If the drive to overthrow Bashar al-Assad was born anywhere, it was born in Deraa, a small Syrian city near the Jordanian border.
Here, on May 21, 2011, the tortured and mutilated body of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khatib was handed over to his family weeks after his arrest at an anti-government demonstration.
His death, and the torture of other local teenagers for writing anti-Assad graffiti, sparked widespread protests and a harsh crackdown by government forces.
If anyone in Deraa should be celebrating the fall of the Assad regime, it is the Khatib family.
But when we arrive, no one in the house is celebrating.
They have just been sent screenshots of documents found in the famous Saydnaya prison that confirm that Hamza’s older brother Omar, also arrested by police in 2019, died in custody.
The children’s mother, Samira, shaking with pain, tells me that she had been waiting for Omar to get out of prison.
“I thought maybe it would come out today or tomorrow, and today I got the news.”
His nephew, Hossam al-Khatib, said the documents had been posted on social media by people roaming Saydnaya looking for information about their relatives. They found Omar’s file and shared it online, knowing he was Hamza’s brother.
“May God take revenge on him”
Samira – dressed in black, still mourning the death of her husband less than three months ago – asks that former president Bashar al-Assad experience in person what she has experienced.
“I hope he pays the price. And may God take revenge on him and his children.”
The fall of Assad has uncovered decades of repression in Syria, and much of Deraa took to the streets on Sunday, giddy with freedom, as rebel fighters took the capital, Damascus, and the former president fled.
Mobile phone footage shows crowds of men running around Deraa’s central square in a chaotic demonstration of joy, shouting and firing guns into the air.
This area was a key opposition stronghold during the Assad regime: fierce battles are reflected in schools and homes, and villages are corroded by tank and machine gun fire.
The opposition in this southern part of Syria does not belong to the alliance led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which advanced from the north and took the capital last week, but the two converged on the capital on Sunday.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) began fighting here in 2011, when harsh government crackdowns following Hamza’s death convinced some serving officers in Assad’s army to defect and form a rebel force.
From poetry to war
One of those rebel officers was Ahmed al-Awda, a poet who studied English Literature at university before becoming an army officer and then a rebel leader.now in charge of the Deraa province militia.
“You can’t imagine how happy we are,” he told me in the nearby town of Busra. “We have been crying for days. You can’t imagine what we feel. Everyone here in Syria lost family members. “Everyone was suffering.”
Awda added that he was one of the first to enter Damascus on Sunday, along with HTS. The first thing he did, he added, was go to the embassies and government buildings, to protect the people inside.
“We took many of the government civilians to the Four Seasons hotel and put a very large force there to protect them,” he said.
“You know it’s going to be a crazy time, so I did my best to protect everyone there, even the government. “I don’t want to punish them, they are Syrians.”
But he says he won’t forgive Assad so easily.
“I will do everything possible to bring him to trial, so that he receives his punishment, because we will not forget what he did to the Syrian people and how he destroyed Syria.”
Assad’s departure has given a fragile unity to Syria and its various opposition forces. But they no longer have a common enemy, and with foreign powers still involved here, their differences could be strained.
There are concerns that Syria could follow the path of Iraq and Libya and split into chaos.
“We saw what happened in Iraq and we rejected it,” Awda concludes.
The latent threat
Assad’s forces were not the only ones Awda fought here in recent years. The cells of the Islamic State (IS) group, which are still scattered in the east of the country, were also a threat.
Awda remembers fighting them and killing a senior IS leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, two years ago.
With Assad’s powerful supporters, Iran and Russia, no longer acting as a brake on IS, many here are worried about a resurgence.
Awda is convinced that this will not happen. “No,” he insisted. “I expelled them. “We did not expel Assad just to live under IS.”
He now wants free elections, believing that the Syrian people will never again elect anyone who becomes a dictator.
At the Deraa cemetery, the plaque over Hamza’s grave is in pieces – broken by a shell from a government tank during fighting with rebel forces here, the family said.
“They continued to beat him even when he was dead,” said a cousin.
Neighbors watched in silence as the Syrian opposition flag was tied around Hamza’s tombstone.
Behind them, the tombs tell the story of 13 years of fighting: an air raid, a battle, an entire family murdered in their home.
The war with Assad is over, but peace in Syria has not yet been achieved.
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