On-Going Genocide in Al Qaeda Syria
Fri 6:25 pm +00:00, 3 Apr 2026
Have you ever noticed how death doesn’t always come all at once? Sometimes it begins slowly, quietly, in a way we barely perceive.
This is exactly what is happening to Alawites in Syria today. When a person is targeted because of their identity, they are not killed immediately; they are first taken, pulled out of their life, placed somewhere outside of time.
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Arbitrary arrest here is not a security measure—it is the beginning of a slow death. A young Alawite man is taken from his home: no clear charge, no trial, nothing tangible—only disappearance.
Inside the prisons, there is no single act that can be named. There is an entire process: torture, rape, beatings, starvation, humiliation. All of this happens continuously, stretching across time, surrounding the person from every direction, until there is no longer any distinction between one moment and another, nor between beginning and end. The body is gradually drained, losing its ability to endure, turning into something controlled from the outside—unable to stop what is happening, or even to understand when it began or where it ends.
A person reaches a stage where they are no longer able to go on, where their very existence hangs by a few fleeting moments. At that point, they are released—returned to the world in that state, carried by what remains of them—only for their life to end shortly afterward, outside the place where everything happened.
This is what happened to Fater Ratib Hamdan, a young Alawite man from the village of Hadatha in the Homs countryside.
He had been married for only three months. He was arbitrarily arrested over a year ago during raid campaigns carried out by the de facto jihadist-fascist authorities in Syria.
He disappeared completely from his family, then was transferred between detention sites until he ended up in Hama prison, where he was subjected to severe, systematic torture, along with complete deprivation of any medical care.
His body was left to collapse without intervention, bearing the accumulated effects of torture and exhaustion, with indications of lethal injections that accelerated his decline.
He was released days before his death—not in recovery, but in his final stage. He was taken to Al-Kindi Hospital, where doctors confirmed there was no hope of survival. He remained there only a few days before being returned home, unable even to move or turn in his bed, until he passed away.
Fater is gone, leaving behind a marriage that never had the chance to fully begin, a home that was never built, and an open wound in the hearts of all who knew him.
What happened to him does not stop at torture or neglect. Depriving a detainee of medical care and allowing him to reach this end is a form of killing—part of an entire method by which a human life is brought to an end.
It is repeated against Alawites in these prisons, and through repetition becomes a fixed pillar of a genocide that does not declare itself, yet is practiced every day.
Here, death does not come all at once.
