In Daraa, heroes of the revolution plan their future amid the ruins
Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship. All his articles can be found in our Syria After Assad section.
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“Each and every family has paid a price for our freedom”, explains a middle-aged man, his dark eyes betraying suppressed despair. “Some lost their homes, some lost years of their lives, and others lost their children, whether as exiles or martyrs.” Preferring to remain nameless out of fear of retribution, he spent seven years in jail for the crime of living in the Syrian town of Daraa, whose revolutionary spirit was a perpetual thorn in the side of the regime. He returned to his home, a shack in a refugee camp for Syrians displaced during the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, to find his neighbourhood destroyed. Yet another Syrian town turned to rubble.
Daraa was one of the birthplaces of the popular revolution against Assad, when a group of around twenty teenagers were arrested and tortured for anti-government graffiti. The local backlash to their abuse was the spark that inspired a heroic rebellion that lasted more than a decade. “We didn’t understand the full significance of what we were doing at the time”, explains Mouawiya, one of the teenagers involved in the action. “We were still just kids.”
But his experience of being tortured in Assad’s prisons taught him all he needed to know about the dictatorship’s brutality. It instilled in him a lifelong commitment to struggle for justice. “They tortured us so badly, using electric shocks, pulling off our fingernails ... it was hard.” Another local explains that he was hung for two weeks by his wrists and allowed only one ten-minute break each day for a sip of water. The jailors hoped to turn the activists into informers, and to find out “who was funding us”, Mouawiya explains. “But none of it had any impact. When they released me, I spent the next five or six months in peaceful protests that kept getting attacked, first with batons and then with bullets and bombs.”
This was the fate of the revolutionary movement across Syria at the time. In Egypt and Tunisia, the regimes abandoned their figureheads in order to preserve the core of the ruling edifice, whose military, economic and political power lay untouched. They calculated that such a move would best preserve their power in the long run. The brutal suppression of protesters in Bahrain and Syria proved to be an alternative option. In both cases, the dictatorship was too narrowly based, and in the Syrian example, too tied to the personality and family of the leader, to attempt the Egyptian method. “So after a while, we formed the Free Syrian Army to fight back.”
Mouawiya explains that the Free Syrian Army was a fairly loose outfit, neighbours arming themselves to defend their communities against an unimaginably violent state. “To begin with, it was mostly small groups of young guys who knew each other, say 20-50 people”, he says. “They would have a leader that would work with other similar groups in the broader district. Eventually we developed a unified command.” That process of organisation took time, and according to Mouawiya, never went beyond the level of Daraa province. Despite its name, the FSA was never a national army, with coordinated battle plans and resources. Rather, it was, depending on the area, a mix of former soldiers that had defected to the revolution and local citizens that had armed themselves to defend their families.
Like in other parts of Syria, the revolution was especially strong in the poorer, working-class areas of Daraa, whose people had suffered the worst impacts of the crony capitalist dictatorship. It is not a touristy area, nor one blessed by natural beauty or resources. Rather, generation after generation has earned a living tilling the stony soil, the bottom strata of workers living in tents on the land where they work. The city’s main roads are dusty and dilapidated, even by Syrian standards. Its one hotel manifests the absolute disconnect of the regime from its people. Clearly designed for official visits, the ground floor is opulent in a classical Arabian style, built from marble, gold and glass. Never mind the slums outside.
With extraordinary difficulty and bravery, the FSA in Daraa liberated large swathes of the governorate for substantial periods of time, including many of the suburbs and small agricultural towns. By 2024, the only part they didn’t control was the heart of Daraa’s capital city, which remained under heavy military occupation.
Though the people of Daraa are rightfully proud of their heroic resistance, it has left their region scarred beyond recognition. Arriving from Suwayda was like entering another country. Every single home on the freeway is marked by the conflict, and entire suburbs lie in rubble. My driver takes an unscheduled detour to show me what the regime did. We pass through the suburb of Al Mansheyah, which lies on top of a little hill, and it’s like being back in Yarmouk or Harasta. Every other house has been liquidated; kids play soccer in the debris.
