There are emblematic cities that embody the troubled history of the Middle East in the last century. The Iraqi city of Halabja. The Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Or the Syrian town of Hama.
This chronicle arrives, however, more than 40 years late. So late that any Western visitor strolling through the streets of Barudiah could never imagine that where there is now asphalt, hundreds of houses once stood. Just as anyone approaching the collapsed arch-shaped wall would never know that those stones are all that remains of the Marwan Hadid mosque.
Mohamed Walid was only eight years old and yet is a perfect guide who allows visitors to distinguish between what remains of the old suburb and what was built on top of the ruins.
"These houses were built where the mosque stood. And the street over the neighborhood's houses that were destroyed by the planes," says the Syrian, who confidently navigates the alleys of the suburb. The narrowest streets, full of arteries and stone arches, are from that time. The apartment buildings - the vast majority - were erected to eradicate even the memory of Hadid and the uprising.
Walid's father was one of the victims of the massacre. He was shot on February 18. The boy tried to stop the soldier who was going to shoot him. "I grabbed the rifle. They didn't shoot him in front of me, but they took him and executed him shortly after", he adds.
Walid chats as he walks through Barudiah. He greets all the neighbors. It is obvious that he is a popular figure in the enclave. Upon reaching a corner where there are several single-story houses, he meets Mahmud Sabag, 68 years old.
He was one of the young men who studied with Marwan Hadid and who then fought in February 1982 in the alleys of Barudiah inspired by the sheikh's memory.
"There were four of us and we were hiding in a house. The army knew where we were, and they started bombing the houses in front of ours. One, two, three. Ours was the fourth. We had to start shooting with AK-47s and managed to surprise them," he recalls.
Sabag tallies the casualties they caused to the regime's armed forces. "Just in Barudiah, we took out about 200 soldiers," he says. But he also admits that the tally of victims was always against them. "If we killed one of them, they executed 20 or 30, mostly civilians", he points out.
The accounts of Sabag and Walid refer to one of the darkest episodes in Syria's history, the bloody suppression of the Hama uprising in February 1982. The event was commemorated in Syria this Sunday for the first time since that date, confirming the historic shift that the country has embarked on since the fall of Bashar Asad.
For over four decades - except for the initial period of the 2011 and 2012 revolution - merely mentioning that event was punishable by years in prison. "It was strictly forbidden to talk or remember anything that happened. It was as if it had never happened", says Mohamed Nizan, who was 12 years old in 1982.
The brutal massacre carried out by Bashar's father, Hafez Asad, left thousands of dead - perhaps tens of thousands - and became a paradigm of the oppression on which the dictatorship was built, serving as a precedent for the punishment inflicted on the Syrian population by the last autocrat when they rebelled in 2011.
On December 5, when the paramilitaries of Ahmed Sharaa liberated Hama, Syria's strongman himself recalled in a video that the liberation of that town "cleansed a wound that had been bleeding for 40 years".
The almost total absence of independent journalists in Syria at that time and the fact that from then on what happened became an absolute taboo in the country meant that the true extent of the tragedy was never fully understood, with the exact number of victims not even known for certain.
According to a recent statement to Al Hurra TV by local journalist Hazem Shaar, who claimed to have had access to Asad's secret service documents, the death toll reached 47,500.
"Those documents made me tremble at the intensity of the horror inherent in the details they relate, acts that are difficult to describe," he said. "It was a massacre intended to serve as a lesson for Syrians in general, and for the people of Hama in particular," he added.
One of the main perpetrators of these crimes was Bashar's uncle, Rifat Asad, who led the so-called Defense Companies, a paramilitary group mostly composed of Alawites, to which many of the executions and atrocities of that time are attributed.
Nicknamed the Butcher of Hama, Rifat lived for years surrounded by luxury in southern Spain. The former Syrian vice president was accused in December 2013 of war crimes and crimes against humanity by a Swiss court, precisely for the Hama offensive, but according to his lawyer, he "has always denied any involvement in the events."
For the survivors of those days, the possibility of expressing their experiences constitutes a significant event that partially compensates them - even if only minimally - for years of suspicion and fear. "During the Asad years, the name of Hama was cursed", says Mohamed Nabil Yunedi, 71 years old.
All the testimonies of those who witnessed those gruesome days agree. On February 2, the day dawned with the general clamor of the mosques. "They shouted: 'God is Great!' and called for 'jihad' [holy war]," adds Yunedi.
He lived then, as now, in the Wadi Haurany neighborhood. There, as in many other districts, young people joined jihadist militants and prepared to defend the town. "All the boys positioned themselves with weapons on the corners."
Machine guns against tanks and aviation. The fate of the uprising was decided even before it began. Luck was the only decider of who survived and who did not. The regime forces seemed to have orders to quash the uprising without any restraint, executing fighters and civilians alike.
"They dug mass graves throughout the city. The Cham Hotel [the most famous in the city] is built on top of a mass grave. Just like the former Baath Party headquarters," comments Mahmud Azhur, a city researcher specializing in the events of 1982, who spent 21 years in Tadmor, the chilling prison associated with Hafez Asad's era.
The prison that a poet described as "the realm of death and madness" was also a precursor to the no less chilling Sednaya prison, established by Bashar.
According to a report by the Syrian Human Rights Commission, the regime utterly or almost completely destroyed at least a dozen neighborhoods including the aforementioned Al Barudiah, Al Kilaniya, or the old town of the city. The military either blew up or crushed with excavators dozens of mosques, Christian temples - including the city's largest cathedral - schools, hospitals, and many other buildings.