Few could bear to look long at his face, with its sunken, sorrowful eyes so full of pain – but when Mazen al-Hamada spoke, you could not help but listen.

He spoke to audiences across the West, in lecture theatres and in parliaments, bearing witness to the darkness of the Assad regime in low, urgent tones.

Sometimes, he showed them his wrists, scarred by the chains from which he hung until he lost consciousness. He would speak of the beatings and the rapes he and others suffered, his haunted eyes reddening at the memory.

On Thursday, they laid Hamada to rest in central Damascus, the capital coming to a halt as its residents gathered to honour the man who became the embodiment of a nation’s suffering and who now had become as powerful a symbol in death as he was in life.

Hamada was one of the last casualties of the 13-year uprising against Bashar al-Assad, tortured to death by a vindictive regime in its death throes just hours before the advancing rebels flung open the doors of the infamous Sednaya prison where he was held.