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.
