The words have been repeated from Tunisia to Egypt, from Yemen to Bahrain. “The people want the regime to fall” — the mantra of revolution. And so, last week, after 15 kids wrote those words on a wall in the agricultural town of Dara’a in southern Syria, the local governor decided to come down hard. The young people — all under 17 — were thrown in jail. The punishment stunned the town and, suddenly, Syria — so confidently authoritarian — got its first strong taste of rebellion in what is called the Arab Spring.
Syria remains a closed and walled-off nation. But descriptions of the uprising in Dara’a were dramatic. The alleged details included dozens of young men pelting a poster — in broad daylight — of a smiling President Bashar al-Assad; a statue of his late father and predecessor Hafiz al-Assad, demolished; official buildings including the ruling Baath Party’s headquarters and the governor’s office burned down. “There is no fear, there is no fear, after today there is no fear!” hundreds of men chant, captured in shaky mobile phone footage allegedly taken on Monday. Over the weekend, provincial security forces opened fire on the marchers, killing several.
President Assad responded immediately. Sending a high-ranking delegation to deliver his condolences to the families of the dead. The governor was cashiered and the 15 kids released. But, according to at least two dissident websites, protesters have given the Syrian government until Friday morning to meet a list of demands relayed back to the President by his delegation. If not, they threaten that this Friday will become the “Friday of the Martyrs” not just in Dara’a and its province, Hauran, which shares a border with Jordan, but throughout the country.
Assad is unlikely to meet demands such as the lifting of the 48-year-old emergency law and releasing all political prisoners. But the government has already agreed to set up a committee to investigate the deaths of the five people reportedly killed. The protesters are also demanding an end to pervasive corruption and amending a real estate law governing property transactions in border areas.
Protesters, who were continuing to demonstrate — though less vociferously — on Tuesday, have renamed the public space in front of Dara’a’s Omari Mosque “Dignity Square” — dignity being another theme of the revolutions in the region. But the government has sought to downplay the unrest, blaming it on Jund as-Sham, an obscure fundamentalist group with links to Al-Qaeda, and Fatah al-Islam, another Islamist outfit routed by the Lebanese army in a months-long standoff at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp back in 2007. In a front-page story in the government-run Teshreen daily on Tuesday, Dara’a cleric Sheikh Ahmad al-Sayasina was quoted as saying, “There were elements from outside Dara’a determined to burn and destroy public property… These unknown assailants want to harm the reputation of the sons of Hauran.” The cleric reportedly said, “The people of Dara’a affirm that recent events are not part of their tradition or custom.”
Protests have already been reported in several other regions including Banias, Qamishli, Douma, Deir ez-Zor, and the capital Damascus. “It’s difficult to contain this,” says Radwan Ziadeh, a Washington-based Syrian dissident and visiting scholar at The Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. “It will take time, but they are chipping away at the barrier of fear.” Of crucial importance, Ziadeh says, is the fact that the uprising did not begin in the long-suffering Kurdish north, providing the regime with an easy excuse to clamp down on the region’s stateless Kurds, nor in Hama or Aleppo, where the banned Muslim Brotherhood has strong underground support. Rather, it happened in what is essentially anytown, Syria.
But Hauran has one distinction. The commanders of at least three of the 10 divisions of Syria’s 240,000-strong Army hail from the province, as well as a significant number of senior officers, making it highly unlikely that they would engage in violence against people from their own tribal areas. Because of this, the Republican Guard, which is fiercely loyal to the president, is now in Dara’a, Ziadeh says. “The security forces have to be careful not to be too violent or to attempt to crush this, because it can easily backfire on them,” he says, and in the worst case scenario possibly lead to military defections.
“It’s a very tense situation,” says a source within Syria who requested complete anonymity. “I think now we’re seeing something of a grace period where the government is promising to act and the people are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt — which will last for a day or two — not more.”
Assad, like his father, has surrounded himself with members of his fellow minority Alawite sect . He has nevertheless been a clever, strong and wily leader. But that was before these youth-led revolts rocked the region. Now, he may face his toughest test yet. Will he survive? What happens in Dara’a on Friday will be key.
See TIME’s special report: “The Middle East in Revolt.”
See TIME’s pictures of the week.
