His arrest helped trigger the uprising against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But, ten years later, Bashir Abazayd wonders if the revolt was worth it.
“I sacrificed everything,” he says quietly, speaking on the phone.
In the past decade, says Abazayd, he lost his brother in an air raid, his father to a broken heart 10 days later and his mother and other siblings to Jordan. A conflict that he inadvertently helped spark swept through his home, his city, his friends and his youth – and inflamed the Middle East.
Abazayd, 25, was just a teenager when, he says, he was arrested and charged with doodling anti-government graffiti on the walls of his school in the southwestern city of Daraa.
“Who would have believed that the regime would kill its own people with chemicals and warplanes?” he asks, speaking of the Turkish port of Samsun on the Black Sea, where he lives, referring to the chemical attacks widely attributed to the Assad government. “That it would destroy houses, hospitals, schools and markets, entire cities, which would burn villages?”
Ten years later, the treatment given by the Syrian authorities to boys who, according to them, were responsible for the graffiti, is widely considered to be the trigger that triggered the uprising against Assad and made Daraa his birthplace. The war that followed was more bloody and brutal than most could have predicted – killing hundreds of thousands of people, displacing half the pre-war population of 22 million and decimating the economy.
Abazayd says that, inspired by the mass protests that brought down dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, he and his friends were delighted with the creeping Arab Spring and wanted to send a message to Assad, an ophthalmologist trained in England, whose family ruled Syria for more of four decades at that time.
In the same period, graffiti appeared on the school wall.
“It’s your turn, doctor,” said the message. “Freedom.”
Over the course of three weeks, Abazayd gave conflicting reports about his involvement with graffiti. He now says that he and his friends had nothing to do with it, but it didn’t take long for Syrian security forces to arrest them anyway.
There are no publicly available court or prison records in Syria to officially confirm that Abazayd was arrested in connection with anti-Assad graffiti in 2011.
However, the Daraa Martyrs Documentation Office, which has documented deaths and arrests of civilians in Daraa province since 2011, shared the names of 16 boys aged 10 to 14 who were arrested, and Abazayd’s was on the list.
Two activists and a local cameraman in Daraa also confirmed that he was among the detainees.
Cradle of the revolution
Syria is in ruins, and while entire areas of territory remain outside the government’s control, Assad maintains undeniable control over what remains of a country that was once a Middle Eastern power.
Frightened by their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States, meanwhile, has done its best not to get involved in another long and costly war. Instead, it trained and equipped armed opposition groups and used sanctions and air strikes to pressure Assad to resign or change course, with little success.
Neither Abazayd nor his friends are to blame for what happened after news of his arrests spread.
Some Syrians believe that the revolt was inevitable and that, had it not been unleashed in Daraa, it would have been unleashed in another city. In early 2011, Daraa was a common city, important only because of its proximity to a crucial border crossing with Jordan.
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Abazayd describes in a shaky voice how he was beaten with sticks and cables in prison until his face was unrecognizable and he wished he were dead.
The people of Daraa took to the streets, asking for the release of the boys. Then, after Friday prayers on March 18, 2011, security forces opened fire on the protesters, allegedly killing two of them in what activists consider the first deaths of the uprising.
The fuse was on.
The demonstrations spread like wildfire, followed by violent repression. Soon Assad, who comes from the Alawite sect, a branch of Shiite Islam, was at war with his own people.
Over time, the conflict became more complex as foreign powers, militant groups, the Kurds – a stateless ethnic group concentrated in the Middle East – and the Islamic State extremist group intervened, weaving a web of belligerent parties. Russia and Iran supported the government, while the United States, the Arab Gulf countries and Turkey supported the rebel groups.
The United States was also among the countries that sent troops to fight ISIS, which exploited the instability to expand the territory of its self-declared caliphate, and supported the Syrian Democratic Forces led by the Kurds in their battle against the militants. To date, about 900 US soldiers are in Syria working to ensure the lasting defeat of ISIS, according to the US Central Command.
