In February 1982, when Hafez al-Assad—in a final bid to decimate the opposition—killed and disappeared tens of thousands of people in Hama, almost no one inside or outside Syria knew exactly how many were dead. It was the culmination of over a decade-long struggle by Assad to cement his rule, years in which people were arrested, tortured, summarily executed or forever disappeared into the regime’s dungeons. Even speaking to another of what had happened, what was happening, could incur a Syrian any of these violences.

Hama, a city on the banks of the Orontes River, had become the center of the opposition, which was an array of interests that had coalesced around the most organized of the groups, the Muslim Brotherhood. This included communists and Christians, even though the Brotherhood was Islamist, pro-capitalist and anti-statist. Before Assad launched an all-out assault on the city, violent confrontations with his opponents had reached a fever pitch, and the end of Assad’s rule seemed inevitable, even natural. At the very least, it would have been fantastical to suggest the regime would endure till the last days of 2024.

This longevity, Syrians believed, had to be proof that the outside world did not know what had happened in Hama, and therefore had not grasped the true and brutal nature of the regime. If only they had seen, they would have been moved to act. But in 1982, the regime was able to impose a complete media blackout. That things could have been different would remain an untested hypothesis.