The Arab Spring Comes to Syria

In late February 2011, as Tunisia's Ben Ali fled and Egypt's Mubarak fell, a group of teenage boys in the southern Syrian city of Deraa spray-painted anti-government slogans on their school wall: 'Doctor, your turn is coming' — a taunt directed at President Bashar al-Assad, the ophthalmologist who had inherited Syria's dictatorship from his father. The boys, some as young as ten, were arrested by the mukhabarat — the feared secret police — and held for weeks. Reports of their torture in custody spread through the city. When families gathered at the governor's office to demand their release, security forces opened fire.

The killings on March 18, 2011 were the spark. Within days, tens of thousands were demonstrating across Deraa province, then in Damascus, Homs, Hama, Latakia, and Deir ez-Zor — the entire length of the country. The protesters' early demands were modest and specific: free political prisoners, repeal the emergency law in place since 1963, allow political parties. Assad initially offered concessions — lifting the emergency law, releasing some detainees — while simultaneously deploying the army. The mixed signals told Syrians that the regime would negotiate and shoot simultaneously.

Assad's fundamental miscalculation was the same one Mubarak had made: that force alone could contain a population that had overcome the barrier of fear. But unlike Egypt's military, which ultimately refused to fire on civilians, Syria's armed forces were commanded by Assad's family — his brother Maher commanded the elite 4th Division — and were deeply penetrated by the Alawite minority sect to which the Assads belonged. The army that drove tanks into Deraa, Homs, and Banias in April and May 2011 would not defect en masse. Soldiers who refused orders were shot.

By summer 2011, army defectors had begun forming the Free Syrian Army (FSA), initially a loose coalition of officers and soldiers who had refused to fire on civilians. The FSA was never a unified command — it was hundreds of local brigades sharing a flag and a name — but its formation marked the militarization of what had been a civilian uprising. Armed groups proliferated, funded by Syrians in exile, by Gulf Arab donors, and eventually by foreign governments. The Syrian revolution that began with teenagers and spray paint was becoming a war.