Syria’s war reached another milestone this week; its fifth anniversary serves to remind us all of what happens when nations stand idly by watching while a humanitarian disaster unfolds. The statistics speak for themselves: 6.6 million people displaced within the country, plus another 4.8 million refugees living in neighbouring countries. Hundreds of thousands more are in various stages of a treacherous journey towards Europe.
No one knows for sure how many Syrians have been killed since 2011 but what has happened in their country stands as a monument to the cancer of disunity across the Arab world, as well as the shameful inactivity of the self-serving West. Europe only began to take notice when desperate refugees knocked on its door asking for help; Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, seized the military initiative.
The human scale of this tragedy compares with nothing in European memory since the Second World War. The biggest scandal, though (aside from the hopelessness of the international community), is that one man could so easily have stepped up and prevented such misery.
I am not talking about the ineffectual president of the United States who kept stamping his feet as the Syrian regime crossed numerous red lines that he had imposed; or the opportunistic, land- and sea-grabbing Putin who now has a strategic naval base free of charge in Syria’s Mediterranean port city of Latakia. It’s neither of those. I’m talking about the Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad, who has presided over what may well prove to the biggest humanitarian disaster of the 21st century.
The war in Syria has gone on for so long that many have forgotten how it all began and the key role played by Assad which allowed it to escalate to where we are today. I was given a sharp reminder of this during a recent visit to Lebanon with an all-female delegation to look at the work being done on the ground by British charity Interpal.
In Saida’s Al-Imani School, funded by Interpal, I strayed into a classroom that wasn’t on the delegation’s route. I’d fallen behind the others after talking to a bright young spark called Hassan, 14, who wants to become a doctor; as I tried to find my colleagues I found myself in the wrong room.
It was full of 11 and 12 year-old Syrian boys who were delighted at this unexpected interruption to their schoolwork and so I asked them where they were from. “Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Daraya, Maddaya, Douma,” they shouted out one by one. These children came from all over Syria to be thrown together by a civil war fraught with sectarianism and hatred which had uprooted them from their homes. Yet here they were together as one group, displaying a unity that is all too rare in the Middle East today.
I went to the next row of boys and, starting from the back, they shouted out the names of towns and cities made infamous by the brutal war. Their unity was heart-warming. Then one boy stopped me in my tracks when he called out loudly and proudly that he comes from “Dar’a.” I looked at him and felt the tears well up inside me.
Dar’a, you see, was home to a bunch of boys exactly the same age as these kids. I know them as the Graffiti Boys and I’ve written about them in MEMO because I thought it was important that we never forget how they ignited the revolution in Syria. This lad was the same age as the Graffiti Boys and as I looked at him I tried to comprehend how Assad’s brutes could have seized a child and set about inflicting unimaginable pain on him. I wondered what sort of adult could pull the nails from a child’s fingers, snap his slender bones, gouge out his eye, smash his skull or break his legs, as well as burn, electrocute and batter him; for that is exactly what the monsters in Assad’s regime did to those boys from Dar’a.
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The graphic details of the torture that took place in the dungeons of Dar’a came flooding back; I could almost hear the screams of young innocents in the seconds after the boy in Al-Imani School called out his home town’s name. He looked at me oddly and a little perplexed; why had hearing him say “Dar’a” brought tears to my eyes?
I’m not even sure if he’d heard about the Graffiti Boys, who scrawled “Ashaab yureed isqat annidham” (the enduring chant of the Arab Spring, declaring the regime must fall) on a broken wall in the town and unwittingly brought down appalling suffering on themselves.
The words angered the Assad regime, so the boys were rounded up and tortured on the orders of Atif Najeeb, a cousin of the Syrian dictator. Confused parents and relatives gathered outside his office and that of Faisal Kalthoum the governor of Dar’a; they wanted to know why their boys had been arrested, but they were met with a wall of silence. Nearly a week later, family members, imams, the boys’ head teacher and other local dignitaries assembled once again and demanded to see either Najeeb or the governor.
At this point no one had a clue about what the boys had done, but their pleas to have their children returned were ignored and the governor advised everyone to forget about them. “My advice to you is that you forget you ever had these children,” he is alleged to have said. “Go back home and sleep with your wives and bring other children into the world and if you cannot do that, then bring your wives to us and we will do the job for you.”
By this time families in towns and villages across the region were shocked and outraged by what had happened and began to demonstrate and rally to show their support for the boys, their families and the town of Dar’a. It was nearly three weeks later — by which time it had become clear that the demonstrations would continue to get louder and angrier — before the regime relented and the boys were released.
Their condition was shocking; all were traumatised beyond belief. All had had their fingernails torn off; one had lost an eye; several had fractured skulls; and all had at least one broken limb. Today, those boys still bear the whip marks and scars on their bodies which bear testimony to the brutal nature of their detention and torture. Several still have nightmares about the screams heard in the cells.
Far from their release calming the situation, the physical evidence that the boys had been tortured enraged the people of Dar’a who made their own two demands: the dismissal of the governor and justice delivered to those who had done such wicked things to the boys, including Atif Najeeb and his torture squad. That is when Bashar Al-Assad could have intervened, but he chose not to; from that day on, the low level demands erupted into a full-blown civil war.
If Assad’s plan was to subdue the uprising and instil fear in ordinary Syrian citizens — those who dared to protest and were considering joining the growing crowds on the streets — it backfired spectacularly for all concerned. With the exception of Putin and Daesh, there are still no clear winners in Syria today.
Nevertheless, peace will come to Syria, and when it does the Graffiti Boys should be remembered. There should be another memorable wall in Dar’a; a wall where their names can be carved with pride. Some of them may not have survived the war and I know that some are in refugee camps, but let us remember all of them here and now:
1) Muawiya Faisal Sayasneh
2) Yusuf Adnan Sweidan
3) Samer Ali Sayasneh
4) Ahmed Jihad Abazeid
5) Isa Hasan Abulqayyas
6) Ala Mansour Irsheidat Abazeid
7) Mustafa Anwar Abazeid
8) Nidhal Anwar Abazeid
9) Akram Anwar Abazeid
10) Nayef Muwaffaq Abazeid
11) Basheer Farooq Abazeid
12) Ahmed Thani Irshiedat Abazeid
13) Ahmed Shukri Al-Akram
14) Abdulrahman Nayef Al-Reshedat
15) Mohammed Ayman Munwer Al-Karrad
16) Ahmed Nayef Al-Resheidat Abazeid
17) Nabeel Imad Al-Resheidat Abazeid
18) Mohammed Ameen Yasin Al-Resheidat Abazeid.
I don’t know if the 400 refugee pupils at Al-Imani School have been told about the Graffiti Boys but it is important that everyone knows their story because it is a salutary tale of what happens when brutal dictators lose control; when Arab leaders forget about unity and solidarity; and when the West fails to stand up for the oppressed who are deprived of the human rights it champions.
Governments and communities around the world are only now coming together as the need for peace talks is finally recognised amid a fragile ceasefire. Such conferences have failed in the past on so many levels that perhaps it’s time for those in attendance to remember the idiom, “Out of the mouths of babes”. They should listen to the voices of the children from Al-Imani School and others across the region. After all, they are the generation who are inheriting the mess created by “responsible adults” over the past five years and, in too many cases, have suffered horribly in the process. We owe it to them.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.