Syria re-emerges united in Daraa, the cradle of the revolution against Assad

The central street of Bosra, a desolate cemetery of concrete skeletons, separates the eastern districts of Daraa, a stronghold of the Syrian opposition, from the commercial and administrative centre controlled by regime forces until a week ago. Close to the Jordanian border, the capital of southern Syria and birthplace of the revolution against Bashar al-Assad in 2011 remained in the hands of insurgent militias for seven years, and even briefly took up arms in 2021. Destruction, abandonment, and misery are the price it has paid for its rebellion.

“We have to make the new Syria work, otherwise no one will believe in it,” says Ahmed Muammir, a 56-year-old municipal engineer, walking briskly through the ruined landscape of Bosra (the name of the street and the neighborhood) on his way to work early last Thursday. Like millions of Syrians, he does not own a car or cannot afford gasoline (at around $2.60 per liter) on a meager monthly salary of a few dozen dollars. “Water still comes out of the tap, but electricity is only on for one hour in every six,” he laments. He has rebuilt his house in the eastern part of Daraa, where about half of the city’s 100,000 inhabitants lived before the civil war. Eighty per cent of the residents of the rebel-held neighborhoods are still refugees in northern Jordan or Turkey at the end of a conflict that has displaced half of Syria’s 22 million people from their homes.

Not far from the ghost town of Bosra, the Southern Operations Command, created on December 6 to unite all opposition forces for the first time, acts from Daraa as the de facto interim government in the southern part of the country, in coordination with the new provisional authorities in Damascus. At the head of this united management of the various opposition groups are army officers who deserted the regime and went over to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), such as Colonel Abu Montner al-Dohri. “We are firmly committed to holding the first free municipal elections in March of next year, and to continuing with the legislative and presidential elections,” says this 62-year-old military officer and opposition leader, who participated in the failed negotiations in 2017 with the Assad government, sponsored by the UN in Geneva, in search of a political solution to the conflict.

“The Southern Operations Command is not going to carry out a purge of officers and senior officials, like the one that took place in Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein. We are not going to make the same mistake. Only 162 generals and regime officials accused of war crimes will have to answer to justice,” he warns. “At this moment, our main task is to guarantee public security and public services,” he explains in his residence in Daraa, escorted by some of the FSA militiamen with whom he triumphantly entered Damascus last weekend in a pincer movement with the forces of the Islamist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which were advancing from the north.

Colonel Al-Dhori is a member of the so-called Centrality Committee, which brings together the majority of the pro-democracy opposition and also coordinates armed groups as diverse as the Druze battalions (a religious minority in the Middle East) of Suwaida, or the Islamist Eighth Division of Quneitra, operating on the southeastern border with the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. Under his command, the factions of the new Syria remain cohesive in the south, even though some of their members maintain ties with countries that have been at odds with each other during the Syrian conflict. Unity seems to prevail in Daraa, for now.

Beyond the imaginary border of Bosra Street, the Al Balad district remains the founding epicenter of the Syrian Arab Spring. The arrest and brutal torture of a group of teenagers, whose fingernails were torn off by the mukhabarat political police for having painted anti-Assad slogans on a wall, was the trigger for massive protests unleashed from the historic Omari mosque. Dressed in his best traditional tunic, 66-year-old merchant Mahmud Almarsi has just returned for the first time from Irbid, in northern Jordan, after five years of exile. “We don’t know when we will be able to return to Daraa, our house is in ruins,” he mutters before midday prayers in the 12th-century Islamic temple, crowned by an original roofed minaret.

The end of the prayer service at the Omari mosque coincides with the end of the school day. Boys and girls in the third grade of elementary school have painted their faces with the green, white, and black flag with three stars, raised by the opposition to the Assad regime. Between shouts and smiles, they gather around the EL PAÍS photographer, like protagonists of the new Syria, which they embody better than anyone else. They all rush towards the camera lens in jubilation. Except for one, who distances himself from his classmates. Mohamed Ammet is eight years old, like almost all of them, but last year he lost a hand and suffered facial injuries when a mine planted by the regular army in Al Balad exploded while he was playing.

The children of Yalal Ayden, a 50-year-old gas fitter, no longer play in the street: they herd their father’s goats in the ditches of Al Balad. Ayden has to feed the 12 children he has had with his two wives, the youngest of whom is just two years old. “Milk and cheese are good for a large family, and I also sell some animals for meat,” he says. “We will get through this. In the new Syria we need peace and security, but also democracy and honesty in the economy,” he adds, listing wishes shared by many of his compatriots. “Above all, we do not need more hatred, more division,” he concludes, surrounded by his youngest children and part of his flock. “We are afraid that our hopes will be dashed.”

The razed houses, the machine-gunned facades, the public buildings riddled by artillery that line Bosra Street and the Al Balad district form a mausoleum of horror of nearly 14 years of war. The conflict has claimed half a million lives and uprooted more than half of the Syrian population (a quarter of whom are in the diaspora abroad).

When Colonel Al-Dohri, head of the Southern Operations Command, is asked how Syrians are going to rebuild a country in ruins, his answer is blunt: “Without massive international aid, we will never be able to.”

With the rigor of a Greek pope, the 53-year-old Orthodox priest Georges Tesjosh speaks in a gentle manner in the Church of the Annunciation in Daraa. “I don’t keep the door locked, the Muslims have never violated this sacred place,” says the priest of the Antiochian rite, educated at the seminary in Damascus and originally from Daraa. “No one here distinguishes his neighbor based on religion; we Christians arrived in Syria long before the Muslims and we will never leave. We are respected because we are part of this country,” he says with conviction, before acknowledging that the jihadist threat has taken its toll on his religious community, which has seen its population drop from 10% before the conflict to less than half of that now: “There are about 240 Christians left in Daraa, including Orthodox, Catholics, and Anglicans.”

The temple is empty during the working day, but in the tailoring workshop opposite the atrium, customers are queuing up. “I need 100 new flags for my shop in the center,” says one of them, who purchases them for 200,000 Syrian pounds ($1.60) apiece. “I barely earned enough to live on as a local tailor, but I haven’t stopped working for a week,” says an exhausted 26-year-old Nayib Bashir, while his customers watch in amazement as he fits the pieces of the flag of the new Syria and the freshly sewn deliveries together on the sewing machine.

A giant flag, like the ones Bashir makes, hangs across the facade of the provincial government headquarters. It is guarded by groups of young men dressed in sportswear and casual clothes. They would look like doormen at a nightclub if it weren’t for their belts full of magazines and the short-butted Kalashnikovs slung across their chests.

“I’m 30 years old, tired, and I have two children, and I want to put down my rifle and go back to university,” muses one of the young men guarding the provincial government, wearing the beret of the FSA militia. Suleiman Estrejan had to abandon his sociology studies more than a decade ago because of the war. “The conflict is coming to an end; it is up to each of us to build the new Syria,” he sums up, before sharing the deep desire that has accompanied him through years of fighting: “There would be nothing better for me than to return to the classroom and say goodbye to weapons.”

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