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BBCIf the push to oust Bashar al-Assad was born wherever, it was born in Deraa, a small metropolis in Syria close to the Jordanian border.
Here, on 21 May 2011, the tortured and mutilated physique of 13-year-old Hamza al-Khatib was delivered to his household weeks after his arrest at an anti-government rally.
His dying, and the torture of different native youngsters for writing anti-Assad graffiti, sparked widespread protests and a harsh crackdown by authorities forces.
If anybody in Deraa needs to be celebrating the autumn of Assad’s regime, it is the Khatib household.
But once we visited at the moment, nobody in that home was celebrating.
They had simply been despatched screenshots of paperwork discovered within the infamous Saydnaya jail confirming that Hamza’s older brother Omar – additionally arrested by the police in 2019 – had died in custody.
The boys’ mom, Samira, shaking with grief, instructed me she had been ready for Omar to emerge from jail.
“I was thinking maybe he’ll come today or tomorrow,” she mentioned. “Today, I got the news.”
Dressed all in black, and already mourning her husband, who died lower than three months in the past, she requested for former President Bashar al-Assad himself to expertise what she had lived via.
“I hope he will pay the price,” she mentioned. “And that God will take revenge on him, and on his children.”
Her nephew, Hossam al-Khatib, mentioned the paperwork had been revealed on social media, by folks scouring Saydnaya for info on their relations. They discovered Omar’s file and shared it on-line, understanding that he was Hamza’s brother.
The fall of Assad has lifted the lid on a long time of repression in Syria, and far of Deraa was out on the streets on Sunday, giddy with freedom, as insurgent fighters took the capital Damascus and Assad fled.
Mobile cellphone footage exhibits crowds of males working round Deraa’s central sq. in a chaotic outpouring of pleasure – shouting and firing weapons into the air.
This space was a key opposition heartland throughout the Assad regime – heavy battles are etched onto faculties and houses right here, village after village corroded by tank rounds and machine gun fireplace.
The opposition on this southern a part of Syria is completely different to the alliance led by Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which swept down from the north and took the capital final week. But they each converged on the capital on Sunday.
The Free Syria Army (FSA) started combating right here in 2011, when the cruel authorities crackdowns following Hamza’s dying satisfied some serving officers in Assad’s military to defect and kind a insurgent power.
One of them was Ahmed al-Awda, a poet who studied English literature at college earlier than changing into a military officer, after which a insurgent chief – now the militia chief of Deraa Province.
“You can’t imagine how happy we are,” he instructed me within the close by city of Busra. “We have been crying for days. You can’t imagine what we feel. Everyone here in Syria lost family. Everyone was suffering.”
Mr Awda mentioned he was among the many first to enter Damascus on Sunday, together with HTS. The very first thing he did, he added, was to go to the embassies and authorities buildings, to guard the folks inside.
“We took many of the civilian government guys to the Four Seasons hotel, and put a very big force there to protect them,” he mentioned.
“You know it will be a mad time, so I did my best to protect everybody there, even the government guys. I don’t want to punish them, they are Syrian.”
But he says he will not forgive Assad so simply.
“I will do my best to bring him to judgement in court, to take his punishment, because we will not forget what he did to the Syrian people, and how he destroyed Syria.”
Assad’s departure has bestowed a fragile unity on Syria and its various opposition forces. But they now not have a typical enemy, and with exterior powers nonetheless invested right here, their variations may come underneath pressure.
There are considerations that Syria may observe the trail of Iraq and Libya and splinter into chaos.
“We saw what happened in Iraq and we refuse it,” Mr Awda mentioned.
Assad’s forces weren’t the one ones he was combating right here over the previous few years. Islamic State (IS) group cells – nonetheless scattered throughout the east of the nation – have been additionally a menace.
Mr Awda says he fought towards them, killing a senior IS chief, Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, two years in the past.
Now Assad’s highly effective backers, Iran and Russia, are now not appearing as a brake on IS, many listed below are nervous a few resurgence.
Mr Awda is adamant this may not occur. “No,” he insisted. “I kicked them out. We didn’t push Assad out only to live under IS.”
Now he desires free elections, believing that the Syrian folks won’t ever once more select anybody who would change into a dictator.
In Deraa’s cemetery, the plaque on Hamza’s grave lies in items – damaged by a authorities tank shell throughout combating with insurgent forces right here, the household mentioned.
“They kept hitting him even when he was dead,” one cousin remarked.
Neighbours watched in silence because the Syrian opposition flag was tied round Hamza’s gravestone.
Behind it, the graves inform a narrative of 13 years of combating: an air strike, a battle, an entire household killed of their house.
The warfare with Assad has ended – however peace in Syria has not but been received.
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