Angry with life under Bashar al-Assad, 16-year-old Muawiyah Syasneh and his friends spray-painted four words onto a wall in their school playground.
Four words of defiance that saw the teenagers jailed and tortured for weeks, triggering Syria’s first protests in early 2011.
Four words that ignited a revolution that spiralled into one of the bloodiest civil wars of modern times.
Four words that simply read: “It’s your turn, Doctor.”
It was a reference to Assad, who was an ophthalmologist in London before he returned to Syria to continue his family’s brutal regime.
“We spent 45 days under torture in prison for these words,” recalls Muawiyah as he stands 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 that not only expelled regime forces from Daraa last week but were the first to seize the capital, Damascus.
“In 2011, after the revolution started, the entire region demanded its children back,” he tells The Independent. “We are proud of what we did because adults couldn’t do it.”
Now 30 and a father himself, there was no way that the young Muawiyah could have foreseen the butterfly effect 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 Southern Operations Room rebels into Damascus to herald Assad’s downfall.
“The battle in Daraa happened so suddenly. We were surprised – in moments, we conquered the city and then Damascus, which was the first time I had ever been 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 it would cause all of Syria and Daraa to rise up. But we demanded our freedom, and now we remain on our homeland’s soil,” he says.
“The war was tough. Many were wounded. Many people died. We lost so many loved ones, and yet we thank God. The blood of the martyrs was not wasted. Justice prevailed, and the revolution was victorious.”
The flint strike that sparked it all took place in this small southern city that few had heard of before 2011. Located just a few miles 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 notorious for his oppressive laws, and for personally overseeing the imprisonment of Muawiyah and his friends.
By early 2011, the streets were strangled by police checkpoints. “You couldn’t enter or leave,” Muawiyah recalls. “We were watching protests in Egypt and Tunisia, where regimes were falling apart. So we wrote ‘It’s your turn, Doctor,’ and burned the police checkpoint.”
At least 15 boys from different families were rounded up – and badly tortured. One of them reportedly died from his wounds.
Muawiyah recalls how the authorities told their parents: “Forget about your children. Make new children. And if you’ve forgotten how to do that, bring your wives.”
By March, thousands – then, tens of thousands – began to gather regularly around the city’s neutral al-Omari Mosque, demanding the return of the children. It ignited protests by frustrated citizens across the country.
“We were surprised by what happened. Everyone demanded the return of the children – families inside Daraa, but [also] across Syria.”
Ehab Qatayfan, 50, who was among the crowds of protesters at the time, says the children’s detention was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“We were in a miserable situation, as you saw with your own eyes – the jails, the prisons, the torture machines,” he recalls from outside that same mosque, 13 years on. “We were oppressed by every single branch of the regime.”
But the protests were met with violence by the authorities, and it snowballed from there. Fighting raged for a brutal seven years, during which time regime forces laid waste to Daraa. Among the dead was Muawiyah’s own father, who was killed by regime bombs in 2014 as he went to Friday prayers.
By 2018, rebel forces had surrendered and, under the terms of a deal, were forced to evacuate to the northwestern province of Idlib. Among those who fled there was Muawiyah, who then escaped onwards to Turkey, 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 opposition forces from Idlib swept through Aleppo, Hama, and Homs – he joined the frustrated youth of Daraa, who turned once more on the Assad regime. To everyone’s surprise, the government soldiers they had feared for so many decades appeared to melt away.
Back in Daraa, years of battle scars have gouged out swathes of the city. Children now play football in the shadows of the towering skeletons of apartment blocks. Families have tried to rebuild makeshift houses in the shells of their former homes.
There, today’s teenagers have known nothing but war.
“My home is destroyed, my father forcibly disappeared, my brother killed. I don’t remember anything before except the fighting,” says one 16-year-old boy, watching his friends play football next to the school where Muawiyah’s graffiti started it all. “My first memory is regime soldiers shooting people,” he adds grimly.
But Muawiyah, whose son is now six, has hope – not for himself, but for the youth.
“We want Syria to be better than before. But frankly, I already lost my future. The future of the next generation is what matters,” he says, clutching his assault rifle.
“I pray for them – that they won’t face the torture we faced, that they won’t have weapons, that they won’t live in wars like we did, that they will have the safety and security we all deserve.”
