Syria Diaries: A hip hop Sheikh in Tadamon

Shelling in the Tadamon area of Damascus. 16/10/2012.

Back in Gaziantep in April BEIRUTSTATEofMIND met with Mahmud al-Hosseini, the Imam of the Uthman ibn Efan Mosque in the Damascus neighbourhood of Tadamon, when Syria's civil war broke out.

In 2011 as the Syrian regime began to use force to quell popular and peaceful demonstrations al-Hosseini increasingly voiced his opposition to the Assad regime - a course of action that put him on a collision course with regime intelligence working in Tadamon.

As FSA units began to arrive in Tadamon in the summer of 2012 Hosseini took to wearing a disguise in order to avoid being detected and picked up by the Syrian mukhabarat:

Hosseini ditched his clerical garb, instead opting for baggy tracksuits, a baseball cap and largeheadphones to avoid detection. "You know, like a hip-hop style," he says. "I started to walk with a swagger."

The disguise proved to no avail. Hosseini was eventually picked up.

This is the account of the time he spent in a detention center presided over by the anti-terrorist branch of the Syrian security services:

GAZIANTEP, Turkey/ Sitting in the salon of a modest house on the outskirts of this southern Turkish city, a group of Syrian refugees congregate around freshly prepared meze. Jokes are exchanged. Mahmud al-Hosseini sits cross-legged, anxiously rubbing his wrists together.

This is a nervous tic he developed uring the four months he spent sharing a cell with 60 other men in a prison run by the Syrian intelligence agencies, somewhere on the outskirts of Damascus.

"It was a scene of misery," he says. "A mass of decaying bodies - fleas, scabies, even gangrene. There was not enough room for people to lie down. We slept cross-legged, resting our heads on the shoulders of our neighbors. One morning after I woke up I was standing to stretch my legs, and I realized the guy whose shoulder I had been resting on had died during the night. I hadn't noticed. When someone died in that place, we used to say that God had blessed them. They were free."

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