By Lauren Williams
BEIRUT: People talk about a spark: the moment when there could be no turning back.
 
In fact, those in Damascus at the time recall a growing sense of unease in Syria in the three months leading up to March 15. Solidarity protests for Libya and Egypt in February were met with beatings. There was a worrying upward trend of arbitrary arrests. People ceased talking.
 
But when Syrian security forces arrested 15 children – aged between 9 and 15 – in late February in the southern city of Deraa for spray-painting Egypt-inspired anti-government graffiti slogans on the walls of a school, and news fanned out of their subsequent torture, anger boiled over. The government’s response was typically forceful, but this time it could no longer contain the discontent.
 
Syrians recalling those first early days in Deraa speak with a sense of pride and determination, mixed with despair that those moments could end up here. One year on there are possibly upward of 10,000 people dead, an estimated tens of thousands detained, cities in ruins and no end in sight to a bloody battle for freedom.
 
Engineer-turned activist “Ahmad,” who asked that his real name not be revealed, remembers searching for his best friend Hussam Abdul Alwalee Ayash, one of the first three martyred when police opened fire on a protest outside the now infamous Omari mosque in Deraa’s Old City on March 18. The protesters were demanding the release of the children.
 
“When we heard the shooting we ran in different directions,” Ahmad recalls, speaking via Skype from Amman, where he fled after an army siege on the city in April.
 
“We were separated and I was looking for my friends.”
 
“Later we found Hussam on the ground. He had three shots to his body and one to his head.”
 
“We had gone out that day thinking there might be a demonstration, but we still couldn’t believe it when they started shooting.”
 
“I remember thinking that night that we would not forget what they had done to Hussam. I knew something big was happening. Then everything changed.”
 
Now, Ahmad says there is no going back. “I have seen so many of my friends die ... I could not forgive myself if we don’t win,” he says. “We owe it to our friends who are arrested and killed. We will do it for their memory.”
 
The arrested children became Syria’s revolutionary catalyst, not unlike Tunisia’s Mohammad Bouazizi.
 
Deraa, a relatively well-off region on the Jordanian border, has a majority Sunni population and had been a traditional government support base.
 
After the arrest of the children, believed to have occurred in late February, their families marched on March 6 to the mayor’s office to demand their release but were dismissed offhand, activists told The Daily Star.
 
Word spread, and on March 15 and 16, small but previously unheard of protests broke out in Deraa, Damascus suburbs and Aleppo, calling for an end to arbitrary arrests. Police responded with beatings and arrests.
 
With the children still detained, eyewitnesses in Deraa recounted demonstrators pouring from the Omari Mosque after prayers on Friday, March 18, demanding their release. The army was called in, opening fire and killing three, including Abdul Alwalee Ayash.
 
“They were chanting for freedom, freedom,” recalled Ahmad.
 
With the chanting crowd gathered outside the mosque, the local police intelligence chief Atef Najeeb, responsible for the arrests, arrived at the scene, Ahmad says.
 
“When they saw him, the people went crazy,” he says. “They ambushed his car and shortly afterward the army turned up.”
 
Soon afterward the mayor arrived. Ahmad says he asked the crowd what they wanted. “They told him: ‘we want our children,’” he says.
 
“He waved his hand in a way that we knew meant ‘forget your children.’”
 
“He left. The military started shooting immediately.”
 
In a series of apparent conciliatory gestures from President Bashar Assad, the children were released on March 20. But by then, says Ahmad, no one was in a mood to forgive.
 
Protests continued, matched with violence, and on April 23, tanks backed by Assad’s armored fourth brigade launched a full-scale siege on Deraa in a pattern that has been repeated in Homs, Hama and recently Idlib in subsequent months.
 
Whether another spark could have occurred somewhere other than Deraa is impossible to know. What is certain, say human rights workers and analysts, is that the government’s swift and uncompromising response set the stage for a wider conflict.
 
“The way the security forces dealt with the parents and the sheer brutality of their response to protests showed the true face of the regime,” says Human Rights Watch Middle East director, Nadim Houry.
 
“Arbitrary arrest and torture were not new,” he adds, “this was the way that they had managed to keep the fear factor alive.”
 
“But when this was challenged, we saw an even uglier side.”
 
There were no celebrations on the eve of the anniversary of the revolution’s kindling in Deraa Tuesday.
 
In a depressing repeat of scenes of one year earlier, activists and human rights groups were reporting that at least 13 civilians had been killed when the army stormed into the area.
 
As always, accounts were unable to be independently verified.
 
Ahmad says residents still plan to protest in the city.
 
“But today is a hard day for Deraa.”