All this devastation is the product of thirteen years of assault from the land and sky. Some parts of Daraa were fought over multiple times. Others were mostly free but subjected to endless bombing from above. Mouawiya’s brother Mohammad shows me the three-metre hole in his roof where a barrel bomb hit, destroying an entire level of his apartment building as well as a bedroom below. Sealing off the damaged areas is the best they can do for now. They can’t even afford to eat properly each day, let alone rebuild.
The Russian air force also bears much responsibility for the damage, launching wave after wave of bombing raids from its Hmeimim airbase. One boy, around 11 years old, tells me that they used to get warning calls from friends in Damascus, giving them a few precious minutes to seek shelter before the bombs began falling. Many people fled the area, seeking refuge in Jordan or Lebanon, while some fighters were sent to Idlib in the north as part of various truces. But many others had no option but to stay. One man says that he spent months living in the nearby telephone interchange without sanitation, water or electricity.
Faysal, a teacher and member of a grassroots committee for the provision of social services, explains that the district had 40 schools to begin with, but by 2018, only four were still standing. The rebels have built another sixteen since then, he says proudly. Families here clearly value education highly, their children’s futures a big concern even amidst the horror of war: “We didn’t want the kids to miss one day of school, and they didn’t”, beams Hanaan, another local teacher. But she admits that the war badly affected the younger generation. “They’re mentally unwell, they recoil from loud noises”, she says, ruffling the hair of a nearby boy.
There are other initiatives to try to improve amenities in the area. Nagham, a local activist I met in Damascus two weeks ago, is leading a campaign to replant trees that had been chopped down for heating fuel during the war. “I see the re-greening of Daraa as serving two purposes”, she says. “First, it’s about bringing natural beauty back to Daraa. Second, I see it as a way of holding on to the souls and memories of the revolution’s martyrs.”
The area’s many mosques are also slowly being rebuilt after the regime destroyed almost all of them. In this fairly religious and largely Sunni town, such spaces are a vital centre of social life as much as they are a place for prayer. It is moving to see thousands of these impoverished people gathering for Friday prayers in the partial ruins of a mosque, having survived, both physically and spiritually, the systematic terror of the past 54 years.
Mouawiya does not romanticise the armed phase of the rebellion, saying that “things started getting messy when money and guns started coming in from the outside”. Some hustlers and crooks got involved, some of them making a lot of money reselling guns meant for the resistance. Mouawiya is visibly angry at this, insisting that it was possible to remain clean if one was fighting for the right reasons. It is inspiring to see this man hold on to principle in a situation of social and economic breakdown, when the regime has made all normal life impossible.
In recent times, some of the FSA brigades in Daraa have begun affiliating to HTS. They were attracted by its superior funding and organisation, but also by what they saw as its success in governing Idlib province. “Things are great there, almost like Europe”, claims an armed guard patrolling the streets. He moved to Idlib just a few months ago after his father was appointed to a leading position within HTS. They returned to Daraa triumphantly, part of HTS’s southward march through Hama, Homs and Damascus. “We’re in HTS, but all the fighters here are local guys”, he emphasises. His fellow militiaman never went to Idlib but has joined HTS for similar reasons. He was first politicised by being shot in the back at the age of nine for playing on his front porch during a government-imposed curfew.
There are plenty of fighters that have not joined HTS. Mouawiya insists that he remains independent and that, in any case, HTS won’t exist for much longer. “It’s finished. All the groups will all be united into the Syrian army. And then there will be elections. There has to be.”
Overall, the dominant impression from Daraa is a feeling of somewhat resigned relief, a great distance from the elation and bustle of central Damascus. People are hopeful, but the suffering of previous years is inescapable, bruising, inscribed both in their physical environment and their collective psyche.
This is partly due to the terrible economic conditions that plague Daraa, and much of Syria. Mouawiya and his family continue to live in grinding poverty, as do most people he knows. Work is hard to find and doesn’t pay much. Freedom hasn’t yet increased anyone’s capacity to buy food, or diesel for heating. Nor has it dealt with the extreme electricity shortages, which mean most people get no more than a couple of hours a day. Several people also rage about the lack of viable homes in the area. “You’re lucky to find a single enclosed room for your whole family”, one says.
If a viable and better Syria is to be built from the ashes of the Assad dynasty, it will need to meet these essential needs—in Daraa and across the rest of the country.
