With a sack over his head, a fractured skull and broken hands, Ali Ferzat wondered what type of execution the henchmen had chosen for him, and he could only think of his wife and children.

“When they put a shoe in my mouth and threw me out of the moving car, my leg was still suck in the vehicle, and I was dragged for a stretch of the road.

“Once on the ground, I couldn’t believe I was still alive,” Syria’s best-known political cartoonist told this newspaper during his first visit to Malta.

Winner of the European Parliament’s 2011 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, Ali Ferzat will be delivering a lecture today at 10am at the University Common Room.

Mr Ferzat is one of the Syrian regime’s most outspoken critics, and in 2012, he was voted as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people worldwide.

In a way, he believes it is public immunity that has kept him alive, as he had been critical of the authorities’ way before the revolution of 2011.

He started off his professional career as a cartoonist in the 1970s and along the way received several threats and financial offers to be silenced.

Syria under the rule of the al-Assads has been marked by violence and he was interrogated several times but never put in jail.

When the current president Bashir al-Assad took office, he tried to intimidate him in a different manner, which included visits to his exhibitions.

The two met in 1996, before Bashar became president, and the latter often asked Mr Ferzat why people loved him so much.

“My answer was very simple: just go to the streets, listen to people and they will start loving you… But of course this was difficult for Bashar, surrounded by bodyguards and weapons.”

My cartoons somehow contributed to the uprising

Mr Ferzat went on to advise Bashar to grant freedom of expression if he wanted to reform the country.

In 2001, Mr Ferzat started issuing the first independent newspaper since 1963, called al-Domari.

People loved the weekly and Mr Ferzat would have to issue two runs in a day  – 75,000 copies in all. But his newspaper irked the authorities.

Among others, they tried to close down his newspaper by cutting its financial supplies and instructing printers not to print it without permission from the government.

He managed to print a final edition at a friend of his, inviting known people who opposed the government to contribute to the content.

Some 30,000 copies were printed on that day, and it is believed that so many people photocopied the newspaper, that there are a million copies in circulation.

That was the final nail in the coffin, and the government officially closed down the newspaper.

So Mr Ferzat turned to the internet and unluckily for the authorities, he started reaching more people than ever before.

His fingers were snapped backwards and his hands fractured. Ali Ferzat was handcuffed and dragged into a car where he was beaten with a baton. He was then saved when a car got a punctured tyre just where he had been left for dead. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

But the threats escalated, and his wife received calls that she would receive her husband in a box.

The threats remained verbal until 2011. “One day I left my office at 5am and noticed a white car with tinted windows following me. I realised they were security services and that they would execute the threats.”

Using two packets of sugar – representing his car and that of his followers – he explained how once they reached Umayyad Square in central Damascus, the car behind him sped up and crashed into his.

They opened his door, grabbed him from his jacket, pulled him out in the street, put a sack over his head, handcuffed him and put him in their car, where he was beaten for 30 minutes.

They snapped his fingers back, breaking them, and fractured his hands and skull. When they dropped him off for dead and drenched in blood, no one picked him up, until a car’s tyre punctured just in front of him and he threw himself onto that same car.

He was taken home and then transferred to hospital. Within two hours, hundreds gathered in protest outside the hospital, and by the evening, international media was covering the attack.

He eventually moved to Kuwait as Syria was no longer safe for him and his cartoons became stronger. “The cartoons broke the fear installed in people for 50 years. My cartoons somehow contributed to the uprising and kept feeding the people…

“This is not a career I live off, but something inside of me that brings me closer to people. I will continue drawing for as long as I live. I criticised people in the past and will criticise those who come in the future.”

Asked how he saw Syria in the Donald Trump era, Mr Ferzat insisted that the revolution was local, and should remain so. It was Syrian, and must be dealt with in Syria by the Syrian people.