The Uprising

OPENING SCENE

It is Friday, March 18, 2011, shortly after midday prayers in Deraa, a dusty market town on Syria's southern border with Jordan. The air smells of exhaust and bread from the nearby bakeries. Men file out of the Omari Mosque onto the street, and some of them do not go home. Instead they begin to walk. They carry no weapons. Several hold hand-painted signs. The crowd grows as it moves through the narrow lanes of the old quarter, drawing men and young women from doorways and rooftops, some out of solidarity and some merely out of curiosity.

The crowd is chanting a phrase that has already traveled from Tunis to Cairo and now to this ordinary Syrian town: "The people want the fall of the regime." It is the same slogan that ended Ben Ali's twenty-three-year rule in Tunisia and Mubarak's thirty years in Egypt. For the men watching from unmarked vehicles at the street's edge, the words carry a specific gravity. Security services open fire. At least four protesters are killed on that single afternoon. In the days that follow, twenty-five people die in Deraa alone.

Within two weeks, the shooting in Deraa ignites protests in Damascus, Homs, Latakia, Baniyas, and a dozen other Syrian cities. Assad's government, which has governed through a combination of surveillance, patronage, and force for four decades, now faces a challenge it has never seriously confronted: a popular uprising that is not organized by a foreign power or a specific political faction but by ordinary people who have simply decided they are no longer afraid. The moment his security forces chose bullets over dialogue, they converted a local protest into something the entire system would eventually be unable to contain.