Third Samira al-Khalil Award Ceremony 2025

By Anne-Marie McManus

The days leading up to December 8th, the first anniversary of the Assad regime’s fall, brought emotional celebrations to the streets of Syria – and, more quietly, to European cities like Berlin, where many Syrians live. Even for those who support the new government, uncertainties abound on its rule. Fears remain about the massacres in which state forces have been complicit this year, and transitional justice measures are frustratingly slow. Berlin remains a home for a network of Syrian activists who – even when the world was ready to normalize with the Assad regime – persisted for years in their struggle from abroad. In a fight for the rule of law and dignity in Syria, these activists founded online publications; created organizations to support the families of Syria’s disappeared; lobbied the United Nations and governments globally; held peaceful protests, put on theatrical plays, penned a vast new corpus of literature and criticism, founded museums, and more. Above all, they protected the memory of those who lost their lives in the years since 2011. Today, when Syrian activists commemorate the people who died and disappeared in the struggle to free Syria of dictatorship, they do more than remember: they re-assert the meaning and urgency of fighting for a free, just, and law-based society in the present.

An example of this kind of memory work took place on December 9th, when members and allies of the Syrian community gathered at Spore Initiative in Berlin-Neukölln to remember the life, activism, and disappearance of Samira al-Khalil. They did so under the aegis of the Samira al-Khalil Award, a three-year old prize that recognizes and honors activists – particularly women – who “struggle to end violations of fundamental rights and freedoms in the Arab and Mediterranean regions.” It was an evening dedicated to individuals who resist in the face of violence and despair, through their activism, narrative, and solidarity. Their very visibility, as several participants noted, made and still makes them targets for repressive forces.

Samira al-Khalil was a prominent Syrian activist for human rights and justice who disappeared in the night of December 9th, 2013. She was kidnapped along with her three colleagues Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hamada, and Nazim Hammadi by Jaysh al-Islam, an opposition Islamist force that had taken control of the Ghouta region near Damascus. The activists have come to be known as the Douma Four, named for the town where they had established a center for peaceful, grassroots work in the early years of the Syrian revolution. Samira’s struggle against the dictatorship of the Assad regime went back decades: in the 1980s, she had joined the dissident Communist Action Party. She was arrested between 1987–1991 and, like so many political dissidents in that era, tortured. In her diaries from 2013, Samira drew on her memories of prison, comparing detention under Hafez al-Assad to her contemporary state of siege under the regime of his son, Bashar al-Assad. Despite the passage of time, the enemy against which she and her colleagues were fighting was, she argued, the same: a cruel and lawless “politics of generalized destruction”, she wrote, “a politics of ravaging everything.”[1]

Against that violent destruction, the work of Syrian activists was and remains to build a society founded on dignity and justice. The installation of a new government after the end of the Assad regime has not concluded this work, emphasized Yassin al-Haj Saleh – Samira’s husband, himself a former political prisoner and leading intellectual of the revolution who has lived in Berlin since 2017. In his opening comments for the award ceremony, al-Haj Saleh explained, “all of us at the Samira al-Khalil Association were enthusiastic” to hold the event “in Damascus.” However, “the blood spilled in Suwayda” – a reference to sectarian fighting in Syria’s south, with evidence of General Security Service involvement – “and fears of attacks against our organizers or participants” kept them in Berlin. Al-Haj Saleh’s implication was clear: Syria is free of al-Assad, but not yet free for activists demanding transparency and justice. He challenged the current Syrian government to hold members of Jaysh al-Islam accountable for their kidnapping of the Douma Four. The Hayat Tahrir al-Sham government has not made gestures in this direction, nor to try Assad regime perpetrators. Some regime officers known for torture and killing have even been rehabilitated under the new state. In this atmosphere of impunity, where anxiety, disappointment, and frustration grow, acts of commemoration like the Samira al-Khalil Award summon the memory of Syria’s lost activists to make clear demands on the political present.

Following al-Haj Saleh’s opening comments, the Syrian-German actress Fatina Laila led the ceremony. She spoke about Samira (for those who recall her memory tend to use her first name) as a shared memory for all in the room: “Every one of us has a story with you, with your presence, with your absence…we fight against forgetting you.” Laila’s words echoed the Berlin-based playwright Mohammad al-Attar in 2021, when he described Samira’s disappearance as “a shared open wound for Syrians” who had struggled for the revolution’s values since 2011 and even earlier. As Laila introduced each of the three prize recipients, first in Arabic, then in German, her sincere emotion and personal reflections anchored the evening’s tone of intimate warmth and solidarity.

