A Father's Testimony: 'They Called Me From His Phone After They Killed Him'

The video circulated without warning. A man from the village of al-Rasafa, in the countryside of Masyaf in Hama governorate, sat before a camera and spoke. His name is Rashid Saad. His son's name was Suleiman.

The massacres that swept coastal Syria beginning March 6, 2025 reached al-Rasafa over the course of several days. Armed factions — described by witnesses as undisciplined, operating outside any chain of command — moved through the villages of the Masyaf countryside. Al-Rasafa was among them.

Suleiman Rashid Saad was killed. After they shot him, according to his father's testimony, they split open his chest and removed his heart. They placed it on his body.

Then they called his father from Suleiman's own mobile phone.

They told him: come and get your son. The body was lying near a barbershop in the village.

Rashid Saad speaks in the video with the particular steadiness of someone who has already exhausted every other way of feeling. He is not numb — his voice carries the full weight of what happened — but he has made a decision to speak, to name what was done, to place it on record.

He speaks of his son. He speaks also of his brother's children — four of them — killed in the same wave of violence that took Suleiman. Four nephews. A brother's entire line of sons.

Al-Rasafa is a small Alawite village. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights documented a massacre in the Masyaf countryside in which 67 people were killed — revenge killings carried out after an ambush against security forces in the area. The days of March 6 through 8 mark the period in which the bulk of these killings took place across the coastal and inland villages.

What the numbers cannot hold is what Rashid Saad holds in his voice: the specific weight of a father who was called on his son's phone by the men who had just killed him.