Angry at life under Bashar al-Assad, 16-year-old Muawiyah Syasneh and her friends spray-painted four words on a wall in their school yard.
Four words of defiance that led to the teenagers being imprisoned and tortured for weeks, sparking the first protests in Syria in early 2011.
Four words that ignited a revolution that led to one of the bloodiest civil wars of modern times.
Four words that simply say: “It’s your turn, Doctor.”
It was a reference to Assad, who was an ophthalmologist in London before returning to Syria to continue his family’s brutal regime.
“We spent 45 days tortured in prison for these words,” Muawiyah recalls in front of the same wall, in the city of Daraa. “It was indescribable. We were children: hung, beaten, electrocuted.”
Over his shoulder is a rifle. He ended up fighting with the Free Syrian Army and, years later, joined the group of rebels who not only drove regime forces out of Daraa last week but were the first to seize the capital, Damascus.
“In 2011, after the revolution began, the entire region demanded that their children be returned,” he says. the independent. “We’re proud of what we did because the adults couldn’t do it.”
Now 30 and a father, there was no way young Muawiyah could have foreseen the butterfly effect that his simple act of teenage frustration would unleash.
He could never have imagined that, more than a decade later, and after fleeing the regime’s intense bombardment of Daraa and becoming a refugee, he would return and follow the rebels from Operations Room South to Damascus to announce the fall of Assad.
“The battle in Daraa happened so suddenly. It surprised us: in a few moments we conquered the city and then Damascus, which was the first time I was in the capital,” he says, showing a photo of himself in disbelief, wielding his rifle in the capital’s Martyrs’ Square.
“When we wrote those words all those years ago, we didn’t think it would lead to this. Honestly, we didn’t think this would cause all of Syria and Daraa to rise up. But we demanded our freedom and now we remain on the soil of our homeland,” he says.
“The war was hard. Many were injured. Many people died. We lost so many loved ones and yet we thank God. The blood of the martyrs was not in vain. Justice prevailed and the revolution triumphed.”
The Flint attack that set it all off took place in this small southern town that few had heard of before 2011. Located just a few kilometers from Syria’s border with Jordan, Daraa had a pre-war population of just 117,000. people. Before the uprising, life was hard.
Muawiyah blames the arrival in the early 2000s of the region’s new security chief, Atef Najib. He was known for his oppressive laws and for personally overseeing the imprisonment of Muawiyah and his friends.
At the beginning of 2011, the streets were choked by police checkpoints. “You couldn’t get in or out,” Muawiyah recalls. “We were seeing protests in Egypt and Tunisia, where regimes were collapsing. “So we wrote ‘It’s your turn, doctor’ and burned down the police checkpoint.”
At least 15 children from different families were detained and brutally tortured. One of them reportedly died from his injuries.
Muawiyah remembers how the authorities told her parents: “Forget about your children. Make new children. And if you have forgotten how to do it, bring your wives.”
In March, thousands (then tens of thousands) began gathering regularly around the city’s neutral al-Omari mosque, demanding the return of the children. It sparked protests by frustrated citizens across Syria.
“We were surprised by what happened. Everyone demanded the return of the children: families within Daraa, but (also) throughout Syria.
Ehab Qatayfan, 50, who was among the crowd of protesters at the time, says the detention of the children was the final straw.
“We were in a miserable situation, as you saw with your own eyes: the jails, the prisons, the torture machines,” he remembers from outside that same mosque, 13 years later. “We were oppressed by each and every branch of the regime.”
But the protests were responded to with violence by the authorities, and from there they multiplied. The fighting raged for seven brutal years, during which time regime forces devastated Daraa. Among the dead was Muawiyah’s own father, who was killed by regime bombs in 2014 while attending Friday prayers.
By 2018, rebel forces had surrendered and, under the terms of an agreement, were forced to evacuate to the northwestern province of Idlib. Among those who fled was Muawiyah, who later escaped to Türkiye, where he endured the hardships of life as a refugee.
Desperate and broke, he eventually returned to his hometown via smuggling routes, and earlier this month – as Idlib opposition forces rampaged through Aleppo, Hama and Homs – he joined the frustrated youth of Daraa, who became a once again against the Assad regime. To everyone’s surprise, the government soldiers they had feared for so many decades seemed to vanish.
Back in Daraa, years of battle scars have devastated large areas of the city. Now children play football in the shadow of the towering skeletons of the apartment blocks. Families have tried to rebuild makeshift houses in the remains of their old homes.
There, today’s teenagers have known nothing but war.
“My house is destroyed, my father forcibly disappeared, my brother was murdered. I don’t remember anything before except the fighting,” says a 16-year-old boy, watching his friends play soccer next to the school where the Muawiyah graffiti started it all. “My first memory is of the regime’s soldiers shooting people,” he adds gravely.
But Muawiyah, whose son is now six years old, has hope, not for himself, but for young people.
“We want Syria to be better than before. But, frankly, I’ve already lost my future. “What matters is the future of the next generation,” he says, grabbing his assault rifle.
“I pray for them: that they do not face the torture that we face, that they do not have weapons, that they do not live in wars like we did, that they have the security that we all deserve.”