celebrate.
Al-Hariri said Assad should be captured and brought before the International Criminal Court.
“He should be held accountable for his crimes in Syria,” she said in Arabic through a translator, who sometimes found the details of Al-Hariri’s experiences too horrific to repeat in English.
Al-Hariri, a former nurse who grew up in the Daraa countryside, said she began assisting the revolutionary forces when the war began, bringing in medicine and food and helping the wounded, because she knew the area well and could evade government security forces.
She was arrested and imprisoned by the regime twice between July 2012 and December 2014.
During her incarceration, Al-Hariri said, she witnessed the torture, rape and killing of her fellow prisoners. She also helped deliver 50 babies in prison, some of them conceived through rape.
Guards attacked and seriously injured her when she protected a fellow female prisoner from rape, she said, lifting up her shirt to show a knife scar on her abdomen that runs across half her body.
A hydraulic-press-like machine that was used to kill people interned in the Saydnaya military prison where she was held for three months and 10 days still haunts her, she said.
“Just bones and blood, and they would put them in containers and then they would throw them in the ocean,” she said.
Amnesty International estimates that 5,000 to 13,000 people were killed at Saydnaya in mass hangings between September 2011 and December 2015.
But none of that deterred Al-Hariri from continuing to support the revolutionary cause — even after her husband, three sons and a daughter were killed while she was in prison, she said. While exiled in Jordan, she continued to oppose the regime and was the first woman to speak publicly about the systematic sexual torture in Syrian government detention facilities in a 2017 exposé published in Le Monde.
For that, she was listed as a terrorist by the Assad government, Al-Hariri said.
Al-Hariri, who has had 14 members of her family killed by the Syrian government since 2011, said she feels for everyone who suffered under “the barbarian regime.”
People began referring to her with the honorific of al-Khansaa, after the 7th-century Arab poet whose family had suffered a similar fate.
When she first began speaking out about the atrocities she experienced and saw while incarcerated, many people didn’t believe her, and some even laughed at her, Al-Hariri said. But video that’s emerging from people entering Saydnaya following the fall of the Assad regime backs up her experiences, she said.
Al-Hariri, who still walks slowly and carefully as a result of the injuries she sustained, said she is planning to go back to Syria as soon as possible.
The first thing she will do once she arrives in Syria will be to kiss the ground and praise God, said Al-Hariri, who plans to visit all the cities in Syria.
She also wants to rebury the remains of one of her sons, now in Jordan, back in her home country. Her house in Daraa has been bombed, but she insists she won’t mind living in a tent.
“This is my land,” she said. “The future is bright.”
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