More than 10 years after anti-government protests turned into a full-blown war, people in Syria’s last opposition bastion are still not ready to give up.
Mohammad Walid Jabas has been protesting for a decade. Back in March 2011, Jabas was one of the thousands of young people who took to the streets of Syria to demand the end of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
For his trouble, in 2012, 80 percent of Jabas’ body was burned when he was struck by shelling from Syrian forces as he filmed clashes between government troops and opposition militants in the northwest. It took months of medical attention and rehabilitation in neighbouring Turkey for him to recover.
Today, aged 30, he is back in his hometown of Kafr Takharim, north of Idlib, where he runs a Local Coordination Committee (LCC), one of the dozens of informal networks of dissident groups in the country that are still pushing for the removal of Assad.
“We believed we could break that wall of fear,” Jabas told VICE World News. “We thought we were entitled to have a free, democratic state, and we really thought things were about to change.” He is continuing the fight, he said, in honour of the estimated 500,000 Syrians – including several relatives and close friends – who have died, and the millions injured or internally displaced as a result of this 10-year civil war.
At his town’s LCC branch, Jabas plans protest events and instructs teams to come up with new slogans and banners. Public anti-regime demonstrations are held every Friday, mostly in the city of Idlib. The north-western governorate and its surroundings were among the first areas nationwide to take up arms against the regime in the Arab Spring.
Today, Assad, with the backing of his Russian and Iranian allies, has retaken most of Syria. The city of Idlib – home to almost 3 million people, mostly civilians and thousands of jihadist fighters – is the last major stronghold controlled by forces opposed to the Damascus government. Although the regime remains a threat, the main danger today is posed by Russian planes carrying out aerial strikes.
“More than once it’s happened that we had planned a protest, then we had to cancel it because of Russian fighter jets roaring around the skies,” Jabas said. “We’ve paid a very heavy price for joining the revolution, we endured huge losses, but we’re not ready to give up. If I’m still fighting, it’s to live a better life in my country, not to go anywhere.”
Nour Hallak, 33, from Saraqib town, in the Idlib region, has vivid memories of the early anti-Assad demonstrations in 2011. At that time, he was in the capital Damascus actively helping to coordinate groups of protesters and organise rallies.
“We imagined a free Syria, free from Assad and his gang,” Hallak told VICE World News. “Now we have war but it won’t last forever, one day this country will see civil change. I am one of those Syrians who are waiting for this transformation.”
A few months into the revolution, he got involved as a volunteer, distributing relief aid and working as an assistant to medical staff at field hospitals in the southwestern region of Ghouta.
After government-aligned troops invaded eastern Ghouta and destroyed the dispensaries at the beginning of 2012, the then aid worker along with his team took the remaining medication to store the supplies in a safer place in Homs city. During the journey through Damascus, he was caught in an ambush and arrested by secret services while carrying medicines and was jailed for two years.
Following his release in late 2013, Hallak moved to the north and worked in various NGOs on capacity-building of local councils and civil society organisations. He currently lives with his family in the Turkish-Syrian border town Antakya and works for an international humanitarian organisation in northern Aleppo.
“Once I was freed from detention, my mother was pushing me to go far away from Syria and not come back,” Hallak recalled. “But after spending two years in prison, I couldn’t leave my country. I don’t want to surrender and go.”
Hallak helps to organise ongoing protests in the northern region, connecting with LCCs in the cities of Idlib and Aleppo. His role includes scheduling meeting, drafting media statements, and running social media campaigns.
“We’re mainly confined to demonstrations since there’s limited space to do political activity,” he added, before explaining that because the Idlib region is partially under the control of extremist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied rebels, the residents are free to oppose the Syrian regime but cannot challenge HTS from within Idlib.
Despite the years of bloody conflict that followed a peaceful uprising, Hallak still believes Assad will be pushed out someday by political means, noting that thousands of political activists who were forced to flee their homeland are waiting to return and regain their rights when the time comes. “Those like myself who started the revolution understand the importance of continuing it,” Hallak said. “We will carry the flame of the revolution forever.”
Journalist Fareed Mahlool was only a teenager when the civil war started. Mahlool – who grew up in the town of Maaret Al Numan, in southern Idlib – was joining protests regularly after finishing work in an auto parts store.
“We were full of optimism in those days,” Mahlool told VICE Word News. “I was picturing my country as a just and democratic one. I still hope to live in the future in a state that doesn’t imprison or oppress people.”
In May 2019, shortly before he went out reporting, a rocket allegedly coming from government forces struck his house injuring his family members and killing his aunt in the attack. His family moved to a temporary home closer to the Turkish border.
Now 26, Mahlool works as a freelance journalist and volunteers at an LCC documenting and sharing content on its social media channels. “We will continue the revolution until we achieve our demands,” Mahlool said.
For 50-year-old Syrian artist Aziz Asmar, it was only a matter of time before he came back to his war-ravaged hometown Binnish, a few miles away from Idlib, after 20 years in Lebanon. Like many of his compatriots, he had left before the Syrian revolution began because he was struggling to find work in Syria.
In Beirut, where he lived with his family, he was working at a publishing house when the uprising erupted. “Watching horrifying and terribly unjust things happening in Syria gave me so much pain,” the graphic artist remembered. “I wasn’t feeling okay about staying outside my country, I couldn’t do anything.”
Growing afraid for his relatives’ safety as the bombing in Binnish intensified in July 2015, he moved back to his hometown at a time when thousands of Syrians were fleeing to find refuge abroad.
Upon his return, he decided to participate in the struggle by recording the story of the Syrian uprising on the city’s war-torn walls. Street art soon became for Asmar a peaceful, though provocative, form of political expression, at a time when, he said, too often people perceive Idlib as a hotbed for jihadists only.
Asmar paints across Idlib on the walls and ceilings of homes destroyed by airstrikes. “I want to send a message that behind each demolished wall there’s a human story,” he said.
Asmar is regularly joined by groups of kids who help him with his artwork, while he often visits schools and orphanages to teach them how to paint. Among his work is a panoramic mural on the wall of a school in Idlib commemorated the 10-year-anniversary of the Syrian revolution. It illustrates the passage of the Syrian war, starting with an image of demonstrators calling for the downfall of the Assad regime.
But Asmar’s work goes beyond focussing on the Syrian revolution to highlight injustices across the world. Last year, his painting on the ruins of a bombed-out building in Idlib depicting the face of George Floyd along with the message “No to Racism” and “I can’t breathe” went viral on social media.
The graffiti artist has no regrets about moving back to Binnish, where he continues to live with his wife and three boys.
“I use my artform here to lift people’s spirits and inspire them to stay,” he said. “My role is to help those around myself in my own way relieve their pain, so they won’t leave. My hope is that every Syrian gets their rights and freedom.”
Originally published in VICE