Despite the violence, for many Syrians those heady months at the start of the revolution were full of hope.
“We started having these deep conversations about democracy, about the shape of the state, about the regime, about what kind of democracy we will have,” said Daraa native Malath Alzoubi, a journalist who participated in the first demonstrations in the city and now lives in London.
“We think it is a wave and we are part of it,” he said, referring to the Arab Spring uprisings that were taking place in the Middle East.
Hope fading
The fiery optimism that fueled many Syrian revolutionaries died slowly.
For some, it was when the Russians joined the conflict on the side of the government in 2015 or when the Syrian army regained control of their hometowns. For others, it gradually disappeared. Among some, it continues to burn despite the devastation.
Many opposition supporters in Syria are disappointed in the international community, which they say has failed to protect civilians from Assad’s government. Others were bitterly disappointed by President Barack Obama’s decision not to intervene against Assad after he accused the government of deploying chemical weapons against civilians, although he said its use would be a “red line” for the United States.
In July 2018, Russian-backed Syrian government forces hoisted the national flag over Daraa and recaptured the vital border crossing with Jordan, in a significant victory for Assad.
As part of an agreement drafted by Moscow, the rebels had the option to leave Daraa and go with their families to other parts of the country controlled by the rebels or to accept an amnesty offer from the government.
Syrian government forces also agreed not to enter the main residential area of the city, known as Daraa al-Balad, on condition that the rebels surrender their heavy weapons, said Omar Hariri, a member of the Daraa Martyrs Documentation Office, the monitoring group rights.
A friend of Abazayd, who claims responsibility for painting the anti-Assad message in February 2011, still lives in that part of Daraa. The friend, who wants to remain anonymous because he fears being targeted by Syrian forces, says he regrets not having left the city while he still had a chance.
The former rebel fighter, whom the documentation office also identified as one of the prisoners in 2011, believes it is only a matter of time before the government takes over the enclave and arrests or kills those inside.
“I made the wrong decision. I should have left Daraa,” he said recently by phone. “I’m a father now, and that worries me even more.”
The scars of war
Although Daraa may no longer be at the forefront of the war, life remains difficult.
The wider city and province are plagued by selective assassinations and occasional clashes between government forces and ex-rebels, said Hariri of the documentation office.
The violence highlights Assad’s battle to control communities long after his forces raised the Syrian flag in their cities and towns.
Residents say that electricity is scarce and that people wait hours in line to buy bread. Syria’s currency plummeted because of the war and the paralyzing economic crisis.
More than half of the Syrian population cannot afford a basic meal; the price of staple foods is more than 200 percent higher than last year, according to the United Nations.
And the prospect that something will improve soon seems remote.
Negotiations in Geneva between the government, the opposition and civil groups to revise the Syrian constitution have made little progress, and Assad is almost guaranteed to win his fourth consecutive seven-year term in this year’s presidential election.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said the Biden government will continue to promote a political agreement to end the conflict and seek to restore US leadership in humanitarian aid to the country.
He added that, if there is to be a sustainable end to the conflict, the Syrian government must change its behavior, but he did not ask Assad to resign.
Meanwhile, those outside Daraa also suffered. A generation of young Syrians around the world lost their youth to the devastating conflict.
Abazayd, who used to help on his father’s farm, but now works long hours as a construction worker in Turkey, says he can barely remember life before Syria started to self-destruct. Instead of a peaceful childhood, his memories are of planes of war, destruction and fear, he says.
Father of a daughter now, he wishes to return to Daraa to visit the tombs of his brother and father, but it is realistic that that day will not come soon.
And yet, despite everything he lost, he remains challenging.
“I am sure that the revolution will continue and that there will be more birthdays in the years to come until the Syrians, with the help of Western countries, overthrow Bashar Assad and his regime,” he said.
Syrian officials have not responded to a request for comment.