The first awardee was Wafa Mustafa, recognized for her activism for Syria’s disappeared. Mustafa’s father, Ali Mustafa, was detained by the Assad regime in 2013 and has not been found since. Mustafa’s advocacy for her father over more than a decade has been relentless, eloquent, and moving. Laila introduced her as the passionate young woman who seems to be everywhere, drawing an approving nod from many in the room. A fiercely charismatic speaker in English and Arabic, Mustafa’s advocacy has taken her from the United Nations and the European Parliament to the Koblenz trial; from the streets of Turkey to Berlin to Damascus. “Some people in our lives”, mused Laila, “teach us how to love. This young woman taught us to think about loving our fathers.” Since the regime fell, Mustafa has been unable to learn what happened to her father. Her public expression of that pain has acted as a mirror for thousands of Syrians who still await news of their loved ones and demand justice. Mustafa’s acceptance speech at Spore Initiative was characteristically direct, expressing an anguished wish that her father could be present – and insisting that the political dream he and others sacrificed for has not yet been achieved.

The next awardee was Syrian journalist, writer, and human rights activist Hanadi Zahlout. Visibly charged with emotion as she took the stage, Zahlout quietly noted the courage it takes to continue speaking under the weight of loss. Detained multiple times under the Assad regime for her revolutionary activism, Zahlout lost three brothers in 2025: they were killed in the massacres in Syria’s coastal region this spring. She emphasized the ongoing dangers and threats faced by activists who are committed, like herself, to public life. Emphasizing the urgency of this issue, she named a Syrian, Murad Mahrez, who had been killed on the very day of the award ceremony. In a theme that ran throughout Berlin’s Samira al-Khalil Award ceremony, Zahlout insisted on the unity of the ongoing struggle for a law-based, peaceful Syria: “Was it a coincidence that Samira was abducted by the same ignorant hands that killed my brothers? I do not think so. The struggle has always been one: against tyranny, against ignorance, against hatred.”[2]

Fatina Laila introduced the final awardee as the brave, loving mother we all search for, moving beyond Syria to encompass regional solidarities in activism. Laila Soueif, the Egyptian human and women’s rights activist and mathematics professor, spoke on-screen to the Berlin audience from Cairo. She is known regionally and globally for her advocacy for her son, Alaa Abd al-Fattah, a former political detainee of Egypt’s Sisi regime. His uniquely creative prison writings redefined the Arabic genre of prison literature and became iconic for the post-2011 generation. “Alaa”, noted Fatina Laila simply, “has become part of the Syrian story” – and so his mother’s activism for him as well. Since 2014, Alaa became a particular target of the Sisi regime and was imprisoned from 2014–2019 and again 2019–2025. Soueif’s characteristic weapon against her son’s detention became the hunger strike. In June of this year, having lost 40% of her body weight, the frail yet defiant Soueif announced to the press, “use my death as leverage to get Alaa out.”[3] As she accepted the Samira al-Khalil award, Soueif’s words to the room of Syrian activists and allies in 2025 in Berlin evoked the need for solidarity in the present: “My country, Egypt, Samira’s country Syria, the countries in our disaster of a region and maybe even all the world, are cursed. [The powerful] have lost their humanity… But our countries are also blessed by millions whose only dream is ‘a life that is like life’, shared by all… Our solidarity is our power, our salvation, and our hope for victory in the battles to come.”

Following the awards, the evening closed with Fatina Laila reading a poem by Nazim Hammadi, touching on pain and hope, and a performance on the oud by Dr. Abd al-Wahhab Kayali. Art and memory were interwoven in an event that, despite an atmosphere of mounting setbacks, attested to its organizers’ and attendees’ dignified resilience and comfort in community. Al-Attar’s words from 2021, which remain relevant even after the fall of the Assad regime, may be the most eloquent to capture the self-awareness of this stance:

“Because we are denied the truth of what happened to Samira and to her friends after they were kidnapped, because we are denied justice anywhere in Syria, waves of doubt and despair sweep over us every day. Bitterness threatens to become our daily bread. Yet we remember the story of Samira and her companions. We remember the stories of other disappeared Syrians, of those who died in prisons or under rubble. We remember all the generosity, courage, and nobility in these stories. And we know that we are only defeated if we become bitter victims.”[4]

Origin: “The struggle has always been one” – On the Third Samira al-Khalil Award Ceremony