Revolt triggered by peaceful protests against Bashar Al Assad enters its 14th year this month
Under a desert sunset almost 13 years ago, a group of Bedouin rebels fighting President Bashar Al Assad hid at the side of a remote road in central Syria, waiting to ambush a bus.
Shepherds had told them that the bus left a local army base daily and headed to the city of Homs, where military tank forces were shelling residential areas to crush the revolt against the president.
Posters of Mr Al Assad and his ally, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, were plastered on the bus’s windows. The weather was cold, and the bearded rebels wore jackets over their grey tunics.
They intercepted the bus near Furqlus, 35km south-west of Homs. A gunfight ensued, resulting in the killing of 11 men, including six pilots and four other officers, as well as the commander of the rebel force.
The operation in late November 2011 was the most high-level attack in the nascent Syrian civil war, due to the high number of senior personnel involved. The Syrian army, which rarely disclosed its casualties, announced it at the time.
The army said that it would “cut every evil hand that targets Syrian blood”.
The attack helped to rally Mr Al Assad’s supporters as the regime promoted its official narrative that “terrorists” were bent on destroying Syria. Opponents of the pro-democracy uprising that started in March of that year said that the pilots had been trained to fight Israel, Syria’s neighbour and enemy.
The account of the attack was based on an interview with Abu Yazan, who was second-in-command of the rebel group, in Hatay, southern Turkey, about a year later.
Abu Yazan was wounded in the eye during the operation. He visited southern Turkey briefly in 2012 for treatment and died in mysterious circumstances in Syria in 2015.
Abu Yazan’s journey is illustrative of how an initial peaceful revolt morphed into a civil war that has left the country radicalised and fragmented today.
The protests against Mr Al Assad began in Deraa, on the country’s southern border with Jordan, in early 2011 after school pupils painted anti-regime graffiti inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.
“It is your turn, doctor,” they wrote, referring to Mr Al Assad’s studies as an eye doctor in London in the 1990s before he become president in 2000.
Secret police responded to the graffiti by imprisoning and torturing the children, sparking calls for protests including a “day of rage” on March 15.
On March 18, after Friday prayers in Deraa, security forces used live ammunition to disperse a large demonstration, killing three people.
For many, this date is considered the starting point of the Syrian civil war.
The peaceful protest movement quickly spread to other parts of the country and was met with repression from security forces.
It began to take on a sectarian nature as the regime deployed militias from Mr Al Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, to suppress the revolt in Sunni-majority urban areas.
Most of the civilians killed in the crackdown were Sunni.
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