The Syrian war, which would eventually consume the country, began with spray paint. In March 2011, 15 schoolboys, all under 17, scrawled slogans on the wall of their high school in Dara’a, a farming town on the Jordanian border. The Arab Spring was on every television. “We used to watch the news about the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt,” one of the boys, Mouawiya Syasneh, told CNN years later, saying such slogans were already familiar and “so my friends and I spray-painted graffiti reading ‘Freedom’ and ‘Down with the regime,’ and ‘It’s your turn Doctor.’”
The Doctor was Bashar al-Assad, the London-trained ophthalmologist who inherited Syria’s presidency in 2000 when his father Hafez died at 69 after nearly 30 years in power. Dara’a’s security chief at the time was Atef Najib, a cousin of the president who had run the province like a private fiefdom since late 2008. His men rounded up local youths under 20, Syasneh among them, and the boys were held for more than a month, beaten and tortured, their fingernails pulled out. When parents begged for their sons, they were told, “Forget your children. If you want children, make more children. If you don’t know how, bring us your women and we will make them for you,” as Alia Malek recorded in her book The Home That Was Our Country. Najib was later sanctioned by the Obama administration.
Dara’a exploded. Protesters burned the Baath Party headquarters and the governor’s office, pulled down a statue of Hafez Assad, and chanted “There is no fear, there is no fear, after today there is no fear!” Security forces fired on marchers, killing several. Assad sent a delegation with condolences, cashiered the governor and freed the boys, but protesters gave the government until March 25, vowing a “Friday of the Martyrs” if demands went unmet: lifting the 48-year-old emergency law, freeing political prisoners, ending corruption. State media blamed obscure Islamist groups, and the square outside the Omari Mosque was renamed “Dignity Square” as unrest spread to Banias, Qamishli, Douma, Deir ez-Zor and Damascus. “It will take time, but they are chipping away at the barrier of fear,” dissident Radwan Ziadeh told TIME, warning that violence against Hauran province, home to many senior army officers, risked military defections.
Then came the rupture. Within 48 hours of the boys’ release, security forces raided the Omari Mosque, and on April 25 army tanks rolled into Dara’a at dawn, cutting power, internet and the city off from the world. The town, in CNN’s words, has never been whole since. Demonstrations went national, moderate activists were hunted down, extremists rose to the fore, and Syasneh himself joined the Free Syrian Army at 16 after his father was killed by a rocket in 2013. “We didn’t imagine things would get this bad,” Ahmed Masri, a Dara’a native now in Virginia, told CNN in 2018. “We thought we’d demonstrate and go on a hunger strike or whatever, and the government would pay attention to our demands. But there was bombing and killing and aircraft and tanks. It wasn’t part of our plan.”
Seven years on, the graffiti’s promise had curdled into a war that shattered Syria. The boys’ words, though, stayed legible: it was, in the end, the regime’s turn.
Sources
- Syria's Revolt: How Graffiti Stirred an Uprising
- For many Syrians, the story of the war began with graffiti in Dara’a | CNN
