Did He Frighten You That Much?
The face is the first thing. Purple and swollen, a thirteen-year-old’s features made barely recognizable by whatever those hours contained. Then the rest: deep cuts across the skin, burn marks, bullet holes, the jaw and kneecaps broken, the penis severed from the body. A spokesman narrates each wound on camera. Two and a half minutes of this.
Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was arrested at a demonstration in Jiza, a small village in southern Syria, at the end of April 2011. He was reported missing for a month before his disfigured body was returned to his family. He was just a child,
an activist told me, asking not to be named. It is a crime—a really serious crime.
The family said nothing. Not to anyone.
Every uprising finds its symbol eventually. Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Greece, Iman al-Obaidi in Libya—names that pass through a movement like current, keeping it charged when fear and exhaustion might otherwise be winning. For Syria’s battered opposition in 2011, that name became Hamza. Crowds chanted We are all Hamza Ali al-Khateeb
at demonstrations across the country that weekend, and—the line that stopped me cold—Did he frighten you that much?
Directed, presumably, at the men who did this to a boy who hadn’t yet finished school.
Syria’s state news agency called the media reports false and fabricated. YouTube had initially blocked the footage, then reinstated it under public pressure. The protests spread across the country. Online, people were already calling him a martyr, already using his death the way movements use deaths—as fuel, as proof, as something to scream at the men who made it happen.
A family loses a child; a resistance movement gains a hero. There’s something almost mechanical about that exchange, and something obscene in it too—the way an atrocity can become, in the momentum of global outrage, a dark gift to the cause it creates. I don’t know how to hold both of those things at once. I watched the video until I couldn’t, clicked stop, and closed the window. The next tab I had open was Google’s Doodle for International Children’s Day. Balloons. Bright colors. Children holding hands around a globe.
For today, my words have run dry.