Written by Tabitha Wedemann
It was the fate of 15 schoolboys in the small town of Dera’a that set the Syrian civil war ablaze. They had been arrested for graffitiing revolutionary slogans on their high school walls, slogans they heard chanted on the streets of Tunisia and Egypt. It was March 2011 and a wave of anti-government protests now known as the Arab Spring was flooding the Middle East, demanding democracy and the protection of human rights. Pockets of unrest had flared up across Syria, too, like tinderboxes waiting to explode.
The arrested schoolboys of Dera’a were tortured in detention. When their parents went to plead with the local security chief – a cousin of President Bashar al-Assad – they were told to forget their children. Demonstrators gathered in front of the mosque, and amid the ensuing violence, at least two people were killed. These were the first deaths of the uprising, and news of them was quick to catch fire in a country ripe for unrest. People everywhere gathered in solidarity, and soon, they were marching for more than those harmed in Dera’a: they were marching as a people silenced for too long.
In Syria, the revolutionary sparks of the Arab Spring ignited a country that had been under a repressive regime for decades. The Baathist party had risen to power in the last of a series of military coups scarring the nation in the years succeeding the French mandate in the mid-20th century. Embodying prevalent discourses on socialism and the unification of the Arabs in a common state, their politics initially presented a popular reaction to feudalism and the artificial state boundaries left behind by the colonial powers. But upon seizing control in 1963, the ideas that had earned the party widespread lower-middle class and peasant appeal were gradually abandoned or deformed.
Syria mutated into an absolute state revolving around the god-like President Hafez al-Assad. Patronage replaced law, gifts replaced rights and dissenters were imprisoned and tortured. When Hafez died in 2000 and was replaced by his son Bashar, these political ills were compounded by the economic. Disbanding the socialist policies Hafez had realised, the newly liberalised market only benefited the entrenched crony elite while pushing more people into poverty. By the time the Arab Spring arrived, half the country’s wealth was held by the richest 5%, and an ongoing drought worsened the plight of struggling communities such as Dera’a. Syria had gone from colonial hands to an authoritarian regime ruling over a country of fear and deprivation.
It was this socio-economic breeding ground from which Syrians unearthed their voice in 2011, one that was not unlike those of other Middle Eastern nations flowering the Arab Spring. But while the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia resigned after mere weeks of protest, al-Assad refused. Peaceful and community-centred resistance was answered with regime violence. Six months after Dera’a, 2,500 had been killed and tens of thousands detained and tortured. While hearing nice stories from Egypt, Syrians were burying their dead. It was this trauma and sense of hopelessness that led people to pick up weapons: a turning point for the country, and one of no return.
The rise of the armed struggle brought an escalation of regime brutality. In liberated areas, al-Assad pursued a ‘scorched earth’ strategy unafraid to kill civilians and destroy infrastructure on a large scale. Towns under siege faced hunger and disease; looting and gangsterism spread as a result. Soon, the leaderless movement had transformed into a cacophony of competing leaders and solidarity yielded to sectarianism. As the resistance lost its moral high ground and its vision for a free and democratic society became blurrier, it created a vacuum of direction that proved fertile soil for a radical alternative to thrive.
Salafism – a branch of Sunni Islam wanting to return society to the presumed way of life of the first Muslims – fed off the desperation of war. For those it won over, it provided the strong ideology needed to survive apocalyptic conditions; others were swayed into tolerance by effective service provision. By 2014, the Salafi jihadist group ISIS had captured vast parts of the country and news of public beheadings had come to dominate coverage of the war. The conflict had evolved into a multi-dimensional tragedy, where the early aspirations seemed distant against the backdrop of chaos and suffering.
Many revolutionaries fought ISIS and liberated Syrian towns from the hands of repression, but under the weight of multiple frontlines and Russian and Iranian regime funds, the devastating effects of the counter-revolution gradually came to dominate. The economy collapsed, schools and hospitals were destroyed, and cities became wastelands as people fled for safety. By the time the refugee crisis reached Europe in 2015, 220,000 had lost their lives, and four times that number had been wounded.
A decade on from Dera’a, the Syrian war has “fallen off the front page”, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in 2021, yet “remains a living nightmare”. While there has been no shift in frontlines in two years and international efforts to defeat ISIS have led to its decline, the UN Refugee Agency reports that 14.6 million people inside Syria continue to require humanitarian assistance, with rising inflation, COVID-19 and a devastating earthquake earlier this year adding to the plight of crippled communities. The Syrian displacement crisis remains one of the world’s largest as over half of the pre-war population has been forced to flee their homes. Buried under the rubble of war, the dreams for which Syrians dared to raise their voices in 2011 today seem more distant than ever.
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Resources:
UNHRC (2023) [online] Syria situation. Global Report 2022. Available at: https://reporting.unhcr.org/operational/situations/syria-situation (Accessed: 20 August 2023)
UN News (2021) Ten years on, Syrian crisis ‘remains a living nightmare’: UN Secretary-General. Available at: https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/03/1086872 (Accessed: 20 August 2023)
Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami, Leila (2016) Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. London: Pluto Press.
